Princeton lecture
Social Justice is back?
“We must give back to reason its subversive aggressive function. In the realm of thought impudence is a method” (Gaston Bachelard)
‘Talking about revolution is like talking about a dream after you wake up’ (Jean Genet)
but difficulty does not necessarily mean impossibility and a complicated situation can be made complex and yet intelligible.
Revolutions open up the insides of society and state, revealing their hidden mechanisms in rare moments of lucidity and depth.
Let me first say that revolutions, subversive as they are against existing status quo (in society and state) also subvert prevailing ideas. Hence my first question is methodological:
Is the most effective method to comprehend revolutions and civil wars in the present Arab World to necessarily apply the latest fashion in academia; i.e. social movements; new social movements; theory of emotions; affect; etc.?
Revolutions are large radical movements seeking to change state and society by the force of popular pressure and replace them with new configuration.
Revolutions invite counter revolutions immediately from all forces defending the status quo and the threatened regime. Also there are rarely revolutions without civil wars, i.e. society split between two opposing civilian/military camps in conflict.
Revolutions might fail; they rarely win from the first go. one party wins (Russian civwar 1917 Spanish civil war) end in draw (lebanese)
The Arab revolutions were verbose: they said a lot about their causes and the demands. The people want the overthrow of the regime. The new terminology is in itself a critique of hegemonic discourse: ‘people’ replaces ‘civil society’; ‘the people want’ = ‘people’s will’ = a radical approach to democracy: popular sovereignty; and the dichotomy ‘regime/people’ replaces to civil society/state . Not to speak about means: overthrow is an act of force/violence not the mere occupation of space in Tahrir Square. In short, the main slogan of the revolution/s reveals a return to the concepts of the national liberation phase.
Declared goals of the revolutions (work, freedom, social justice, human dignity) were at the same time diagnoses of main problem: unemployment (raised perhaps for the first time in AW which holds world record of percentage of youth to population; world record in unemployment, world record unemployment of youth); despotism, social, regional and class inequalities, disrespect for human person, especially for the worth of the individual.
Strangely enough, only two of these slogans/demands were chosen by the ruling regimes and the media: freedom/and dignity’ the first mutated into pluralism, human rights, minority rights, etc or the other, held as an Arab (tribal) value to add the necessary touch of orientalism in grounding the revolutions in Arab soil/sand. And all the revolutionary process was rediced to a process of ‘ transition to democracy’, which now has ended the arab-muslim exception and finally joined the ‘third democratisation’ wave.
Social justice
Should title be followed by question mark? Is it back? Is what is back of social justice? Why is it back ? How was it before?
>Banned from decent literature for over a quarter of a century of neo liberalism, equated with communism or barbarism.
>Von Hayek’s opposes freedom to justice and equality. Freedom is the essence of western civilization, born with the birth of the individual and the development of individualism, whereas equality belong to the inherited primary instincts, and is a form of barbarism. Why barbarism? Because Civilization could not be born until it freed itself of those instincts through the transition to the market, the crucible of free individuals, as he calls it.
>Cvilization or barbarism, neo liberalism cannot be divorced from force and violence.Thomas Friedman emphatically warns us that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market needs the ‘iron fist” of the US Pentagon and MacDonalds hamburgers cannot replace MacDougal products, the giant US arms manufacturers.
In econ, the theology of the market, growth replaces development and the state posed as clear enemy pitted against it is the civil society distributed by trickle down of wealth of the super rich
inequalities reduced to poverty and this measured according to market terms: consumption of dollars/day, 1$ deep poverty/4$poverty (no difference in income, property, wealth, etc.)
>everybody talks about the middle class in societies that have no classes or where the middle class is the only ‘class’. we are told that it lies between the poor and the affluent (we re told to evade using the term ‘rich’ as it is liable to ‘raise envies’).
> There are poor people but no rich people. Not only that, but the definition of middle class is manipulated to serve achieving the goals of the Millenium (not achieved as failed to eradicate deep poverty by 2015!) When the WB declares that 1.2 billion human beings have been lifted out of poverty they do not tell us that their majority in china and india where there was applied a high mean they now earn/rather spend/ 2 $ defined as the poverty threshold and joined the middle class, which means an individual who can manage with 60$ a month is no poorer than where he left except in WB statistics.
Poverty without wealth. Yes wealth is remembered by Oxfam once a year on the eve of the Davos meeting of the rich. Eloquent statistics: 62 persons own s much as half of the world’s population.
Poverty reduction seen and practiced not a case on unequal access to property, revenue, resources, wealth, etc. Poverty is approached not as a social problem concerning the whole of society and to be dealt with by the whole of society (through a system of taxation, reducing class and regional disparities, through social redistribution) poverty is the problem of the poor people; at times it is their responsibility; or it is something similar to an epidemy, to be eradication. Or alleviated by the paternalist ‘social protection’ . Better by charity, latest fashion: the state is funded by other states – the italian in leb– under auspices of bank, the WB, the leb gvt distributes charity to some 74,000 poor in the form of cash, food tickets, free health care, electricity and free education fees in the public schooling system, etc)
There is no limit to messing around with terms not to admit need for equality
Shift from class-social-based inequality to space-based inequality. World Bank decided that three quarters of poverty is no more social but geographical. Granted we believe in this percentage, how do we deal with the remaining quarter of poor humans?
Study of inequalities without equality:
how to depart from equity; dissociate justice from equality and then justice from equal opportunities and end up with social justice social protection (slogan of WB: protection for the poor, good jobs for the rest)
>WB calls for introducing social justice into social protection. But by social justice is meant solely vulnerable people who lack opportunities because they are excluded due to age, ethnic, gender, religious and sexual identity.
Let me put a naïve question: in the democracy manuals put down our throats for at least the past three decades people are supposed to be equal before the law and in their political rights, no? If this legal –political equality seems to be self evident, grounded either with God (equal in God) or Nature (born free and equal, how come have to be equal in politics and not equal in econ-socio?
> new social justice: pits social justice as a claim to equality against social justice as the right to difference.
Human rights. How come reduced to individual and personal rights? What about social and economic rights?
Haven’t those also to do with human dignity. The dignity of the individual? To be in need is to beg for charity
I want to make the point that the arab revs as a high resounding warning about serious failures and tragedies in the present world system under neo liberalism.
Introducing social justice after revolutions
WB reviews strategies after 2011
After the rev erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, the two model arab countries of econ dev with highest gdp growth rates,
Robert Zoellik first reaction was to declare revolt in Tunisia caused by too much ‘red tape’. Gave example of policewoman hitting Muhammad bouazizi. Later he would and Strauss Kahn of the WB that the GDP growth as an index of successful economic performance does not necessarily lead to create jobs!
What has been since done to further job creation?
Corruption. increased tremendously under neo-lib, when public interests and private interests became mixed and interchangeable. privatisaing the public. Based on the distinction bet public interest and private one.
= What do you call corruption? Red tape, inflated bureaucracies, over spending on public services and social distribution, clientelism, sectarianismetc. the latter is made responsible for lebanon’s poverty in a recent WB study.
But please tell me what do we call this?
The Ghazzafis family dispensed with Libya’s 162 billion $ thru their control of the Lybian National Sovereignty Fund; the six Saudi princes receive among themselves the revenue of one million barrel of Saudi oil/a day; out of some 10 million daily outpuy(now much depreciated) ; a Qatari prince buys the next Olympics for 20 billion $.; the United Nations after having absolved ex Yemeni president ali abdalla salih (and his collaborators) for 32 years in power, i.e. of assassinations, wars, plunder, corruption, bringing Al Qaida into yemen, invasion of the country’s southern governates, six wars against the Houthis– that was called Transitional Justice. When Saleh fell out with the UN, it published an estimation of his wealth amounting to some sixty billion dollars. In the paradise of economic competition, one Syrian businessman Rami Makhlouf, the cousin of Bashar al Assad, and business partner, boasts that he controls 60% of the Syrian economy. Three thousand Lebanese businessmen and politicians have deposits to the amount of 4.2 billion $ in just one Swiss bank, HSBC in Switzerland, while the country is lauded for having a solid banking system because of its banking secrecy law
>Ali Babaism?
Human rights/social and economic rights
In fact HR and especially social and economic rights are stripped of the notion of right, charity, philanthropy, protection
= Remind of articles 22-26 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948. Rights to: work; equal pay for equal work; social security; social protection (this is how the chart defins them: the only notion left in use- meaning minimum wage, life to man and family an existence in conformity with human dignity; say few words about new meaning); right to a life that insures health, happiness/wellness, in terms of food, dress, medical care, lodging, social security in case of unemployment, sickness, invalidity, old age, etc. right to education that should be free and obligatory at least in elementary stage
ISIS
>Why do people young muslims join ISIS? Why do people choose this version of Islam?
>There is no ‘real Islam’ as there is no ‘real Christianity’ or ‘real Judaism’. Need to interpret stems from need to give contemporary meaning to a text which is not temporary and yet pretends to be valid for all times.
>No ISIS without American invasion and occupation of Iraq, no Syrian ISIS without Iraqi ISIS without the role of Syrian intelligence in filtering tens of thousand of Jihadis during the eight years of the US occupation in Iraq; ISIS is also a comeback of Saddam Hussein’s Baath, and no ISIS had not all major parties intervening in the regional conflicts and the revs backed them: KSA, Qatar, Turkey, Iran to name the main ones.
mafias, rentier economies
>ISIS contemporary: mafia networks auto financed now by control of oil fields, dams, contraband, etc.
Speaking of this issue. How significant that oil is rarely mentioned when it comes to growth/development.
Would there be Revs., Daesh, Civwars had modernism went beyond elites and the cities? Would there be Revs., Daesh, Civwars had the contrad, between city/countryside; center/periphery, between rich and poor, ben sizeably reduced? Would there be needs for Revs., Daesh, Civwars had a small part of oil and gas revenues and arab funds invested abroad been used create producti and rightsve economies that produce jobs, and meet basic human needs?