A Response to Manfred Sing
As a non-repentant Marxist, I was surprised to learn that I was listed as a liberal convert in an article by Manfred Sing on the disillusionment of a passe-partout category called Arab Post-Marxists, Mr. Sing is supposed to be a specialist in Islam, Middle East affairs and Arab Communism. Yet, I am amazed how he managed to put in the dozen lines devoted to my ‘conversion’ so many misquotes, mistranslation, misinterpretation, branding and ideological profiling to prove his syllogism: disillusioned Arab Marxists/Post Marxists have converted to liberalism and turned from politics to culture, Fawwaz Traboulsi is an Arab Marxist/Post Marxist, therefore Fawwaz Traboulsi has converted to liberalism and turned from politics to culture.
The first proof of my “liberal newspeak” is that I equate democracy with revolution- “democracy is revolution” as in the title of my book, Al-Dimuqratiyya Thawra, 2012. Mr. Sing studied Arabic in Damascus, so he can be held responsible for how he has read the book’s title: “Al-Dimuqratiyya Thawra” cannot be the Arabic equivalent of “Democracy is Revolution”; it can only be correctly translated as “Democracy is a revolution” meaning one kind, among others, of revolutions. Had I meant to emphasize the equation, I only had to write ‘Al-Dimuqratiyya hiya al Thawra.’
Furthermore, it seems that ‘equating democracy with revolution’ “comes close to Fukuyama”, and I am blamed by Mr. Sing because I “did not see the need to deal with the debate on “the end of history” though it is “the self-evident duty for leftists.” (p. 155) I was not granted any attenuating circumstances for failing this leftist duty, though ON THAT SAME PAGE Sing is referring to, I said that I was not engaging in the Fukuyama debate “for the sake of expediency”, but cited instead critiques by Zizek, Hardt and Deleuze on public space and civil society concepts and on the contradiction between capitalism and democracy. (Al-Dimuqratiyya Thawra, p. 95). For that matter, I decided to rather ‘deal with’ Huntington’s ‘clash of civilization’ and his culturalism, but this does not seem to absolve me of the ‘liberal conversion’.
Mr. Sing not only mistranslates the title of the book and its contents, he twists another citation and changes its meaning. I indeed wrote that the outbreak of the Arab revolutions of 2011 had disproved prevailing notions of an “Arab democratic deficit” and ‘Muslim exceptionalism.’ (Al-Dimuqratiyya Thawra, p.20) but this comes out in Sing as ‘disproving Western theories about Arab exceptionalism and ‘Islamic democratic deficit,” with the obvious connotation: “here’s another one who blames everything on the West”.
It so happens, Mr. Sing has only read three pages, or had three pages read for him by an assistant, of a book of some 30 articles and 284 pages and yet allowed himself such sweeping generalizations: a sure sign of intellectual honesty and sound academic ethics.
I could not find where I mention ‘Western theories’ in the two pages Sing refers to (pp. 20-21) but he surely overlooked on page 21 my critique of ‘democracy promotion’ directed not against ‘Western theories’ in general, but against George Bush’s version of ‘democracy promotion’; though the rest of my critique is directed not against ‘Western theories’, but against ‘local theories’ by Arab nationalists, Islamists and Leftists who oppose democracy because it is either ‘western’ or ‘foreign’ or imposed by American imperialism, yet my main attack is against those Arab liberals who expected, or called for, an American military intervention in their countries to bring them democracy. (Al-Dimuqratiyya…” p.21)
Mr. Sing, the anti-liberal, though not sure what kind of liberalism he is referring to, is also opposed to democracy, because it does not put into question capitalist property relations (p.157). Democracy does not necessarily put into question capitalist property relations, indeed, but it does put into question social patriarchal relations and political and legal inequalities. But had Mr. Sing bothered to read beyond pages 20 and 21, he would have found that this issue was dealt with in the second essay of the book under the title ‘No Freedom without Equality’. (p.33-51)
Nevertheless, if Sing has a different path of transition from the regimes of oil oligarchies and military dictatorships in the Arab World, other than secular political democracy and equality before the law, I would like to hear it, unless he would like to suggest that we skip this unnecessary political democratic phase and head directly to setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat, ‘put into question capitalist property relations’ and transit to communism. In that case, I, and many people on the left in this part of the world, would be glad to solicit his expertise for the performance of that glorious historical high jump.
For the rest, I am supposed to “attack unspecified “neo-liberalism” and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East throughout the book”. Mr. Sing, content with the three pages he supposedly read to establish the ‘conversion’, has not even bothered to leaf through the table of contents, or bothered to get some assistant to bother in his place. Had he done so, he would have found a number of articles and essays devoted to elaborations of a radical socialist perspective on democracy, dealing with: Bernard Lewis’ orientalist interpretation of the Arab Revolutions of 2011 and his apocalyptic prophecy about the Iranian nuclear bomb; Obama’s speech on democracy in the Arab World; Tim Mitchell on the relationship between oil and democracy; Habermas’ concepts of ‘public space’ and ‘discursive democracy’, in addition to writings on the difference between liberal pluralism and democracy, and between democracy and ‘civil society’!
As for my unspecified attacks on neo-liberalism, they are highly specified indeed; they form a continuing concern over the years since an early critique of Von Hayek’s neo-liberal ideas in 2004 which shouldn’t have escaped the specialist on Arab Communism as it was published in the theoretical journal of the Arab Communist Parties with which Sing is acquainted, since it is mentioned in his same paper.
Now comes the cherry on the cake. Since all disillusioned Marxists/Post Marxists who converted to liberalism should turn from politics to ‘cultural activity’, I have to follow suit since I ‘found myself a teaching job’ at the Lebanese American University (p. 164). Good to know that Mr. Sing – a staunch anti-private property, anti-democracy, hardline, anti-Post-Marxist Marxist materialist, and eminent ‘disillusionment’ Fashionista, sitting comfortably on his academic chair and sharing his wisdom between Freiburg University and the Leibniz institute of European History- cannot imagine that a university teaching post can just be a salaried job to make a living! Worst, this condescending academic implies that an academic job is a demeaning cultural occupation compared to politics. One is afraid lest Mr. Sing starts feeling for his gun!
Wrong again Mr. Sing! even on ‘when I found myself a teaching job’, I started teaching two years later than the date you mention.