Princeton lecture 4 March 2016
Mamdouha Bobst Center for Peace and Justice
Comrade Gaston Bachelard “we must give back to reason its subversive aggressive function. The in the realm of thought impudence is a method”
‘Talking about rev. is like talking about a dream after you wake up’ (Jean Genet)
#Difficulty of thinking and talking about an experience
Revs open up insides of society and state revealing its hidden mechanisms Rare moments of illumination and action. What can we learn form them?
Subversive not against existing status quo (in society and state) but also against dominant prevailing ideas. Hence my question earlier today: ‘Is the most effective method to understand rev civil wars necessarily to apply the latest fashion in academia socmvt/neosocmvt?”
# Rev large radical movement seeking to change the existing system in state and society by the force of popular pressure and replace them with new systems.
#Rev invite counter rev. immediately from all forces defending the status quo and the threatened regime; rarely are there revolutions without civil wars, i.e. society split bet two opposing civilian military camps in conflict. Might fail (rarely win from the first go) one party wins (Russian civwar 1917 spanish civil war) end in draw (lebanese)
Lets look at ours
One alternatie approach is to take seriously why tens of millions of arabs, youth in particular, expressed when took to public places and streets in 6 arab countries from lattakia in northern Syria to sanaa in southern arabia.
The people want the overthrow of the regime. New terminology itself is a critique of hegemonic discourse: ‘people; replaces ‘civil society’; ‘want’ = people’s will, a radical approach to democracy; and the ‘dichotomy regime/people’ replaces tdychotomy ‘civilsoc/state’. Not to speak about means: ‘overthrow’ is an act of ‘force/violence’ not ‘capacity building’, ‘raising awareness’, ‘lobbying’ or the mere ‘occupation of space’ as in tahrir square.
In a word, looks like 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 of protest and contestation: unemployment (raised perhaps for the first time in AW highest world % in youth to pop, unemployment, unemployment of youth); despotism, radical conception of democracy, against social regional and class inequalities, respect for human person, especially the worth of the individual.
Strangely enough, Freedom and Dignity were subsumed as need for transition to democracy, the recurrent old question: arab-muslim exception to follow the third democratisation wave in case of freedom; and dignity or transformed into an arab (tribal) value to add the necessary touch of orientalism in rooting the revs in arab soil/sand.
What was dropped” unemployment, a novelty as traditional opposition parties rarely evoked it intheir programs and what job creation required in terms of economic policies. One illustration of the urgency of thisproblem are the recent Qisreen riots in Tunisia last month and Social justice
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, since the end of the cold war, equated with communism or barbarism.
>Von Hayek’s Opposes freedom to justice and equality the former being the essence of western civilization which was born of the birth of the individual and the development of individualism, whereas the latter belong to the inherited primary instincts, they are forms of barbarism. Civilization could not be born until it freed itself of those instincts through the transition to the market, the crucible of free individuals.
Neo lib not divorced from force and violence Thomas Friedman asserts Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” needs the ‘iron fist” of the US Pentagon and MacDonalds hamburgers are served with the products of MacDougal, the giant 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 and wealth and well being now distributed by trickle down of wealth of the super rich.
>culturalism. Though postmodernism claimed the end of grand discourses, culturalism has become one. Develop Huntington’s theory
>end of the five letterd word:everybody talks about the middle class in a society that has no classes; as it lies between the poor and the affluent (not even the rich). There are poor and not rich. Definition of middle class is lowered 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 hteir 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.
>shift from class-social-based inequality to space-based inequality. WB decided that 3/4 of poverty is no more social but geographical. Granted we believe this, how do we deal with the remaining quarter of poor humans?
>poverty reduction seen and practiced not as poverty 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) but a problem of the poor people to be eradicated by social protection
>Poverty without wealth. Yes remembered by Oxfam but on a world scale no impact of ground: charity devolves on state or better on sects (Lebanon: compationate communalism)
>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. What is usually the more comprehensive category now should into the smaller category.
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”.
> finally, new social justice: pits social justice as a claim to equality against social justice as the right to difference. Quote nancy fraser
> naïve question: granted not many people believe anymore in the natural equality of humans, but if pol-legal equality remains so obvious that people are not equal how come econ-socio?
Failures in neo-lib.
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 lib
Eloquent figures: 62 persons own in wealth equivalent of half the worlds population; failure of dealing with poverty unemployment. Etc.
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?
Latest WB report, Inequalities, Uprising and conflict in the Arab World (2016) i) one of rare attempts to look into inequalities rather than poverty ii)methodologically based on latest new social movements approach: emotions (wellness, satisfaction, etc., self-representations
iii) spatial inequalities vs social hierarchical inequalities; iv)redressing inequalities as rights to difference vs redressing inequalities as right to equality; v)introducing social justice into social protection = including all the above: spatial, differentials, etc
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, etc. the latter is made responsible for lebanon’s poverty in a recent WB study.
The Ghazzafi family dispensed with Libya’s 162 billion $ thru their control of the National Sovereignty Fund; the six Saudi princes receive gamong themselves daily the equivalent of the revenue of one million barrel of Saudi oil 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 fali abdall salih (and his collaborators) for 32 years in power, i.e. assassiantions, wars, plunder, corruption, bringing al qaida into yemen, invasion of the country’s southern governates, six wars against – that was calles Transitional Justice, later fell out with the man and publically declared that his wealth is in the order of 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?
Secterianism; dialectics of privileges/deprivation and uneven and contradictory location of groups vis a vis power, force, intelligence (knowledge), privileged position n economy, social capital, edu capital, etc.
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?
>No real islam as no real Christianity or real Hudaism. Need to interpret stems from need to give contemporary meaning to a text which is not temporary and yet pretends to be valis for all times.
>No ISIS without american invasion and occupation of Iraq; no Syrian ISIS without Iraqi ISIS AND 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, 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?
>no military solution to daesh, previslously ‘drying up the sources of terrorism’ meant their financial resources. Now should mean their socio-economic and political bases: group injustices; social marginalization; unemployment; social class and regional inequalities.