PUBLISHED
December 29, 2024
KARACHI:
Antonio Gramsci’s adage that “the previous is dying, and the brand new can’t be born; on this interregnum, an ideal number of morbid signs seem” is painfully apt for the Arab world.
Trapped in cycles of revolt, the area replaces one tyranny with one other, endlessly recycling energy below the guise of change whereas contending with the relentless pressures of worldwide rivalries.
If the area was as soon as below the iron fist of statist authoritarianism, it’s now the perpetual ‘revolution’ itself that appears to be its bane: a morbid banalisation of revolutionary change itself.
If Western powers as soon as propped up autocrats in defiance of the individuals’s will, they now seem to champion disenchanted plenty — a grotesque contradiction, symptomatic of an empire in dissolution.
Lately, as December crept into the war-ravaged Center East, the world was met with a well-recognized spectacle, this time in Syria: jubilant crowds filling the streets, storming palaces and firing weapons to mark the autumn of one other autocrat. It was a textbook scene of chaos, emblematic of late-modernity politics performed out below the looming shadow of neoliberalism.
But once more, one other Arab nation regarded set for a altering of the guard and a brand new flag, just for the mud to choose a return to ‘enterprise as regular’ – the eventual ‘return to regular’.
In opposition to the backdrop of celebrations and cautious hopes, Syrian insurgent chief Ahmed al-Sharaa, also referred to as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, emerged in an sudden guise, donning a swimsuit and white shirt. In his polished apparel, he known as for lifting worldwide sanctions — a golden ticket again into the worldwide fold — and proclaimed that the brand new Syria sought no quarrels.
Right here was one other former jihadist, freshly baptised within the imperial waters, innocent and tamed.
The transformation was unmistakable: rigorously chosen phrases, a rebranded picture and muted rhetoric. He was, as if to say, serving up a ‘decaffeinated revolution’, a motion watered down to suit the style of Western palates.
As soon as once more, the tides of upheaval gave option to mere adjustment, making certain the Western agenda remained intact and the proverbial boat wasn’t rocked too arduous.
Nevertheless, Western media and sure leftist circles, fast to have a good time the ‘delivery of a brand new Syria’, but once more ignored how equally radical revolutionary actions have up to now absorbed into the equipment of the neoliberal establishment with the blessings of the Empire’s safety equipment, and the way all outbursts of revolt have been efficiently neutralised.
However on the root of the tragicomedy lies the neoliberal order’s obsession with novelty and fixed change itself – as a substitute of actual ‘evental’ transformation – which has been repeatedly uncovered every time warlords turn into revolutionaries within the Center East. Is it not the change itself that feeds the established order?
As some cautious optimists famous after the autumn of Damascus, the true check lay within the ‘morning after’ — when the push of unity wore off, abandoning the sobering weight of actuality. It was then that the zeal for solidarity wanted to be harnessed into concrete political motion or, on the very least, a coherent administrative blueprint.
But the urgent query of “what now?” wasn’t simply being requested regionally; as a rule, its solutions got here from voices far faraway from the area itself.
In the meantime, caught between the false dichotomy of ‘nationwide sovereignty’ — typically a guise for tyranny — and the foreign-backed push for ‘democracy’, exemplified by interventions just like the Iraq invasion, lies the breeding floor for the ‘morbid signs’.
For progressive politics, the sample displays a deeper malaise: political language itself has turn into a jail, muting genuine progressive voices and confining discourse inside dominant narratives.
The collapse of the secular Left within the area stays the area’s best tragedy, leaving a void crammed by Islamic fundamentalism. Whereas the latter mimics the Left’s name for social justice, it lacks emancipatory beliefs. The Syrian struggle devolved into ethnic and non secular strife, additional revealing the felony absence of a unifying secular imaginative and prescient.
Amid this dearth of genuine, indigenous narratives, the problem appears to be to interrupt free from the cycle of pro-Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism, which have been perpetuating one another.
Civil society actions in Egypt—by means of unions, girls’s teams, and intellectuals—provided glimpses of hope, however the area nonetheless contends with the West’s contradictory stance.
Regardless of lofty rhetoric, the West has repeatedly sabotaged progressive openings whereas professing to champion them. In 2011, when Arabs broke free from the binary for the primary time, occupying public areas not within the identify of fundamentalism however for progressive calls for, the West was profitable in working its ‘ideological bomb disposal’ – not by crushing the heresy however by paradoxically integrating the emergence of the disaster and ultimately deadening the ‘dysfunctions’ and disturbances.
This has left a panorama dominated by false radicalism, dictated decisions, and illusory gradualism. Because of this, the one different different seen within the muddied waters of the area is both a capitalist-parliamentary framework, parochial identitarian freedoms at the price of long-festering financial precarity (the reason for unrest within the first place), or tamed autocratic regimes to safeguard US-Zionist pursuits within the area.
America, particularly, has a historical past of channelling well-liked uprisings into parliamentary-capitalist frameworks, and gatekeeping revolts, as seen in South Africa post-apartheid, the Philippines after Marcos, and Indonesia after Suharto.
In such a state of affairs, progressive truths spoken in a language sanctioned by the worldwide establishment disguise meanings extra regressive and harmful.
‘Half revolution, no revolution’
Within the Sixties, Herbert Marcuse launched the thought of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the so-called sexual revolution: human impulses may be unleashed, but stay tightly tethered to capitalist management.
This lens helps unpack the deeper which means behind protests and revolts missing a transparent agenda. Their very lack of goal speaks volumes concerning the ideological and political predicament.
At the moment’s protestor is a dissatisfied client who lives in a society that loudly champions alternative however affords a stark actuality: the one alternate options to enforced democratic conformity are both blind revolt or harmful violence.
Opposition to the system can not current itself as a viable different and even as a utopian dream—it erupts as a substitute as a futile, chaotic outburst.
In a consumerism-driven society that thrives not on full unity however on dissonance, there’s little distinction between a brand new pair of sneakers from a high-end retailer and a political identification that, mockingly, medicates the accidents of consumerism itself. Each soothe the strain of nerves.
French thinker, Alain Badiou, a Maoist and a soixante-huitard, has argued that we exist in an more and more ‘worldless’ social house — one the place protest, stripped of goal or imaginative and prescient, manifests solely as mindless violence.
Or, because the thinker succinctly places it in his guide ‘Ethics’, “not each ‘novelty’ is an occasion”. Mere spurious negativity and wild, mad dance of revolt solely find yourself creating fashioning new, extra ferocious idols out from the mud of the previous ones.
Destruction, whereas cathartic, can’t change the hassle wanted to rescue and defend what is sweet. The tenet is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus — justice, the place the road between justice and vengeance blurs.
Blake aptly wrote:
“The hand of vengeance discovered the mattress,
To which the purple fled;
The iron hand crushed the pinnacle,
And have become a tyrant in its stead.”
As an illustration, when the pandemic hit the world, a serious break was anticipated that will ultimately power a reflective pause, a chance to assume past the purview and conceive a transformative “exterior” to avoid wasting the humanity.
But, as was anticipated, the power of historical past reigned and the disaster was responded to by a “new regular” completely according to the contradictory nature of late capitalism.
‘Refolutions’
Most accounts of the Syrian battle deal with its inner dynamics, spotlighting the Assad regime’s iron fist and the opposition’s failure to get its act collectively, whereas casting worldwide involvement as an afterthought. Nevertheless, exterior forces have been the true movers and shakers from the outset, shaping the course of occasions on each side.
Although neither Assad nor the opposition have been puppets on a string, international involvement added gasoline to the hearth, amplifying the struggle’s scale and trajectory.
Discontent throughout the area exposes cracks within the neoliberal order. Nevertheless, responses hardly ever transcend its framework. The result’s a cycle of futility, the place resistance turns into spectacle quite than substance.
Leftist politics oscillates between extremes. On one facet, unyielding radicalism refuses to compromise, identical to the Maoist resolve to concede nothing. On the opposite, fatalistic acceptance of shallow reforms merely patches over crises with out addressing their root causes. Because the adage goes, “The extra issues change, the extra they keep the identical.”
This lethal oscillation typically advantages regimes that skillfully defuse revolutionary momentum with beauty reforms. The result is a trompe-l’oeil of transformation—the phantasm of progress masking unchanged oppressive techniques.
The urgent query stays: Can a really transformative imaginative and prescient emerge, or will Arab revolutions stay confined throughout the contradictions of late capitalism?
Iranian scholar Asef Bayat describes the Arab uprisings of 2011–12 as “revolutions with out revolutionaries,” a time period he unpacks in his guide of the identical identify.
Drawing a stark distinction with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—a traditional instance of a revolution with organised revolutionaries—Bayat, who himself noticed the Iranian upheaval carefully, systematically compares these actions.
In response to Bayat, the Arab uprisings have been distinct for his or her lack of radicalism, characterised by what he calls “dissent and deradicalisation”.
In contrast to the Iranian revolution, these uprisings lacked mental grounding in ideologies like nationalism, socialism, or Islamism, leading to no decisive break from the previous order. As a substitute, they represented “revolution as a motion” by means of mass mobilisation, however not “revolution as an final result” that ushers in systemic change.
This liminality—present in a transitional state with out progressing to full transformation—was their defining trait. It wasn’t a stepping stone to revolutionary reconstruction however quite a stalled midway level, encapsulated in a protester’s placard: “Half Revolution, No Revolution!”
Bayat coined the time period “refolution” to explain these half-revolutions, borrowing from Timothy Garton Ash’s use of the time period to explain the mix of reform and revolution seen throughout the collapse of Communism in 1989.
He argues that the structural changes imposed by the IMF and World Financial institution have been the straw that broke the camel’s again, steering the uprisings away from radical change and into the grip of neoliberalism.
As for the Syrian revolution, a cautious hope, regardless of the cynical instances we dwell in, stays, albeit stained by blood and betrayals of fourteen years. Or, as poet Robert Lowell described such conditions: “The sunshine on the finish of the tunnel is simply the sunshine of an oncoming prepare.”