Arab Revolutions Under Threats of Penetration and Third Hegemony

Current Arab revolutions must originate from their own organic environments in order to produce their own new social formations including new structures, institutions, agencies and sets of beliefs, values, norms, discourse and systems of meanings as a sine qua non for an Arab self-determent, sovereignty, independence and sustainable development. Permanent indigenous, inborn Arab revolution is the only guarantee to stem the hemorrhage of Arab economic surplus, external pillage and plunder, penetration and infiltration, destructive and insidious social forces, dependency and finally to avoid the “Third Hegemony”.

By “Third Hegemony” (TH) we mean the hegemony of the imperialist center over the current Arab revolutions and the role of the local counter-revolutionary forces in strengthening that hegemony [1]. TH is different from core’s traditional domination especially by force, it is a new tactic that minimizes military invasion/domination and uses all local forces, classes, intellectuals, ruling elites - that are penetrated by western imperialist powers - to counter popular uprisings and revolutions, i.e. to occupy Libya by Libyans as agents for the imperialist center in the final analysis. Revolution is neither a protest nor a reform; rather it is a continuous process of radical and fundamental negation of the status quo. It’s a process that must aim at detonating and uprooting the current unjust, exploitative, inequitable, unequal, corrupt, dependent, repressive and oppressive, hybrid, exogenous and manipulative structures, institutions, agencies, symbols, semantics, behavioral patterns, sets of beliefs and value systems, discourses, terminologies and meanings.

It is a revolutionary spatial process that must transpire through all sites of the society: sites of production, and of circulations, sites of individual and collective consumptions, site of subjectivity –civil society— and at the sites of distributions and redistributions of income, wealth and power. It’s a bitter and long social struggle embedded in a ferocious class war aiming at radical social change towards people’s spatial emancipation i.e. social, political, economic, cultural, moral, symbolic, semantic, ideological and physical/geographic emancipation. Revolution is a cyclical process of de-legitimization, legitimization and re-legitimization and hence the term of permanent revolution.

To secure their success i.e. sovereign, independent and sustainable self-determent development, Arab revolutions are required to de-link themselves from the structures, institutions and agencies of the colonial and neo-colonial legacies and depart from the underlying logic of capitalist expansion, especially from the underlying logic of the current round of capital expansion of the offensive U.S. led neo-liberal project. Otherwise, such “revolutions” will continue to operate within the parameters of the current vicious cycles of the predatory, cannibalistic and offensive neo-liberalism.

The current revolutionary trends in the Arab Homeland came in surprise to the ruling classes which strengthen their control over the societies through mainly two mechanisms:

– Emptying and hollowing the class consciousness (Tajweef al-Waa’i): of the popular classes through a total elimination of all forms of opposition especially political parties
– Emptying and depleting class consciousness enable the ruling comprador classes, and the imperialist capital, especially the multi-national corporations to steal and confiscate people’s wealth (Tajrif al-thrawa) through corruption and exploitation. Even in this instance, the Zionist Ashkenazi Regime ZAR has its share, i.e. indirect trade with many Arab regimes on the one hand and direct trade with Jordan and Egypt (the Gaza and Qiz agreements)

While one still hesitate to call it revolution, the counter-revolution is going on in parallel. In fact, the counter-revolution has been at work for a long time—since the era of colonization and neo-colonization. If counter-revolution did not exist then revolution itself would not have been necessary.

The counter-revolution has been active in several forms: underdevelopment, de-industrialization, compradorization, fragmentation, dependency, culture and economic consumerism, political repression and oppression as well as socio-economic control. External penetration is an old historical phenomenon that serves nations’ interests, domination and hegemony. Its goal is the subjugation of other nations, states and peoples to appropriate economic surplus for the sake of capital accumulation and the concentration of power.

In this conflict, due to the Tajrif, dependency, external penetration through open markets…etc, all these factors are evidences of class alliance of the local and foreign ruling/owning classes. Accordingly, it is obvious that class is the crucial factor despite the fact that in most conflicts, within and between nations, the national element is there and looks as if it is the only reason.

The idea behind this article aims at analyzing the relationship between colonized and the colonizers, penetrated and the penetrators in the context of the current popular Arab uprisings to demonstrate that the colonized still operate within the boundaries of the colonizers’ orientation, structures, institutions, agencies and cultural discourse even while trying to revolt. This is to differentiate between people’s local, genuine motive for revolutions, i.e. working class, middle class youths, unemployed…etc who were struggling through workers strikes, political parties, social and political struggle for decades and that of the co-opted intellectuals and political liberal elite, who are shouting for democracy in Tahrir Square in Cairo (Midan al-Tahrir ) without transforming their protest to challenge the social and economic structure of the regime, its tight relationship with imperialism and its subjugation to the ZAR.

To fathom the current Arab revolutions it is essential not to fall into the trap where we perceive all participants as revolutionary people. While millions of angry masses poured to streets, (the case of Egypt) this doesn’t mean that they are politically and consciously motivated. They are protestors but not necessarily revolutionaries in a conscious manner. That is why, they might be easily manipulated and the revolution might deviate from its real track. This weakness of the protesting masses enables the western-oriented and trained Information Technology Elite ITE—internet savvies. This youth has been trained in the US new centers of counter-revolution established in Serbia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia ….etc [2]. In stark contrast to this group there is the vast majority which consists of nationalist patriotic youths, well-educated and unemployed but lacks the normative discourse, strategic vision and plans of what is to be done and where to go.

Unfortunately, what is rarely mentioned is the long ferocious political struggle of political parties, working classes and unions for several years before the masses took to the streets and flooded Miadin el Tahreer (Arab liberation squares). So far, the capitalist neo-liberal and rentier Arab media, including many courtiers intellectual and lackeys, have been focusing on the internet savvies and the ITE. Did that happen because of ignorance or because the “revolutionaries” aimed at not tapping the taboo of capital and its innate cannibalism inherent in its expansionist logic? If this is the case, then it means that Arab revolutions have been infiltrated and penetrated from within and without by counter-revolutionary forces—by Arab and non-Arab neo-liberal anti-revolutionary social forces. The weak role of political parties and the late coming of the trade unions at the outset of the revolutions led to a disastrous mistake not for the current moment but for the future as well.

Many liberal and renegade Marxists praised the absence of political parties, unions and class struggle. They argued that revolutions never had a leadership and accordingly there is no need for political parties and vanguard. In their opinion, democracy and pluralism are enough to do the work. They continue to argue that Marxist analysis and ideology including terminology are old fashion and a new language must develop instead.

History is always open for new social forces to induce fundamental change and it never ended or stopped. It’s worth emphasizing here that Marxists also believe that their theory is open for any progressive, radical developments.

Here we have two important issues to deal with:

First: political parties are human social mechanisms for struggling, ruling and change. Accordingly, it is ahistorical to claim that political parties are not necessary for the challenge of the current offensive neo-liberalism! Few months following the revolutions, it became evident that the absence of political parties is the most dangerous weakness of Arab revolutions. Political and ideological parties are indispensable factors in the success of the Arab revolutions, at least until they develop their development philosophies, strategic visions, plans, programs and orientation.

Second: the logic of history emphasizes that new, revolutionary developments must produce their own social forces i.e. structures, institutions, agencies, goals, programs, strategies, ideas/ideologies, language and terminology, set of symbols as well as discourse.

Unfortunately, those courtiers intellectuals and lackeys, ITE, renegade Marxists, Islamic streams—Salafi, Wahhabi currents and Muslim brotherhoods, liberals, right wingers, reactionary and conservative forces, capitalist predators…etc. are in fact struggle to stop, undermine, deform and redirect the revolutions at their initial, start-up stages using appealing concepts such as procedural democracy –which focuses on “free and fair elections” without any relation to economic, social and genuine political democracy. Elections, which mostly are neither free nor fair, considered as an end by itself—, the rule of rich elites, “freedom” of the market, and the new religion of mass consumerism.

Liberal democracy has been developed by and for elites and was evolved gradually over the last three centuries only to be subjugated to capital needs and market exigencies and this is why it failed to accomplish social and economic democracies despite the presence of the so-called civil society, political pluralism and economic liberalization.

Since its inception, the current Arab people’s democracy sprung up from the bottom up, from the popular and limited middle classes and was not imposed on nor foisted by elitist groups from the top-down. Since their very beginning in December of 2010, Arab revolutions have been progressing gradually and slowly and this process means that two scenarios are expected: either they will continue to develop slowly but deeply or that counter-revolutionary forces will continue to undermine them from inside and outside.

Nevertheless, the so-called civil society under capitalism in the west is a mobilized civil society acting mostly on behalf of the ruling classes and the powerful elites and their internal and external hegemony. A civil society, including its working classes, that supports its ruling elites, classes and generals to launch aggressions and wars against other nations and conduct repeated massacres and slaughters against unarmed people should not and must not be called “civil” society nor civilized people. A society which subjugates others to the logic of capitalist expansion and subject others to its ruling class’ hegemony and fight other nations to blunder their wealth and use it to resolve its internal contradictions and legitimacy crisis is not and will not be a liberal society.

There is no real, genuine pluralism in western liberal countries. Historical developments and records show that pluralism in the west remains part and parcel of the different factions of the ruling bourgeois classes including the communist parties which had adopt the bourgeois and elitist parliamentary approach for struggle and change. This kind of pluralism is a stark evidence of the success and prevailed ruling bourgeois classes’ hegemony.

All forms of power have remained and maintained within the capitalist circles i.e. wealth, army, culture, knowledge, media, discourse, politics…etc. Those who attain power are the haves and not the have not, those who have the resources and means to spend, i.e. to bribe and pay more. Even “communist” parties who decline to compete for power through parliaments are playing the same game, but finally lost their content. Procedural, elitist democracy which constantly and repeatedly manipulates public opinion via the capitalist media to circulate and re-circulate different capitalist factions and powerful elites for the sake of their interests while ignores the demands and interests of the vast majority of the people cannot and must not be called democracy, rather a bogus, manipulative democracy. This genre of democracies had led and will continue to lead to the destruction of other countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, and other countries on the list of the western ruling classes. This destruction, known by the bourgeois organic intellectuals as “Creative Destruction” was permitted, supported and legitimized by the manipulated western working classes thanks to the ruling class hegemony.

The demonstrations against war and globalization [3] on the eve of the Western/Atlantic aggression against Iraq never affected the decision of all western regimes, from Washington through London, from Paris to Oslo. To the contrary, it gave such regimes a mandate to launch the war via such media manipulation that kept emphasizing people’s “right” to protest as a part of western liberal democracies, whereas the ruling class maintained its “right” to practice massacres and hence ignoring anti war voices.

Two factors lie behind the continuity of this situation which is falsely called capitalism’s ability to last or the “End of History”:

The continuity of pillaging and plundering of the wealth of the poor nations has been a crucial factor in keeping the western ruling classes’ hegemony intact as it extracted, appropriated and transferred the peripheral and semi-peripheral social surplus into their societies i.e. maintaining social peace and resolving the inherent capital contradictions embedded in and manifested at the social classes conflict. Wealth of the poor and dependent nations has been used as opium that anaesthetized the peoples of the core countries of the capitalist system from revolting. This is one aspect of the racist and opportunistic practices of the western civil societies who have been, consciously and unconsciously nevertheless, benefiting from their empires’ aggressions, wars, dominations, pillage and plunders. The Fabians under the British Empire is a case in point.

The central problem of the current Arab revolutions is rooted in the role of social forces which strive to stop, undermine, deviate and deform people’s democratic revolution to keep them hocked and harnessed to the yoke capitalism and western bourgeois domination and hegemony. These anti and counter-revolutionary social forces are struggling with all means at their disposal to prevent the Arab people from attaining their sovereignty, genuine independence and sustained self-determined development. In other words, they are fighting fiercely to undermine any sliver of hope for Arab unity as the only development solution for the Arabs in the Arab homeland.

A threatening danger to the current Arab revolutions is represented by liberal, courtiers intellectuals and lackeys, army leadership and generals, Wahhabi, Salafi and Muslim brotherhoods currents, rentier media, NGOs, ITE trained in and by the US agencies, especially the CIA and NED (National Endowment for Democracy)…etc. These are the social forces of penetration we mentioned above. All these forces are highly alerted and activated by the counter-revolution.

The counter-revolutionary people are well-trained, well-financed, highly organized, well-paid and fully aware of their role in blocking the road of the unfolding, emerging Arab revolutions. These forces still remember the long years which took them to undermine, isolate and put an end to the Arab nationalist revolution, especially that of Nasser in Egypt.

Nasser’s nationalistic; Pan-Arabism revolution was a direct threat to the strategic interests of the western ruling classes. Pan-Arabism was a struggle for Arab liberation from colonialism to achieve Arab unity. Despite the fact that Nasser’s revolution wasn’t radical enough against capitalism and western cultural values, western modernization, and despite its moderation, the counter- revolution insisted on its liquidation. This historical fact sheds light on the question why the West at the present moment, especially the U.S.A., strives to control the current revolutions with the aim to keep them within the parameters of procedural, formal democracy and under the grasp of the predatory neo-liberalism.

In other words, the counter-revolutionary forces are scared of the prospects that Arab revolutions will develop and evolve into a permanent revolution and will move into the second revolution, i.e. the national revolution which will re-nationalize industries and banks, restore land for the peasants and restore the stolen public sector and restart the struggle for Arab unity and liberating occupied Arab land. Moreover, they are strongly concerned that the second revolution will progress into its ultimate third phase of socialist orientation and revolution. Genuine democracy in the Arab Homeland is against the current and strategic interests of the core capitalist countries as well as against their procedural, elitist and bogus democracies. Such genuine democracy will lead ultimately to people’s control of their resources, decisions and present and future development. This is the essential reason why western bogus, elitist democracies are striving to promote bogus, elitist democracies in the Arab Homeland.

Re-Deepening Penetration and Third Hegemony is the Dark Alternative

Terms like “Civil Society”, “Human Rights”, “Promotion of Democracy”, Hegemony…etc. have been invoked since the emergence of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s and have been applied all over the world including the Arab Homeland to re-engineer societies from below, re-circulate elites and to dismantle the intimate triad between revolutionary ideas, organic intellectuals and the masses prevalent in the era of national liberation movements during the 1950-1970. The ultimate goal of the imposing and applying such concepts has been to smooth the working of neo-liberalism—capital expansion and accumulation and the exercise of western hegemony around the world and the elimination of any kind of resistance from below. Economic restructuring, political “liberalization” and social re-engineering went hand by hand.

The terms “Civil Society” and “Hegemony” have been appropriated and used far from their revolutionary content and intentions as Gramsci develop them. “Civil Society” became an indispensable site to exercise the American and western global policies of “Human Rights”—applied during the Carter administration and was brainchild of Zbignew Brzezinski. The Reagan administration wasn’t satisfied with this policy and came up with the policy of “Human Project/Promotion” to enhance neo-liberal hegemony by the US on behalf of the core capitalist countries in parallel and in harmony with neo-liberal capitalist expansion.

As for hegemony, Gramsci’s theory based on the contradiction and struggle of the working class hegemony, the first hegemony, to conquer bourgeois hegemony, the second hegemony, and replace it, the first is against the second in social/class struggle towards socialism.

To grasp the antagonistic contradiction between the two hegemonies is vital for political organizations in their social struggle. The point of discussion here is not to find out how hegemony is applied in the current Arab revolutions because it is hard to agree that there is a political society that allows the development of civil society on the one hand, and because the mistaken understanding and conceptualization of hegemony here is one sided, i.e. the hegemony of the ruling class/s which aimed at maintaining “social peace”.

The concept I am trying to elaborate here will be referred to as the “Third Hegemony”, by this we mean the hegemony of the imperialist center over the current Arab revolutions and the role of the local counter revolutionary forces in strengthening that hegemony. It is a substitution of the imperialist domination by a new and complicated form of hegemony. While the first and second hegemonies from Gramsci’s point view are local and internal, the third one is mixed of local and external hegemonies and mainly devoted for the “Other”, the ruling classes in the core [4].

The mechanisms of the third hegemony are of two parts complimenting each other:

• The local one includes local classes, elites and individuals whose role is to stop the current revolutions on the borders of procedural, formal political democracy and neo-liberalism, to maintain the same regimes after toppling their top leaders, to call NATO’s forces to support the so-called revolutionaries, to use all means to depose the Syrian regime not because it is a repressive one, but because it is against the Zionist Ashkenazi Regime (ZAR) and because it’s the only secular and resistant regime who stands against all imperialist schemes of the “New Middle East” and the “Creative Chaos and /or Destruction”. On the other hand, NATO had supported the Gulf monarchies and sheikdoms of the occupation of tiny kingdom of Bahrain and by this it suppressed the popular democratic uprising there only to re-emphasize once again the western hypocrisy and its insincere and insidious intentions of “promoting democracy” in the region/ Arab Homeland.
• Second, the role of the imperialist camp is to infiltrate and penetrate the Arab revolutions through a lot of co-opted, westernized intellectuals, security apparatuses and forces of the current regimes, digital technology and know-how, vehement media and via trained groups of youths who were educated and trained in the new training centers of counter-revolution. The imperialist camp led by the US is re-ordering its camp at several levels:
  • Pushing Turkey to be the spearhead against radicalization of Arab revolutions via the marketing of American/Turkish Islam.
  • Supporting Moslem Brotherhoods in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.
  • Using the Wahabis in the Gulf monarchies and sheikhdoms to pressure new regimes in Egypt and Tunisia to avoid any radical steps by threatening, especially Egypt, of deporting the large numbers of Egyptian workforce. On the other hand, the Gulf regimes apply another kind of pressure though the offering of loans to Egypt and Tunisia which they desperately in need during this transitional period [5]. Still there is no confirmation that these loans will be paid.

The final result of this alliance between the two parties is to impose TH on the region which is not a direct imperialist domination. To illustrate, NATO did not send troops to Libya but left it to Libyans to kill each other and to prepare their own country for new neo-colonialism without military occupation like what happened in Iraq but through destruction of Libyan infrastructure and civil neighborhoods form the air [6] the same is taking place in Yemen but in semi-secret tactic. But it is the maintaining of the current dependent regimes, applying procedural, forms and bogus democracy and neo-liberalism, accept IMF and WB prescriptions, open markets and making peace with the ZAR.

To emphasize TH, the US and other imperialists had declared their support of the fall of Mubarak and Bin Ali in an attempt to show as if they are behind the revolutions. On the other hand, they launched military assaults against Libya and have been supporting the betrayal and armed groups infiltrating Syria, not the patriotic faction, opposition by all means, i.e. media, weapons and first and foremost capital…etc, and are declaring day and night that, Gaddafi must leave, Assad in his final days, Saleh must accept the Gulf mediation…etc. This is in addition to US, French and British official visits to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen are aiming at showing the peoples of the region that everything still in the hands of the West as a part of psychological warfare to show Arabs that there is no alternative to the western domination, penetration and third hegemony [7]!