By all standards, 2011 will go down as a remarkable year of
unrest, uprising, demonstration, and change. The Arab Spring seemingly burst
out of nowhere, catalyzed by a street vendor’s self- immolation in Tunisia.
That led to mass demonstrations that unseated the country’s leader. That spark
ignited strong and dogged demonstrations in Egypt in Tahrir Square, in Cairo,
that continued until President Mubarek was forced to relinquish power. Then
across the Middle East, oppressed peoples rose in their turn to rid themselves
of their own dictators - in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Syria, in Libya. Some have
not been successful but are ongoing. Rebels in Libya were fortunate to receive
air and weapons support from NATO as civil war broke out. At the time of
writing, the situation in Syria is dire for the protestors facing the tanks and
guns of the army.
A few things have become clear. All these countries were
suffering from world economic conditions that meant high unemployment,
especially among the youth, and a sharp rise in food prices that made it
difficult, even for those lucky enough to have work, to put food on the table.
Parents don’t tolerate seeing their kids go hungry for long without acting.
They had, of course, put up with brutal dictator- ships, secret police,
torture, and absolutely no say in the way their countries are run for decades.
It was a recipe for disaster, an uprising waiting to happen, and we salute the
courage shown by the men and women of those countries.
What were the results? In Tunisia and Egypt, the people have
been forced to take to the streets again to force interim leadership to get on
with the job of establishing democracy. In Egypt, the army is in firm control.
It could easily have crushed the uprising but the generals chose to get Mubarek
out of the way. In Libya, the NATO assistance ensured the fall and death of the
Khadafi regime. The presence of oil in that country may have had something to
do with NATO’s involvement. Khadafi was a loose canon and oil supplies,
dwindling as they are, need a steady and reliable supply. It’s even better if
those supplies can be controlled by Western capitalists. The struggles in Yemen
and Syria continue without result so far. Probably the best result that can be
hoped for, under the circumstances, is for the establishment of some kind of
limited democracy. Socialism - common ownership, free access etc - has never
been brought forward, although, presumably, socialist parties will be able to
organize where the knowledge and will arise.
Lessons that come out of the Arab Spring so far are 1) that
uprisings, no matter how popular, have little chance against the guns and tanks
of the state without outside help or the mass defection of state troops. In
countries with universal suffrage, it is better to use the legal parliamentary
system, which, by the way, ensures a majority with legitimacy to establish
socialism 2) the domino effect that created uprisings in several countries
proves the power of social networking and modem tech- nology which can grease
the wheels of capitalism’s slide into oblivion once the people want socialism3)
socialism cannot be established unless there is class consciousness among the
masses and it is an articulated goal.
The second event of note was, and is, the Occupy Movement.
Although most of the Occupy sites have been cleared, the movement continues.
Like the Arab uprisings, Occupy appears to have occurred through spontaneous
combustion, thanks again to modern technology. Occupy sites appeared almost
simultaneously all over the world, all with the same slogan, “We are the
ninety-nine per cent”. This does prove socialists right when we say a socialist
revolution and its ideas would not be confined to one country or region but
would spread like a virus throughout the world. National borders may be armed
to the teeth and policed 24/7 to keep people in or out, but they cannot contain
and stifle ideas or electronic signals.
A pleasing aspect of Occupy, at least the one we visited,
was the socialist-like organization - no leaders, and therefore no followers,
decisions made democratically through elected committees, and daily discussions
of the topics in a public forum - more or less as we see a socialist world
working. Although individual opinions vary among the rank and file, Occupy does
not understand, nor promote, socialism. They appear to see the major problem as
the great and growing gulf between the 1% and the 99%. Focus on this aspect of
capitalism, a natural consequence of the capitalist mode of production, has led
to solutions to reduce the gap when it really has to be eliminated altogether.
It’s not good enough to simply expect to finish up with less poor and less rich
and leave the system that demands that there be a gap in tact. All inequality -
economic, political, racial, gender must end. Given that, it must be quite
obvious that we haven’t had equality of access to necessary goods and services
since the advent of private property. As soon as surplus grain became available
in the first agrarian revolution ten thousand years ago, someone grabbed it as
theirs by force or cunning and inequality was born and continued through the
slave empires, through feudalism, and into our present economic system. So we
have a system that is based on inequality - owners and non-owners, employers
and employees, capitalists and workers. Inequality has been around a long time
but that doesn’t mean it must or will last forever. It must be obvious if we
think this through to its logical conclusion that we must simply get rid of
private property, the private monopoly of creating and distributing wealth.
Common ownership of the world’s resources and their use for
producing necessary goods and free access for all mankind to all these goods,
as needed, will necessarily end inequality. There won’t be owners and classes
any more - we will all be owners!
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