14/12 The Arab revolutions: Alain Baron

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Outline of lecture

1.Introduction: Revolutionary wave, double break with dominant discourse

  • 1.1. Orientalist vision from colonial tradition:
    “people from the Arab region doomed to authoritarianism and obscurantism”
  • 1.2. Dominant discourse since thirty years. “The end of history”:
    the will to prolong for eternity the period starting with the end of the seventies

These revolutions do not appear out of the blue or out of the Internet magic:
counter tendencies were already at work and accelerated during the last years.

2. The revolutionary crises in Tunisia and in Egypt

  • 2.1. Global context of crisis of capitalism financial, economic and ecological crisis.
  • 2.2. Crisis of the dominant oligarchies in power in Tunisia and in Egypt:
    “those from above can not rule anymore like before”
  • 2.3. “Those from below don’t want to be rules like before anymore”:
    revolt of the youth, mobilisations by the workers and the “intermediary layers”
  • 2.4. The major phases since January-February in both countries (rather long part)
  • 2.5. An unstable situation, globally the relationship of forces is maintained,
    the process started at the beginning of 2011 is not closed
  • 2.6. A chaotic dynamic of extension to the whole of the region

3. The limits of these processes

  • 3.1. Weakness of self organisation
  • 3.2. Absence of revolutionary mass party : a small and fragmented radical left
  • 3.3. A difficult link between youth and organisations of adults
  • 3.4. In Tunisia, a difficult link between the people of the most developed cities and the poor regions of the interior of the country
  • 3.5. Le weight of decades of dictatorship
  • 3.6. Mass islamist parties
  • 3.7. The essential parts of the previous State apparatus is kept in place
  • 3.8. Capacity of the dominant classes and of imperialism to regain the initiative:
  • Tunisia:
    • the High Council is installed,

they use for their own agenda the popular demand for a constituent Assembly

    • attacks against women’s rights
  • Egypt:
    • referendum in February
    • legislation against the right to strike
    • attacks against freedom of speech
    • elections in November

4. What Prospects?

  • 4.1. A break with capitalism and imperialism: on what conditions ( declaration of the Fourth International, interview Hamma Hammami …)
  • 4.2. Towards a “democratisation at the level of the Maghreb-Machrek region”? (Gus)
  • 4.3. Towards the stabilisation of religious and conservative regimes?

( the “Turkish model”)?

  • 4.4. Towards totalitarian religious regimes?

5. Build international solidarity

  • Campaign against the debt
  • Support for mobilisations of workers, trade-unions, defence of women’s rights,
 mobilisations of the youth and for freedom
  • Help with the building of a revolutionary vanguard
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