Alex Callinicos,Imperial Delusions

 International Socialism, Issue: 142

31 de marzo 2014

Once upon a time, after the end of the Cold War, a fairy tale came to prevail, especially in Europe: economic globalisation was washing away national antagonisms and drawing states into a benign system of “global governance” under which the peoples of the world would share freedom and prosperity. Peter Hain, when he was a Blairite Foreign Office minister at the turn of the millennium, even predicted “the end of foreign policy” as governments increasingly pursued “the new global imperative” of cooperating to address issues such as HIV/Aids and “terrorism”.1 The crisis in Ukraine, demonstrating as it does persisting geopolitical conflicts among the Great Powers, should deliver the coup de grace to this ideology.

Ideologies, however fantastic, can still have real effects. One important function of this one has been to provide the European Union with its self-image as a “normative power” uniquely embodying the virtues of globalisation and free of the militaristic bullying that disfigures the global policy of the United States.2 There was always much bad faith here: as the neoconservative Robert Kagan pointed out just before the Iraq War, the EU was only able to specialise in the soft power of diplomacy and trade because it could rely on American hard military power to keep the world safe for Western liberal capitalism.3 

But the EU’s vainglorious conception of itself has survived even the eurozone debacle. It informed the casual arrogance with which Brussels offered the cash-strapped Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych participation in its “Eastern Partnership” on a take it or leave it basis, merely promising to refer Kiev to the tender mercies of the International Monetary Fund. This gave Vladimir Putin the option he seized last November of offering hard cash to draw Ukraine into his own projected “Eurasian Union”. But when Yanukovych took the bait, this sparked off a popular movement which took the EU’s promise of prosperity and human rights at face value. As Marx pointed out, “theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses”.4

Why have the ensuing revolt and Yanukovych’s eviction from the presidency precipitated perhaps the most serious confrontation between Washington and Moscow in Europe since the 1961 Berlin crisis during one of the hottest phases of the Cold War? The answer lies in Ukraine’s strategic importance to Russia. As Tim Garton Ash put it, “with Ukraine, Russia is still an empire”.5 Wrested by the Romanovs from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century and expanded by later conquests, eastern Ukraine provided successive regimes with strategic depth, grain and raw materials. Crimea, casually attached to Ukraine by the Communist Party first secretary Nikita Krushchev in 1954, has, since Catherine the Great destroyed the Crimean Tatar Khanate in 1783, allowed Moscow to project naval power across the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean.

Ukrainian independence with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 was therefore a blow to the power of the rump Russian Federation, mitigated only by the agreements that have allowed its Black Sea Fleet still to use the base at Sevastopol. But the project of expanding the EU and NATO through Eastern and Central Europe and into the former USSR, pursued relentlessly by Bill Clinton and George W Bush, posed an even more serious threat. As George Friedman puts it:

Ukraine is about 300 miles from Moscow at its closest point. Were Belarus and Ukraine both admitted to NATO, the city of Smolensk, which had been deep inside the Soviet Union, would have become a border town. Russia has historically protected itself with its depth. It moved its borders as far west as possible, and that depth deterred adventurers—or, as it did with Hitler and Napoleon, destroyed them. The loss of Ukraine as a buffer to the West leaves Russia without that depth and hostage to the intentions and capabilities of Europe and the United States.6

For subscribers to the ideology of globalisation, such fears are archaic. But Putin is not one of them. In this he is typical of the ruling classes of the major “emerging market” economies with which Russia is often grouped, for example through the BRICS. The Russian model of capitalism over which Putin has presided is often described as “authoritarian”. This doesn’t mean it refuses integration into the world market. On the contrary, Russia has a niche as a major supplier of oil and gas, which account for 75 percent of all exports, while 45 percent of consumer goods are imported.7 Notoriously, Russian billionaires love London, as much for the access to financial markets and wealth management services offered by the City as for their Mayfair mansions.

But—like the rulers of China, India and Brazil—Putin wants globalisation on his terms, ones that allow a greater assertion of national power and a weakening of US hegemony. He has worked hard to rebuild Russian imperial power in its ex-Soviet “near abroad”. And he is determined to keep NATO away from Russia’s borders. He fought a brief war with Georgia in August 2008 to make the point. 

Putin skilfully exploited the Syrian war to increase Moscow’s global leverage and denounce US global ambitions. In words that have an ironic ring now, he used the New York Times as a pulpit from which to oppose Barack Obama’s abortive threat last autumn to attack Bashar al-Assad’s regime with cruise missiles: “We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilised diplomatic and political settlement”.8

So it was inevitable that if Ukraine tilted westwards, Russia would react, as Putin did, first by trying to block the partnership deal with the EU, and then, after Yanukovych’s fall, by seizing Crimea. But this is a continuation of a much longer history. Ukraine since independence has been fractured by the inter-imperialist rivalries that traverse it. These fractures, however, go further into the past. Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century was like a microcosm of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Extremes”.

It began the century scattered among different states, above all Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russian Revolution unleashed a vicious struggle between revolutionaries (above all the Bolsheviks based among the miners of the Donbass in the east), Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and Red and White armies. The outcome left Ukraine partitioned, the east a Soviet republic, while the west (Galicia and western Volhynia) was incorporated into Poland. Soviet Ukraine was one of the chief victims of the Stalinist collectivisation of agriculture, suffering in 1932-3 a terrible famine that Ukrainian nationalists controversially claim was a deliberately engineered act of genocide.9 

The Second World War ushered in a new chapter of horrors. The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 carved up Poland. Moscow seized western Ukraine, but lost it along with the rest of the country when Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941. Ukraine became a charnel house. The Nazis murdered 4 million people there, while the nationalist UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) led by Stepan Bandera allied itself with them in the hope of winning independence. As the Red Army advanced westwards in 1944-5 this hope died, but Soviet forces waged a counter-insurgency war against the UPA in western Ukraine till the early 1950s. Meanwhile, once Crimea had been recaptured in 1944, Stalin ordered the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to central Asia for alleged collaboration with the Germans. These deportations and subsequent immigration created an ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, which gives the lie to Putin’s claim that “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia”.10

Selective readings of this panorama of suffering and atrocity were reactivated with the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91. Notoriously, western Ukraine, Uniate Catholic and Ukrainian speaking, orients culturally, politically and economically towards the EU, the south and the east, Orthodox and Russian-speaking, towards Russia. In the west Bandera (assassinated by the KGB in 1959) is a hero, in the east a fascist. The Tatars who returned to Crimea after 1989 form an economically marginalised Muslim Turkic minority fiercely opposed to the peninsula’s reincorporation into Russia. 

Ukraine’s past created merely the potential for conflict: history isn’t destiny. Anatol Lieven argues that the elements of a common Ukrainian national identity were forged in the Soviet period, when Ukraine was for the first time unified: “Russians in Ukraine can best be understood as people left behind by the Soviet Union, very unsure of their own identity, but more closely linked to their Ukrainian home than to their Russian homeland”.11 

What made conflict actual in Ukraine were the overdetermining inter-imperialist rivalries involving the US, EU and Russia, and the country’s disastrous transition from state to market capitalism. As in Russia, Ukraine’s productive resources were sold off cheap to politically connected business oligarchs who made themselves billionaires by looting the economy. In both countries this led to a phase of gang warfare, in which a weak and corrupt state allowed rival “businessmen” to settle accounts violently. But in Russia in the 2000s Putin reimposed political order on this economic anarchy, for example, taking back the bulk of the energy industry into state control. In Ukraine, however, the gangsters run the country. In the early 2000s President Leonid Kuchma was accused of complicity in the beheading of a campaigning journalist.12 In December 2012 a judge and three members of his family were found beheaded in Kharkiv.13 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian economy suffered an ever more severe collapse than Russia’s during the era of neoliberal “shock therapy” in the 1990s, and did not experience a recovery comparable to that under Putin. Nominal per capita income in 2012 was $3,877, lower than that of Jamaica, Tunisia, or Paraguay (Russia’s is $14,302).14 Cheap credit and high commodity prices during the 2000s masked the underlying problems, but the global economic and financial crisis cut exports, slashed output by 15 percent in 2009, and pushed the hryvnia down in the currency markets. Foreign exchange reserves fell from $40 billion in 2011 to $12 billion today. According to the Economist, “Ukraine needs to find about $25 billion this year to finance its large current-account deficit and to meet foreign creditors”.15 Yanukovych’s vacillations between the EU and Russia and the ensuing upheaval were among the political effects of the global crisis.

Politics in Ukraine is the continuation of gangsterism by other means. Political power has seesawed between two rival gangs of oligarchs, each with their own regional bases. The 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” marked a victory for the western gang, headed by Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych, the loser in that contest, beat Tymoshenko in the 2010 presidential election, only to provoke the occupation of Independence Square in Kiev (“Euromaidan”) in November 2013 in protest against his rejection of the EU partnership deal. 

The protest movement seems to have been motivated by a mixture of opposition to Yanukovych, illusions in “Europe”, hatred of all the oligarchs and their political cronies, and the Western version of Ukrainian nationalism, which gave an important opening to the extreme right.16 The influence of the far-right, and their presence in the new government, dangerous though it is, does not mean Yanokovych was the victim of a “fascist coup”, as not simply Russian nationalists but many on the Western left claim. He fell because oligarchs—notably Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitry Firtash—who had been key backers of his Party of the Regions reacted to the popular mobilisation by withdrawing their support and instructing the deputies they controlled to vote for his removal by the Ukrainian parliament.17 Some oligarchs have been rewarded by the new government by being appointed governors of eastern provinces.

So, despite “Euromaidan”, this last “colour revolution” was merely the latest twist in Ukraine’s corrupt game of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But it was a twist too far for Putin. Probably his preferred solution would be to keep Ukraine whole but weak and fractured, thereby providing a buffer against NATO. Annexing Crimea in some ways undermines this objective by removing a bloc of pro-Russian voters from Ukrainian politics. 

After the 16 March Crimean referendum, Russia proposed keeping the peninsula in a federalised Ukraine and Ukraine out of NATO, but this was dismissed out of hand by the West. Even now Putin has annexed Crimea and Sevastopol separately, perhaps with future negotiations in mind (a first tentative move towards serious talks came in a meeting between the US and Russian foreign ministers in Paris at the end of March). His move in any case puts the squeeze on, not just Ukraine, but all the ex-Soviet republics—including the EU member states on the Baltic—that have Russian minorities (pro-Moscow enclaves already exist in Moldova and Georgia).

The Western response has been limited. Everyone sane ruled out military action. This is, in a sense, a continuation of the Cold War policy that tolerated the use of Soviet military power to maintain the satellite status of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But Putin would be the first to point out that the boundaries of Moscow’s sphere of influence have moved a long way eastwards. And the clamour by the pro-Western wing of the Ukrainian oligarchy for NATO membership continues, even though two ex-US national security advisers, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, have called for Ukraine to be “Finlandised”—ie economically integrated into the West, but kept geopolitically neutral. Both men have plenty of blood on their hands, but they recognise that incorporating Ukraine into NATO would commit the US to going to war to defend it.

So far Putin’s punishment is taking the form of targeted sanctions against his cronies and threats of more severe measures. The problem is that globalisation cuts both ways. Russia’s integration into the world market means that its capitalists will be hurt by sanctions, but so will the European capitalists who do a lot of business with them. Germany, the swing state in the EU, relies on Russia for 38 percent of its energy imports and did $80 billion worth of trade with Russia in 2012 (compared to a mere $19 billion for the US).18 These links explain why German chancellor Angela Merkel was instrumental in blocking sanctions against Russia after the 2008 Georgian war. 

But the centrality of the US to the global financial system can be used to hurt Russian economic interests. “The US banks are a phone call away from the White House and the Senate,” one prominent Western banker told the Financial Times.19 A Russian official has predicted capital outflows of $65 to 70 billion in the first three months of 2014.20 With much less at stake economically and preoccupied with China, the Obama administration can up the ante rhetorically, and leave the EU to pick up the bill for sanctions and take most of the flak if they fail. But if it were not to respond to further Russian moves—say, in eastern Ukraine, or against the Baltic republics—then it will face the perennial problem of American hegemony: how to prevent its “credibility” draining away among allies and clients. 

Meanwhile the EU must confront secretary of state Colin Powell’s warning to George Bush over invading Iraq: “If you break it, you own it.” Ukraine’s tilt westwards creates expectations of a European economic rescue. But the imposition of austerity on the eurozone “periphery” makes it politically impossible for Brussels to be generous to Ukraine. The IMF is fast-tracking a loan whose main conditions—devaluation of the hryvnia and sharp increases in consumer energy prices, rejected by Yanukovych—were accepted with puppy-like alacrity by interim prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Domestic gas prices will rise by more than 50 percent on 1 May.

The reaction of the Western left to this enormous crisis has been, to put it mildly, confused. Far too many (including some who should know better) have been willing to cast a blind eye at or find excuses for Russia’s military intervention. The reasons for this attitude are, in ascending order of respectability, Stalinist nostalgia, exaggeration of the role of the extreme right in the anti-Yanukovych movement, and the search for some counterweight to American power. The net result is a revival of what used to be called campism in the days of the Cold War—seeing states in conflict with the US and its allies (then the USSR, now usually Russia and China) as in some sense progressive allies of the left.

None of this has much to do with the revolutionary Marxist tradition. The fate of Ukraine preoccupied Trotsky during the last year of his life in 1939-40, as Europe rolled into the Second World War. Distilling the results of prolonged debates among Russian Marxists (which continued after October 1917) in which Lenin consistently insisted on the necessity of defending the right to self-determination of oppressed nations, Trotsky defended “the independence of a United Ukraine” (ie incorporating Polish Galicia and Volhynia) even if that meant “the separation of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR”—and this, remember, at a time when he was vehemently arguing that the Soviet Union was still a “degenerated workers’ state” that revolutionaries should defend against Western imperialism.21 

Quoting Trotsky can be a religious exercise, but his views are worth bearing in mind when considering supposed Marxists who dismiss the idea of Russian imperialism as an “abstraction” or even advocate the partition of Ukraine. Putin’s apologists on the Western left must explain how their stance squares with the right to national self-determination. If they defend Crimea’s (extremely dubious) claim to separate from Ukraine, where do they stand on the long-standing Chechen struggle for independence from Russia, brutally crushed by Putin? And what will they say if Russian forces move into eastern Ukraine and become mired in crushing the nationalist insurgency that this would almost certainly provoke? 

Of course, the US remains the dominant imperialist power on a world scale. And of course, it is thoroughly hypocritical for Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry to denounce Putin’s seizure of Crimea, forgetting Washington’s interventions in its own backyard such as the October 1962 naval blockade of Cuba or the December 1989 invasion of Panama (a state, incidentally, carved out of Colombia at Teddy Roosevelt’s behest at the beginning of the 20th century). 

But from a Marxist perspective, imperialism is about more than American power. The classical theory of imperialism is, more than anything else, a theory of intra-capitalist competition. Imperialism is a system, the form taken by capitalism when the concentration and centralisation of capital bring about the fusion of economic competition among capitals and geopolitical competition among states.22 Putin’s actions express exactly this imperialist logic, combining geopolitical preoccupations (above all, blocking NATO expansion) with economic motivations (fear that Russian firms will be squeezed out of the Ukrainian market by European rivals). 

The confused left response to the Ukrainian crisis is in part the result of an optical illusion created by the so called “unipolar moment” of apparent US global dominance after the end of the Cold War. Particularly in the light of Afghanistan and Iraq, American power has seemed so overwhelming and so malign that everything must be subordinated to resisting it. But this was always precisely an illusion. US hegemony has always been contested, reflecting the fact that imperialism involves a hierarchical distribution of power among competing capitalist states. This fact is becoming more important now. 

The relative decline of US power that has become evident since Iraq and the crash is opening up a period of more fluid competition, in which the weaker imperialist states begin to assert themselves. Putin’s strategy has reflected this for some time. Potentially a much more important conflict is developing in Asia, as China’s economic rise encourages its ruling class to flex their muscles geopolitically, in particular by building up the military capabilities to exclude the US Navy from the “Near Seas” along their coasts. The clashes between China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands are harbingers of more to come.23

In this era of growing inter-imperialist rivalries political clarity among revolutionary Marxists is vital.24 In New York, London and Moscow the main enemy is at home (a slogan Karl Liebknecht coined in response to a great inter-imperialist war whose centenary we will soon be remembering). But acknowledging this is no reason to apologise for our own rulers’ rivals. Imperialism is a hydra-headed beast. It needs to be killed, not merely one of its manifestations.

Notes

1: Hain, 2001, p7.

2: See Anderson, 2007, for a devastating dissection of the EU’s narcissism.

3: Kagan, 2003.

4: Marx, 1975, p250.

5: Ash, 2014.

6: Friedman, 2014.

7: Economist, 2014a.

8: Putin, 2013.

9: For different perspectives on the famine, see Conquest, 1986, and Getty, 1987.

10: http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6889. On Crimea, see the brilliant historical portrait in Ascherson, 1996, pp12-33.

11: Lieven, 1999, p49.

12: Koshiw, 2002.

13: Wrenn, 2012.

14: 15: Economist, 2014b. 

16: See the interesting interview with a Ukrainian revolutionary syndicalist, 

http://avtonomia.net/2014/02/20/maidan-contradictions-interview-ukrainian-revolutionary-syndicalist/ 

17: Neef, 2014.

18: McGregor and Wagstyl, 2014.

19: Farchy, Hille and Weaver, 2014. 

20: Hille and McGregor, 2014. 

21: Trotsky, 1974, p305.

22: Callinicos, 2009.

23: See Kim, 2013, and Dyer, 2014.

24: For an expression of this clarity at the height of the second Cold War, see Harman, 1981 (thanks to Rob Ferguson for excavating this).

References

Anderson, Perry, 2007, “Depicting Europe”, London Review of Books (20 September), 

www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/perry-anderson/depicting-europe 

Ascherson, Neal, 1996, Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism (Vintage).

Ash, Tim Garton, 2014, “At Stake in Ukraine’s Drama is the Future of Putin, Russia and Europe”, Guardian (21 February), www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/21/ukraine-putin-russia-europe-independence-disintegration 

Callinicos, Alex, 2009, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Polity).

Conquest, Robert, 1986, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror Famine (Hutchinson).

Dyer, Geoff, 2014, Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China (Penguin).

Economist, 2014a, “Sochi or Bust” (1 February), http://tinyurl.com/qcbtrsn 

Economist, 2014b, “Why is Ukraine’s Economy in Such a Mess?” (5 March), www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/03/ukraine-and-russia 

Farchy, Jack, Kathrin Hille, and Courtney Weaver, 2014, “Russian Executives Quake as US Sanctions Rattle Markets”, Financial Times (21 March), www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f35068a-b119-11e3-9548-00144feab7de.html#axzz2whiPRQnz 

Friedman, George, 2014, “Russia Examines its Options for Responding to Ukraine”, Stratfor Geopolitical Weekly (18 March), www.stratfor.com/weekly/russia-examines-its-options-responding-ukraine 

Getty, J Arch, 1987, “Starving the Ukraine”, London Review of Books (22 January), www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n02/j-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine 

Hain, Peter, 2001, The End of Foreign Policy? (Fabian Society, Green Alliance and Royal Institute of International Affairs).

Harman, Chris, 1981, “Brezhnev’s Headache”, Socialist Review (January/February), 

www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1981/01/poland.htm 

Hille, Kathrin, and Richard McGregor, 2014, “Russia Braced for $70bn in Outflows”, Financial Times (24 March), www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19b9ad88-b37c-11e3-bc21-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2wpGdcFqO 

Kagan, Robert, 2003, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Atlantic Books).

Kim, Ha-young, 2013, “Imperialism and Instability in East Asia Today”, International Socialism 138 (spring), www.isj.org.uk/?id=882

Koshiw, Jarko, 2002, Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist (Artemia Press).

Lieven, Anatol, 1999, Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (United States Institute of Peace Press).

McGregor, Richard, and Stefan Wagstyl, 2014, “White House Relies on Merkel to Maintain Sanctions”, Financial Times (17 March), www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fbf9046c-aded-11e3-9ddc-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2wJzX9ryv 

Marx, Karl, 1975, Early Writings (Penguin).

Neef, Christian, 2014, “Yanukovych’s Fall: The Power of Ukraine’s Billionaires”, Spiegel International Online (25 February). www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-oligarchs-in-ukraine-prepared-for-the-fall-of-yanukovych-a-955328.html 

Putin, Vladimir, 2013, “A Plea for Caution from Russia”, New York Times (11 September), www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?_r=0 

Trotsky, Leon, 1974, “The Ukrainian Question”, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39) (Pathfinder), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine.html 

Wrenn, Eddie, 2012, “Judge and His Family Beheaded ‘With Machete’ in Mediaeval Ukrainian Massacre”, Mail Online (17 December), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2249317/Judge-Vladimir-Trofimov-family-beheaded-Ukraine-gruesome-massacre.html

Alex Callinicos. Spectres of Counter-revolution

Internacional Socialism, Issue: 140

Counter-revolution now haunts the Arab world. But it takes diverse and confusing shapes. In Syria, for example, it appears as the regime headed up by Bashar al-Assad and as the United States, which has been threatening military action against it. The Saudi royal family leads the Gulf states as they strive to maintain the status quo in the region—here by direct armed intervention (Bahrain), there by propping up the old regime (Egypt), elsewhere by backing sectarian Sunni jihadis (Syria). And, most importantly, in Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, counter-revolution takes the all too solid form of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, commander in chief of the armed forces, and master of the country since he removed the elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Mursi on 3 July.

Nearly three years after the outbreak of the Arab revolutions the Middle East seems more tangled and confused than ever. This is enough to demoralise many who were inspired by the overthrows of Ben Ali and Mubarak. But this is one of those moments to recall the old 1968 slogan: “Do not adjust your head—the fault is in reality.” The confusion is real; it arises from the contradictions that define the situation—contradictions that are expressed, for example, in the hesitations of Barack Obama’s administration.

Egypt: the intertwining of revolution and counter-revolution

One response to the resulting ambiguity that is gaining ground among left liberal and more robustly left wing opinion is to deny that there have been revolutions in the first place. One well-informed commentator, Hugh Roberts, wrote recently: “It now seems that the pedlars of hallucinations have been cowed and it is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a ‘second revolution’. But to describe them as a counter-revolution, while indisputably more accurate, presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place”.1

Aijaz Ahmad, probably the most prominent intellectual associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is, in his own way, just as damning:

For all their spectacular demographic and performative grandeur, neither of these uprisings [25 January 2011 and 30 June 2013] can be judged “revolutionary”, even in the limited sense that the Nasserist Free Officers’ coup of 1952 could be deemed to have been. The Nasserists introduced fundamental systemic shifts very swiftly through such measures as abolishing the monarchy as well as feudal privileges, redistributing landholdings, restructuring foreign alignments in an anti-imperialist direction, building a public sector and adopting a whole host of policies that favoured the poorer and the lower middle classes. Nothing remotely resembling that has been either promised or projected in 2011 or 2013.2

In preferring the July 1952 military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power and enabled him to carry out a state capitalist restructuring of Egypt’s political economy to what he concedes were “two massive popular risings of historically unprecedented scale” Ahmad expresses the outlook of a wide section of the left and secular nationalism, not just in India, but in the Arab world and indeed in Egypt itself. The same preference for “progressive” military regimes because of their state capitalist domestic policies and geopolitical alignments is expressed in his support for the Assad regime in Syria:

Syria is the last remaining representative of Arab nationalism as it used to be understood historically. It still calls itself socialist. Even though it has implemented a great deal of neoliberal reform, the state sector is still dominant. It bans, literally bans, religion from politics. It will not recognise the existence of religious political parties. It is a historic opponent of Israel for a variety of reasons… In the old days, it was very closely aligned with the Socialist Bloc, and some of that kind of alignment still remains.3

Ahmad is representative also in treating all the different shades of political Islam as one single reactionary mass. Nevertheless, he recognises the scale of popular mobilisation in Egypt: “Egypt has not two main political actors, the military and the Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood], between whom we have to choose, but three—the third being the mass movement”.4 

For Roberts, however, the mass movement and the activists (particularly those of Tamarrod, the coalition of activists that mobilised the giant demonstrations of 30 June), are the useful idiots of more sinister and subterranean forces, the most important of which—the military—has now stepped into the limelight. He argues that Mubarak during his nigh on 30 years as head of state built up a high degree of political autonomy from the army, centred on an increasingly dynastic presidency, and from time to time using the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) to counterbalance the military. From this perspective:

What happened on 11 February 2011 was a renewal of the Free Officers’ state. Mubarak’s fall didn’t in itself amount to a revolution because the fundamental framework of the state established by the Free Officers following their coup in 1952 was still in place, as the emergence of the SCAF [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] as the dominant political actor should have made clear to everyone… The army had been the source of political power since 1952… It had been marginalised by Mubarak and so took little part in the day to day business of government, but it hadn’t been displaced by an alternative source of power. And so the events of January and February 2011 that brought it back to centre stage were not a revolution …there is at least a germ of coherence in the claim made by General Sisi and by Tamarrod that 3 July 2013 restored the fundamental logic of 11 February 2011. We can see this once we accept, however reluctantly, that this logic was the reassertion and reclamation by the army of its historical political primacy and not a real revolution, let alone the revolutionary advent of democracy.5

The very important element of truth in Roberts’s analysis is that the overthrow of Mubarak left the political and repressive core of the Egyptian state—the army—intact. This sharply differentiates February 2011 in Egypt from February 1979 in Iran, when an armed insurrection mounted by a coalition of the left and Islamists succeeded in smashing the Shah’s army.6 Of course, the military is the last line of defence of any capitalist state, but in Egypt it has also been a key institution of political power since 1952, as well as the lynchpin of the alliance with the United States forged by Anwar Sadat in the 1970s. Roberts may exaggerate in implying that the generals seized the opportunity offered by the 25 January revolution to reassert their primacy, but undoubtedly they have become since Mubarak’s fall the key organising force of the bourgeois political scene—first as the ruling SCAF between February 2011 and July 2012, then in a more backroom role under Mursi, and then, since they overthrew him, back in the driving seat (notwithstanding the negligible camouflage offered by a token civilian president and cabinet).

The ability of the military to play this role is a source of strength for the Egyptian bourgeoisie, but it is also a symptom of the latter’s chronic political weakness. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Egypt since the start of the revolution has been the contrast between the scale of the mass movement and its expression at the level of politics. The bourgeois parties proper remain a pathetic shambles—but so do those of the secular opposition of nationalists and leftists that developed under Mubarak. Sisi has been able to pocket the support of the National Salvation Front (NSF) that united the bulk of these forces against Mursi without this imposing any serious constraint on him. Egypt’s internationally best-known liberal, Mohamed ElBaradei, discovered a backbone and resigned in August as interim vice president because of the massacres of Brotherhood protesters, only to face threats of prosecution for “breaching national trust”. Shamefully, the Tamarrod have acted as cheerleaders of the repression of the MB.

The only exception to this pattern—the only serious bourgeois party and the most powerful organised political force in Egypt—is, paradoxically, the Muslim Brotherhood itself. During the Mubarak decades the MB leadership, thoroughly conservative economically and socially, built up a powerful popular base thanks to its welfare programmes and its prominence in opposition to the regime. After February 2011 it was the logical partner of the military in restoring bourgeois stability to Egypt, and Mursi’s assumption of the presidency presupposed an understanding between these two forces. SCAF had failed to contain popular insurgency: maybe Mursi would make a better fist of it.

What actually pushed him ahead in the second round of the presidential election was the support of the bulk of the revolutionary movement, which came to see voting for Mursi as the only way of blocking Ahmed Shafiq, the candidate of the feloul, the “remnants” of the old regime. The narrowness of Mursi’s victory in June 2011—51.73 percent to 48.27 percent—underlined the widespread suspicions of the MB, but also demonstrated the sizeable popular base for counter-revolution among the more conservative layers of Egyptian society.

It was Mursi’s presidency that gave these forces their opening. Roberts argues that, in effect, in seeking the government the Brotherhood walked into a trap. Certainly in office it found itself grappling with contradictions that threaten to destroy it. To keep the Egyptian bourgeoisie and the White House happy, Mursi sought to pursue orthodox neoliberal policies (though ducking and diving, for example, over the terms of a loan from the International Monetary Fund to avoid a revolt over higher fuel prices). This was probably the biggest factor in alienating the popular masses. He also maintained the peace treaty with Israel.

At the same time, to hold on to the MB’s base (under pressure from the competition of the Sunni purist Salafi parties) and out of a (as it has proved, thoroughly justified) distrust of the military, Mursi sought to concentrate power in his hands (notably in his “constitutional declaration” of November 2012) and more generally to strengthen the social and political position of Islamism. The effect was to antagonise both the revolutionaries and the broad spectrum of bourgeois opinion. The violence unleashed against protests by the police and the military and by Brotherhood supporters and the sectarian attacks on the Coptic minority fed a torrent of hatred that has destroyed his presidency and, at least in the short term, strengthened the army’s hand.

The immense popular mobilisation of 30 June was an authentic movement of the Egyptian masses. Its success in achieving Mursi’s removal—the second Egyptian president to be overthrown as a result of a popular rising in two and a half years—is undeniable. But, in the case of both Mubarak and Mursi, the executor of their dismissal was the army. And, of course, Sisi and his fellow generals were not acting as neutral “servants of the people” but as the key institution of capitalist power in Egypt.

The Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists (RS) offer a convincing analysis of the army’s motives:

When it became clear that popular anger had risen enough to overthrow Mursi, it became necessary for the most powerful and cohesive institution in the ruling class—the military—to intervene quickly to contain the anger of the masses and implement their demand. It was necessary to get out of a losing bet on the head of the regime and to rearrange and unify the ruling class around new leaders who would appear as heroes, carrying out the people’s demands and uniting with the people in “one rank”.

The army was really caught between two fires. The first was the fire of the mass movement, and the possibility of it breaking through its limits in the event of Mursi continuing in power. The second was the fire of the Brotherhood and the Islamists in the streets, and with the opening of complex fronts in Sinai to a greater extent and some areas of Upper Egypt to a lesser extent, in the event of Mursi’s overthrow… The army chose to avoid the fire of the mass movement, despite the consequences. It decided to knock out Mursi, while absorbing the masses and stopping the development of their movement, and face the fire from the Brotherhood which was less threatening than that of the masses.7

What allowed the army to play this role was the inability of the revolutionary movement to develop either sufficiently robust forms of popular self-organisation or a political party capable of effectively articulating the economic and political aspirations of the workers, peasants and urban poor. This failure is understandable—the RS, for example, has striven magnificently to overcome these limitations, but a small Marxist organisation with relatively shallow social roots cannot overcome the effects of decades of repression and the distortions imposed by the Stalinist politics that has dominated the Egyptian left and led its main sections into the NSF and behind Sisi.

None of this justifies the one-sided dismissal of 30 June expressed most strongly by Roberts. The overthrow of Mursi was the result simultaneously of a popular rising and a military coup. Anyone who fails to grasp both these determinations of the situation will be unable to understand the fundamentally revolutionary dynamic unleashed by the rising against Mubarak.

Nevertheless the ambiguity produced by this duality in the short term favours the military. This was evident during the 30 June mobilisation, when the feloul were able to jump onto the anti-Mursi bandwagon. The ambiguity is reinforced by the army’s ability to exploit the ideological legacy of Nasserism, which allows it to don a “national” and “popular” (though not democratic) garb—all this reinforced by one of the most prominent NSF leaders, Hamdeen Sabbahi, who waged an impressive left wing campaign during the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, but then threw away the opportunity this created to translate votes into organisation by relentlessly courting the military instead. Absurdly, Sisi—who preens himself in dark glasses like a Latin American general during the bloody decades of military rule—is being proclaimed the new Nasser, though there is no sign that he plans to make Egypt a centre of resistance to Western imperialism any time soon.

This doesn’t mean that the generals can expect an easier ride than their predecessors in SCAF or Mursi enjoyed. For one thing, the MB will prove a hard nut to crack. It survived all the sometimes ferocious repression it suffered from the British, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and its activists are strengthened by the sense of democratic legitimacy violated coming from their elected president’s removal. Moreover, as the RS note, the MB leadership is already seeing activists peel off to join jihadi groups whose rejection of the parliamentary road to Islamism may seem to have been justified by events. As so often happens, Sisi’s campaign against the Brotherhood’s “terrorism” is likely to breed more real terrorists.

More fundamentally, Egypt is, in effect, bankrupt amid a world economy that, as Michael Roberts shows elsewhere in this issue, is still struggling with the effects of the crash and slump of 2007-9. The coup released a flood of loans from the Gulf, starting with Saudi Arabia and including most recently Qatar (hitherto a strong supporter of the Brotherhood). This will buy time for the regime, which has made strenuous efforts to end the power cuts and food and fuel shortages that (no doubt with some help from the feloul) fed popular discontent with Mursi.

But these subventions can’t abolish the fundamental contradiction between the demands from local and foreign capital for further neoliberal restructuring of the Egyptian economy and the habits of popular mobilisation that have developed since 25 January. Part of the significance of 30 January was that it represented a widening of the geographical scope of this mobilisation, drawing in many from the countryside previously untouched by the revolution but who were infuriated by Mursi’s economic policies.

The army is trying to rebuild the repressive capacities of the state—rehabilitating the police and intelligence services shattered by the rising against Mubarak and reappointing secret policemen as provincial governors. The precedent created by the repression of the MB and the exceptional powers the regime has assumed under the state of emergency renewed in September represent a potentially mortal danger to the entire revolutionary movement. But while popular hatred has left the MB isolated, the military leadership would still find it much harder to use its own forces (largely conscripted from the urban population) directly to crush mass movements in the cities.

As Napoleon said, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. The resulting need to co-opt as well as coerce is reflected in the appointment as minister of labour of Kamal Abu-Eita, president of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions. Abu-Eita’s shameful decision to join the military government reflects his own Nasserist politics, but it also arises from the astonishing rapid development of a trade union bureaucracy where hardly any independent unions existed before 25 January. Whether measures of this kind will succeed in containing the workers’ movement is doubtful. The formation of the new government was rapidly followed by a strike wave in the textile industry that largely won its demands.

None of this diminishes the setback represented by the coup. The military has, for the time being, succeeded in fracturing the revolutionary movement. But, as we have stressed ever since the original uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, revolution is a process and not an instantaneous event. It is marked by advances and retreats, rises in mass consciousness and self-organisation and success for the counter-revolutionary forces.8 It is the fusion of these aspects on 30 June that makes the situation in Egypt so confusing, but this is not the final chapter. 

Having tried the military and the Muslim Brotherhood each once, in rejecting the latter the masses have had to return to the former. What can break this cycle is the greater development of the workers’ movement and of the political left that can begin to offer for widening layers of the exploited and oppressed a genuine alternative. The stakes are very high.

Syria: imperialism at bay?

One of the eternal questions about military coups is how far they are coordinated with Washington.9 As over Syria, there seem to be differences in emphasis between Obama, who cancelled joint US-Egyptian military exercises in response to the August massacres, and his secretary of state, John Kerry, who praised the generals for “restoring democracy”. But the US is no doubt relieved to see a degree of stability restored in the Arab world. In an interesting discussion of US policy towards Egypt, Ian Bremmer argues that, while “Washington has had virtually no influence on developments in Egypt over the past six weeks” (ie since 30 June), Obama “will cling to the status quo as long as it remains acceptable”.10

But the eyes of the White House and the Pentagon have been firmly fixed elsewhere in the Middle East. Whether or not the US eventually does launch military strikes against the Assad regime (ostensibly to punish it for the chemical attacks east of Damascus on 21 August), one thing has become crystal clear over the past few weeks: Obama is extremely reluctant to order action in Syria.11

The reason for this has nothing to do with (depending on one’s point of view) strengths or weaknesses in the president’s character—a predilection for peace or a failure to match George W Bush’s militaristic swagger. After all, Obama has, as Stephen Holmes puts it, made “remote-controlled killing” by Predator drones “the centrepiece of his counterterrorism policy”.12 He is under no illusions that the global hegemony of US capitalism has to be maintained by, in part, the use of force. Obama’s reluctance to get involved in Syria arises from strategic reasoning, positive and negative.

Positively, one of the main aims of the Obama regime has been to liquidate the wars the US lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and reorient American military capabilities and diplomatic efforts across the Pacific towards its only serious rival, China. Getting embroiled in another Middle Eastern quagmire would undermine this “pivot to Asia”.

Negatively, getting too deeply involved in Syria could have disastrous consequences of its own. Those sections of the left, represented by Ahmad, who support the Assad regime because of its geopolitical alignments fail to acknowledge the depth and scale of the popular rising against the regime that started in the spring of 2011.13 Nevertheless, Syria lies along major fractures in the regional and global interstate system.

The resulting complexity is well brought out by the journalist Patrick Cockburn, one of the most lucid critics of Western policy in the Middle East: 

Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China vs the West.14

It is as much as anything else the interweaving of these conflicts that has given Obama and the Pentagon (which seems much less hawkish over Syria than the State Department) pause. For example, in its efforts to break the alliance binding together the Islamic Republican regime in Iran, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Shiite mass movement Hezbollah in the Lebanon, Qatar has promoted an influx of Sunni jihadi fighters into Syria, which has given Al Qaeda a foothold there. Their sectarian zealotry has tarnished the image of the revolution both inside the country and internationally. 

But the growing role of the jihadis among the forces fighting Assad has also made Washington very cautious in its efforts to give arms and training to these forces. Everyone knows these days about blowback—the damaging unintended consequences of US intervention around the world.15 The biggest case of blowback was of course 11 September 2001, carried out by a network that originated in the efforts by the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the mujahideen resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. It would be another spectacular instance of blowback if Obama helped to revive Al Qaeda after claiming the assassination of Osama bin Laden as his greatest foreign policy triumph. 

Of course, contrary to the misrepresentations of Assad apologists, the anti-regime forces can’t be reduced to the jihadis. A wide spectrum of political currents is involved in fighting the regime, and suspicion of Western imperialism is widespread in Syria, as elsewhere in the Middle East. But this merely reinforces Washington’s worries that, if the revolutionary forces won, Syria might become a much less predictable factor than it has been under the Assads. 

Then there is the dimension of inter-imperialist rivalry. This shouldn’t be overstated: there is no new “Cold War” in prospect. Russia in its diminished post-1991 form is no longer a global power, and China, which is developing the military and economic capabilities to challenge US hegemony in Asia and possibly on a larger scale, shows no interest in doing anything more than deny Washington the legitimacy of United Nations Security Council authorisation for military action against Syria. But Russia in the Vladimir Putin era has successfully asserted its dominance in its “near abroad”, notably in the 2008 war with Georgia, and has longstanding ties with the Assad regime. Having, as it sees things, been tricked into allowing Nato intervention to deliver the coup de grace to the Gaddafis in Libya, Moscow is determined to block any further American effort to extend its domination of the Middle East.16

Russia doesn’t have that many cards to play but it’s played them well. Syria has put Russia and Putin, the Financial Times concedes, “at the centre of global diplomacy”.17 But what is interesting is not Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s proposal to put Assad’s chemical weapons under international control—there were similar diplomatic initiatives before the US attacks on Iraq in 1991 and 2003—but the US response. While the Bushes father and son brushed aside earlier attempts to stave off war, Obama and Kerry almost tripped over themselves in the speed with which they agreed to discuss Lavrov’s proposal. Another sign of Obama’s reluctance to get drawn into another Middle Eastern war is his relatively friendly response to the efforts of the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, to draw Washington into negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Whatever the eventual outcome in Syria, the Russian demarche was taken by Obama as a chance to escape from the bind he had got himself into—first by making Assad’s use of chemical weapons a “red line” and then by asking Congress to approve military action.

The latter move was, of course, prompted by the historic defeat over Syria of David Cameron’s government in the House of Commons on 29 August. Nothing like this has happened in British politics since Lord Aberdeen’s ministry was brought down in 1855 by a vote criticising its conduct of the Crimean War. The Tory backbenchers’ rebellion against military action against Syria is a sign of the weakness of the government and of the decline in Cameron’s personal authority. 

But the sheer depth of the scepticism expressed in the debate about the judgement of the military and intelligence services and the fact that Obama reacted by putting the fate of his presidency in the hands of a Congress packed with hostile Republicans shows that something much more fundamental was involved. 

Above all, it shows that the US lost the war in Iraq. This may seem like a silly thing to have to say, but many on the left deny it. The most sophisticated version of the argument is offered by Naomi Klein, who documents the profits the occupation of Iraq allowed American “disaster capitalism” to make.18 This is a fairly gross piece of economic reductionism. To secure their long-term profitability, US capitals require a state that is capable of defending their interests globally. If the effectiveness and legitimacy of this state are reduced, then American capitalism more generally is weakened.

As US imperialism ponders yet another military adventure in the Middle East, we can measure the extent to which it has been weakened, above all in the perceptions of its own citizens and those of other states. Senators, members of the House of Representatives, and MPs have been responding to publics that have become hugely sceptical about the US and British national security establishment. This is a result of the experience of the wars the West has lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the lies told to justify them. But it is also a tribute to the efforts of the anti-war movement that developed in opposition to the younger Bush’s “war on terror”.

In some ways the defeat the US has suffered in Iraq is more serious than that in Vietnam. Though Washington struggled with the “Vietnam Syndrome” limiting its ability to intervene militarily abroad for decades after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the impact in Asia itself was limited by the alliance with China initiated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and by the expansion of strong capitalisms closely linked to the US in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The Middle East has always been a harder region to manage, as the messes the Reagan administration got into in Lebanon and Iran during the 1980s show.19 The US overthrow of Saddam Hussein strengthened the Iranian axis (Iraq is now ruled by a Shiite government aligned to Tehran—another case of blowback), and the Arab revolutions have now further destabilised the region.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that US imperialism is finished. The American ruling class retains enormous economic and military capabilities. And its allies in the Egyptian army may succeed in reimposing a bloody order on their country. The Arab revolutions are confronting a very dangerous moment. But they aren’t finished either.

Notes

1: Roberts, 2013, p3.

2: Ahmad, 2013.

3: Ahmad, 2011. Ahmad’s identification of state capitalism and socialism comes over very strongly in his superb critique of postcolonialism: Ahmad, 1992.

4: Ahmad, 2013.

5: Roberts, 2013, p6. Roberts draws heavily on the absorbing blow by blow account of the internal struggles within the post-1952 Egyptian state between the president, military, and security apparatus in Kandil, 2012.

6: I owe this crucial point to Phil Marfleet. His recent articles on Egypt offer indispensable background to current developments: see Marfleet, 2013a, b, and c. Thanks to him, Anne Alexander, Joseph Choonara, Charlie Kimber, Judith Orr and John Rose for their comments on this piece in draft.

7: Revolutionary Socialists, 2013.

8: Callinicos, 2011.

9: See Harmer, 2011, for a fascinating study of Allende’s Chile that, while documenting the role of the Nixon administration in the build-up to the September 1973 coup, argues that the initiative was in the hands of the Chilean military working closely with the Brazilian junta. There are parallels in the Egyptian case with the influence the Saudis seem to be exercising on Sisi. 

10: Bremmer, 2013.

11: The inconclusive evidence that Assad (as opposed to some lower echelon of his regime) ordered the attacks is weighed in Blitz, 2013a.

12: Holmes, 2013.

13: See Maunder, 2012, and Callinicos, 2012.

14: Cockburn, 2013.

15: Johnson, 2001.

16: See a good analysis of how the Syrian crisis fits into Russian strategy in Friedman, 2013. Friedman’s recent commentary is interesting more generally: hawkish after 9/11, he has repeatedly stressed that the US has no vital national interests in Syria.

17: Blitz, 2013b.

18: Klein, 2007.

19: See Freedman, 2008, part 2.

References

Ahmad, Aijaz, 1992, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso).

Ahmad, Aijaz, 2011, “Why Syria Matters” (30 November 2011), http://williambowles.info/2011/11/30/video-why-syria-matters-interview-with-aijaz-ahmad-by-prabir-purkayastha/

Ahmad, Aijaz, 2013, “Revolution or Restoration?”, Frontline (20 September 2013), 

www.frontline.in/cover-story/revolution-or-restoration/article5085155.ece?homepage=true 

Blitz, James, 2013a, “Syria: Did Bashar al-Assad Personally Order the Chemical Weapons Attack?” (9 September 2013), http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2013/09/syria-did-bashar-al-assad-personally-order-the-chemical-weapons-attack/ 

Blitz, James, 2013b, “A Long Week: Putin’s Diplomatic Gambit”, Financial Times 

 (14 September 2013), www.ft.com/cms/s/0/55e2f4c4-1c6c-11e3-a8a3-00144feab7de.html#axzz2et9zT0XR 

Bremmer, Ian, 2013, “Barack Obama Declines to Correct His Egypt Mistake”, Financial Times (15 August 2013), www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1a363ea0-0596-11e3-8ed5-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2eknQ6IKo 

Callinicos, Alex, 2011, “The Return of the Arab Revolution”, International Socialism 130 (spring 2011), www.isj.org.uk/?id=717 

Callinicos, Alex, 2012, “Rumours of Crisis, Revolution, and War”, International Socialism 134 (spring), www.isj.org.uk/?id=792

Cockburn, Patrick, 2013, “Is It the End of Sykes-Picot?”, London Review of Books (6 June 2013), www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n11/patrick-cockburn/is-it-the-end-of-sykes-picot 

Freedman, Lawrence, 2008, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Friedman, George, 2013, “Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff” (10 September 2013), 

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/syria-america-and-putins-bluff 

Harmer, Tanya, 2011, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American War (University of North Carolina Press). 

Holmes, Stephen, 2013 “What’s In It for Obama?”, London Review of Books (18 July 2013), 

www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/stephen-holmes/whats-in-it-for-obama 

Johnson, Chalmers, 2001, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Owl Books).

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Klein, Naomi, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin).

Marfleet, Phil, 2013a, “’Never Going Back’: Egypt’s Continuing Revolution”, International Socialism 137 (winter 2013), www.isj.org.uk/?id=866 

Marfleet, Phil, 2013b, “Egypt: The Workers Advance”, International Socialism 139 (summer 2013), www.isj.org.uk/?id=904 

Marfleet, Phil, 2013c, “Egypt: Revolution Contained?”, Socialist Review (September 2013) www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12379

Maunder, Jonathan, 2012, “The Syrian Crucible”, International Socialism 135 (summer 2012), www.isj.org.uk/?id=824 

Revolutionary Socialists, 2013, “Letter to Comrades” (15 August 2013), http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/34144/Egyptian+Revolutionary+Socialists+letter+to+supporters 

Roberts, Hugh, 2013, “The Revolution That Wasn’t”, London Review of Books (12 September 2013), www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/hugh-roberts/the-revolution-that-wasnt