Prabhat Patnaik : Middle-class uprisings take the place of earlier workers’ ones

The Telegraph, 6 November 2013

PERFECTING THE STATE
- Middle-class uprisings take the place of earlier workers’ ones
PRABHAT PATNAIK

From Tunis to Cairo to Istanbul to Delhi to Rio de Janeiro we are witnessing an upsurge of middle class militancy. To call these uprisings “middle class” is not to denigrate them, not to belittle their moral concerns or seriousness of purpose; it is merely to state an undeniable social fact. Such uprisings in the current epoch appear to have taken the place that workers’ uprisings used to have in an earlier epoch.

This is not the first time that we have seen middle-class uprisings. In fact, the worldwide student uprising of the late 1960s, of which people like me were products, was also a middle-class uprising, which Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian communist film-maker had even debunked as such. But that uprising was still inextricably linked to Marxism: its immediate raison d’etre was opposition to imperialist aggression against the communist-led national liberation struggle in Vietnam; its theoretical inspiration came from Marxist philosophers like Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Louis Althusser; it unleashed an immense interest in the study of Marxism; it sought to achieve a tie-up with the working class (which it succeeded in doing in May 1968 in France), and, while scornful of the Soviet Union and the orthodox communist parties, it revived the dream of a society transcending capitalism, of a libertarian socialism different from what Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union offered.

Today’s middle-class upsurge is completely cut off from Marxism. It is techno-savvy; but it does not have a taste for any theory, let alone Marxism. And socialism does not figure in its agenda. Many in the Left have made common cause with it, from the Communist Party in Turkey, to sections of the non-Maoist “Marxist-Leninist” Left in India, to such outstanding Left intellectuals as Samir Amin in Egypt; and the support of the Left has often been critical for its success, most notably in Egypt, where the Left trade unions played a decisive role in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. But the middle class movement itself has not been Left. Its concern has not been the transcendence of capitalism, but, at its most general, the removal of certain obvious and glaring flaws in the polities of the countries where it has emerged, such as the overthrow of a corrupt dictatorship (Tunisia, Egypt), or an end to the political imposition of religious fundamentalism (Egypt), or an end to corruption by what it calls the “political class” (India).

Indeed, it would not be wrong to say that the middle-class upsurge has been informed by the desire to realize an ‘ideal’ bourgeois State, which is democratic, secular and corruption-free, rather than to transcend the bourgeois State. And since it has replaced, at least for now, the traditional Left-led workers’ struggles, marked by demonstrations, strike-actions, and uprisings, which had been a feature of such societies for decades, as the core of oppositional political praxis within bourgeois societies, it is expressive of the recession of the socialist project.

The struggle for the realization of an ‘ideal’ State that is democratic, secular and corruption-free, even within the bourgeois order, certainly deserves support. In Left parlance it is a “transitional demand”, in the sense that, though unrealizable within the bourgeois order, its very unrealizability makes possible a growth in the level of consciousness of those who struggle for it, so that they see the need to go beyond the bourgeois order. It is like demanding a universal right to food, employment, healthcare and education within our society: since such universal rights will never be actually realized within the bourgeois order in societies like ours, the demand for them becomes a stepping stone for more far-reaching demands.

But this progression presupposes that the struggle involves the people at large, and that the un-realizability of the initially-limited goals of the struggle within the prevailing order raises their consciousness. The hallmark of the middle class upsurges, however, is not only their distance from the people at large in societies where they have emerged, but also their unwillingness to work among the people over a sustained period, their refusal to engage with society as a whole, as distinct from the polity alone. This trait follows from the fact that they are characterized typically by a lack of organization, a lack of theory, and a lack of any comprehensive programme; indeed they take pride in these absences.

The fact that both in Tunisia and Egypt, the people voted for the religious fundamentalists when free elections were held after the overthrow of dictatorships is symptomatic of the state of consciousness of the people at large in those societies; and middle-class militancy had no agenda for working among them to change this consciousness (which makes it so different from the Russian narodniki of the late 19th century).

Lacking electoral support, and any agenda of working among the people, middle-class militancy attempts to carry forward its project of perfecting the bourgeois State through the help of ‘enlightened’ elements within the bureaucracy, and the armed forces (and occasionally the judiciary) and is deeply hostile to parliamentary institutions dominated by persons whom it considers, not without reason, “unenlightened”.

But since the bureaucracy and the armed forces constitute the central elements of the bourgeois State, with parliamentary institutions providing, if anything, a window through which the people can potentially intervene, its project of perfecting the bourgeois State ends up necessarily as one of strengthening of the bourgeois State, without any such perfection being actually achieved. The strengthening of the bourgeois State that it effects, in other words, is not a result of the bourgeois State moving towards perfection; it arises without any such movement towards perfection.

The developments in Egypt provide a classic example of this. Since the political forces that had struggled against Mubarak at Tahrir Square lacked adequate support among the masses, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that formed the government after the elections following Mubarak’s overthrow. And since the Muslim Brotherhood used this opportunity to impose religious fundamentalism, the middle class upsurge in quest of the ‘perfect’ bourgeois State, started demanding the removal of Mohamed Morsi, the elected president. The armed forces duly obliged, and have since let loose an extraordinarily bloody repression on the supporters of the Brotherhood, and effectively negated the democratic gains that had come in the wake of Mubarak’s overthrow.

True, these gains would perhaps have been negated anyway by Morsi and the Brotherhood if they had continued in power. But the appropriate time to ask for Morsi’s overthrow should have been when he scuttled or rigged fresh elections. Providing an opportunity, even indirectly, for an army coup against an elected government, no matter how odious it may have been, is a negation of democracy. Some would no doubt invoke in this context the ‘progressive’ role of the Egyptian army which, after all, had produced a Gamal Abdel Nasser who for long had kept the Brotherhood at bay, championed non-alignment, taken on imperialism, and prevented the emergence of predatory capitalism. But the absence even under Nasser of an institutional framework, such as what democracy provides, had enabled an Anwar Sadat to succeed Nasser and undo his legacy. The point in short is that a strengthening of the bourgeois State, through a change in the relative weight of the bureaucracy and the army vis-a-vis the elected representatives augurs ill for the people; but this is what middle-class militancy willy-nilly ends up achieving.

The demands of the middle class upsurge in India confirm this tendency. An autonomous Central Bureau of Investigation, a lok pal placed above the country’s elected prime minister, appear at first sight to be reasonable demands for curbing corruption. But they amount to putting greater faith in an ‘enlightened’ bureaucrat than in the electoral process of the country, and open the way for authoritarianism. What is more, since corruption is endemic to the neo-liberal dispensation, amounting in effect to a tax imposed by the political authorities on those favoured few who are allowed to gain from the private appropriation of public or common assets (or what Marx had called “primitive accumulation of capital”), the ‘enlightened’ bureaucrats too would in due course get embroiled in it. The strengthening of the bourgeois State would have occurred in the name of fighting corruption, without corruption being reduced an iota.

Middle-class militancy’s acquiescence in downgrading the elected component of the State in comparison with the bureaucracy (and the armed forces) strengthens the bourgeois State, which, though effected with good intentions, is dangerous. The movement towards an ‘ideal’ State requires rather a strengthening, apart from electoral institutions, of the secular mass and class organizations, such as trade unions, through which the people can express themselves. These, however, are precisely what neo-liberal capitalism destroys.

The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi