#roughly a third of the way through by far the best most critically astute work on the region I've ever read

[thevividgreenmoss]

As seen through Eurocentric spectacles that regard capitalism as a progressive stage in history for all, including the victims of genocide in the colonies, class entente occurs nationally in the centre, but internationally the wars against Third World working classes are not part of class antagonisms (Warren 1973). From this perspective, a Third World working class identified in terms of its nationality is not organically part of the international working class but belongs to some subspecies that is not so technologically advanced. While capital has been for the time being at least victorious in establishing national boundaries as class boundaries in the minds of many, the social classes involved in value relations and value creation are by necessity internationalised. Very few products can be manufactured from solely national sources, and few nations can survive on their own. In this broader optic, the internationalist class struggle, as opposed to chauvinist class reconciliation at the centre, is the democratic process. One may note in passing that the wealth of the centre is partly the historical surplus value of the colonies and, for long, the left strategy of tying reform to revolution in central formations has been more of a payoff to central working classes to quell peripheral unrest rather than revolutionary strategy. Of course conceptually it matters whether one uses multitudes, North or South, Third or First World to delineate the scope of reform policy. Where the structure of the thought or concept ends, the political and ideological impact begins. Reform politically centred in the West has rarely delivered an internationalist impact in the East. Unless the calculated risks are high, not a single effort by a central peace movement could avert aggression in the Third World.

In Arab developmental circumstances, the struggle of the working class against a merchant class subordinated by US-led capital defines the politics of democracy. Democracy in a developmental process is manifest in the form of civil liberties and the success of the working class in overpowering the circuit of capital and increasing its (labour's) share. This general definition evades the more thorny issue of the disarticulation between social being and social consciousness. Are the politics of the working classes compatible with the betterment of their living conditions? In intraclass conflict, for instance, one segment of the working class may undercut another by grabbing a higher share of income from a declining wage bill. So, even as labour income goes down, one section of the working class can be better off at the expense of another. Capital's primary political objective is precisely to pit one stratum of the working class against another, including equally a vilification of many of the Third World working classes. Within such strands of thought, class politics is viscerally ideological and conspiratorial.

...Democracy that ascended by the power of the ballot box in fragmented societies was reincarnated as dictatorship by the ballot box, or what has been called, by activists dismayed by the arrival of Islamists to power, boxocracy. I will use this coinage to mean the hollowing of the substance of democracy by formal procedure. Idealising the voting process has not bridged the divide between working-class struggles and the combination of civil liberties with higher shares of the surplus. On the contrary, boxocracy puts the same ruling class back in power again and again with different faces, while the persistence of 'free market' policies reproduces and deepens structural inequalities. The biased constitutions, the rules of a political-economic game that promotes short-term grab, and the predominance of imperialistically groomed civil society-identity (religious or ethnic) over citizenship have reduced democracy to the rule of a thing - the fetishised ballot box - over people. A citizen has come to reflect and internalise the social form of appropriation devolved to his or her section of the working class, and as such he or she belongs to sect, clan or ethnicity and rarely to the state. In any case, the open capital and trade accounts side of the market reduces functional Arab citizenship to the size of one's savings pocket book abroad, and only abroad; no amount of cash can buy security at home in the Arab world. The devaluation of citizenship, in fact, is an essential attribute of modern capitalist democracy. The tendency of liberal doctrine to represent the historical developments that produced formal citizenship as nothing other than an enhancement of individual liberty is inexcusably one-sided (Wood 1995, 211). The supposedly representative institutions, situated as they are within a context of unequal power structure, reproduce the power of classes rooted in imperialism. Boxocracy, the rule of the ballot box, is a kind of filter that blocks working-class representation while transferring ever more political power to the ruling classes. It is thus a reified political process behind which lurks the agency of capital. This hollowed-out pseudo-democracy offers a choice between two or three variations of capital's program and its agendas. It is bereft of the bundle of economic and social rights derived from working-class participation in the power structure of the state. As such, bourgeois democracy is, especially in an Arab context, the alienation of the working class (Wood 1995, 216).

In the dialectic of theory and practice, the internalisation of atomistic modes of existence by workers reduces the possibility of ideological development derived from the conditions of social struggle. Counter-reform counters revolutions, and political failure breeds defeatism and a crisis of alternatives. By reform I mean the measures taken to fuel internationalist class struggle and not the current payoffs to central working classes from colonial loot. Ballot-box democracy operates as part of the arsenal of the dominant ideology, deepening the alienation of an already traumatised worker from the rest of society (the 'traumatised worker` is a term used by Riccardo Bellofiore in his lectures at Turin). It absorbs the pressures from below. No regime, of course, is unresponsive to pressure from below, yet the role of boxocracy appears to be most pivotal in assuring that the 'below` is never cohesive enough to exert any pressure on those above. This is one of the reasons why, after decades of supporting undemocratic regimes, US-led capital is experimenting with the democratisation of Arab formations. In any case, given the retreat of the Left, US-led capital has little to fcar. As the 2012 Egyptian parliamentary clcction showed, the ultrafundamentalists trailed the Muslim Brotherhood. Democracies bereft of working-class rights abort the historical agency of labour. They have proven just as reliable to capital as authoritarianism, perhaps more so. Ballot-box democracy operates within a pro forma structural context of social inequality antecedent to nominal political equality. Capital's media and cultural hold, weak working-class organisation, working-class consent generated by ideological and financial means, and the adumbration of social and economic rights are some of the precursors to the ritual of voting in boxocracy. In the AW, on top of all this, reinventing the past as surreal identity politics crowns capital's ideological rule.

...As Arab capital abases itself to he mercantilism of empire by deindustrialising, its national allegiance becomes suspect. Imbalances in income, ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege as the merchant class emulates the consumption patterns of its central counterparts, state-licensed merchant activity and resource grab grind down national cohesion, or more loosely, the social contract. An imperialistically determined mode of organising life around importing goods for sale on the national Arab market and exporting the revenues in dollars decapitates national industry. Labour is not only deskilled in this process of shrinking production; it is idled. The price system that shapes the process of exchange is no longer national - the terms of international trade set most of national prices. The citizens - the worker and the working class - do not confront the national bourgeoisie in the democratic process; rather, it is the powers that shape the globe with which national labour has to contend.

Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment