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Bayat - Revolution without Revolutionaries

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Introduction

  • Most people expect revolutions to “simply” happen
  • Revolution without “revolutionary ideas”
    • No shariati, Rousseau, etc

Revolutions of Wrong Times

  • Marxist-Lenist liberation front in PDRY and Oman
  • Why did the meaning of “revolution” become “refolution”?
  • 1970 Revolutions
  • Arab Spring
    • Mohamed Bouazizi
    • tunisia
      • Trade unionists played pivotal role
    • egypt
      • Largely related to Tunisia
      • the “We are all Khaled Said” movement (April 6 Youth Movement)
      • Toppled Mubarak
    • yemen brought down Ali Abudllah Saleh
    • bahrain - thousands of Sunni and Shia occupied Pearl Roundable in Manama, three month Emergency law in response
  • Big differences between Arab Spring and 1970 Revolutions
    • “Lacked any associated intellectual anchor” - pg 11
    • “Unlike the revolutions of the 1970’s that espoused a powerful socialist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and social justice implulse, Arab revolutionaries were preoccupied more with the borad issues oif human rights, political accountability, and legal reform” - pg 11
      • How much of this is due to peripherialization? As the power of individual states fade on the global stage, does that mean our goals are similariy less defined?
  • “Occupy”
    • Draws links to the occupy movement
      • “Almost all expressed dissent against the effects of neoliberal policies, notably staggering inequality, unemployment, precarious work, and uncertain life that had gripped a large segment of ordinary citizens” - pg 13
      • “Sociologists Manuel Castells and Sideny Tarrow suggest that the achievement of the Occupy movements was their very operation. Consdering the process as the product” - pg 13
      • “Philosphers Alain Badiuo and Slavoj Zizek imagined in these revolutionary arenas the propsect of a new social order…”
        • Matt Ford points out - “one cannot live in a cradle forever”
    • Questionable linkage, given that they were temporally and capitally the same
      • One can ask, why did the same type of revolutions not play out as a result of the 1997 asian financial crisis
      • mid-way between 1970 and 2010
      • Why did the asian financial crisis coalese into protests? Massive looting, but less structural reform? Was that because many of the governements knew what to do?
      • “The protests of 2011, however, were neither for revolution nor for reform; rather, they expressed a rebellion against the insitutions of representative democracy without offering any alternative” - pg 17
        • What baggage does this claim bring?
      • Alternative political parties, Syriza in Greece, Pdemos in Spaim, Aam Aadmi Party in India gained support
  • “Refolutions”
    • Complex mix of revolutions in the 20th century fashion and reform
    • If we take the fact that these revolutions happened at all as the achievement, why did they not happen in 1997
      • “The arab revolutions occured at an ideaological time in post-cold war history, when the very idea of revolution had largely disappeared from social thought and political struggles, where the three major postcolonial ideaologies - anticolonial nationalism, maxism-leninism, and militant islam - that vigorously advocated revolution had vanished or had been undermined. In their place was the powerful neoliberal paradigm and its normative frame” - pg 18
    • “Foucault’s idea of entrapment in disciplinary power, as Edward Said contended, ended up replacing “insurrenctionary scholarship” with “quietism”
    • Movemnts became more fluid, states become more intelligent
  • “Neoliberal Effect”
    • 1974 military coup against Chile
    • Argues that the diminishing of hte social contract with the IMF and World Bank, alongside structural adjustment policies and liberalization had initiaited this
  • Novel revolutions?
    • Why did the 2011 revolutions turn out to be different?

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