A guest post on the astonishing uprising in Spain, by quilombosam. Discuss:

“On 15thMay 2011, around 150,000 people took to the streets in 60 Spanish towns and cities to demand “Real Democracy Now”, marching under the slogan “We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and politicians”. The protest was organised through web-based social networks without the involvement of any major unions or political parties. At the end of the march some people decided to stay the night at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. They were forcefully evacuated by the police in the early hours of the morning. This, in turn, generated a mass call for everyone to occupy his or her local squares that thousands all over Spain took up. As we write, 65 public squares are being occupied, with support protests taking place in Spanish Embassies from Buenos Aires to Vienna and, indeed, London. You probably have not have read about it in the British press, but it is certainly happening. Try #spanishrevolution, #yeswecamp, #nonosvamosor #acampadasolon Twitter and see for yourself. What follows is a text by Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herreros from the Spanish collectiveUniversidad Nómada.

IT’S THE REAL DEMOCRACY, STUPID

15THMay, from Outrage to Hope
There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 2011 has come to mark a turning point: from the web to the street, from conversations around the kitchen table to mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from outrage to hope. Tens of thousands of people, ordinary citizens responding to a call that started and spread on the internet, have taken the streets with a clear and promising demand: they want a real democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people. They have been unequivocal in their denunciation of a political class that, since the beginning of the crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and obeying the dictates of the euphemistically called “markets”.

We will have to watch over the next weeks and months to see how this demand for real democracy nowtakes shape and develops. But everything seems to point to a movement that will grow even stronger. The clearest sign of its future strength comes from the taking over of public squares and the impromptu camping sites that have appeared in pretty much every major Spanish town and city. Today––four days after the first march––social networks are bursting with support for the movement, a virtual support that is bolstered by its resonance in the streets and squares. While forecasting where this will take us is still too difficult, it is already possible to advance some questions thatthis movementhas put on the table.

Firstly, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15thMay Movement are spot on. A growing sector of the population is outraged by parliamentary politics as we have come to known them, as our political parties are implementing it today––by making the weakest sectors of society pay for the crisis. In the last few years we have witnessed with a growing sense of disbelief how the big banks received millions in bail-outs, while cuts in social provision, brutal assaults on basic rights and covert privatisations ate away at an already skeletal Spanish welfare state. Today, none doubts that these politics are a danger to our present and our immediate future. This outrage is made even more explicit when it is confronted by the cowardice of politicians, unable to put an end to the rule of the financial world. Where did all those promises to give capitalism a human face made in the wake of the sub-prime crisis go? What happened to the idea of abolishing tax havens? What became of the proclamation that the financial system would be brought under control? What of the plans to tax speculative gains and the promise to stop tax benefits for the highest earners?

Secondly, the 15thMay Movement is a lot more than a warning to the so-called Left. It is possible (in fact it is quite probable) that on 22ndMay, when local and regional elections take place in Spain, the left will suffer a catastrophic defeat. If that were the case, it would be only be a preamble to what would happen in the general elections. What can be said today without hesitation is that the institutional left (parties and major unions) is the target of a generalised political disaffection due to its sheer inability come up with novel solutions to this crisis. This is where the two-fold explanation of its predicted electoral defeat lies. On the one hand, its policies are unable to step outside a completely tendentious way of reading the crisis that, to this day, accepts that the problem lies in the scarcity of our resources. Let’s say it loud and clear: no such a problem exists, there is no lack of resources, the real problem is the extremely uneven way in which wealth is distributed, and financial “discipline” is making this problem even more acute every passing day. Where are the infinite benefits of the real estate bubble today? Where are the returns of such ridiculous projects as the airports in Castellón or Lleida, to name but a few? Who is benefiting from the gigantic mountain of debt crippling so many families and individuals? The institutional left has been unable to stand on the side of, and work with, the many emerging movements that are calling for freedom and democracy. Who can forgive Zapatero’s words when the proposal to accept the dación de pago1was rejected by parliament on the basis that it could “jeopardise the solvency of the Spanish financial system”? Who was he addressing with these words? The millions of people enslaved by their mortgages or the interests of major banks? And what can we say of their indecent law of intellectual property, the infamous Ley Sinde? Was he standing with those who have given shape to the web or with those who plan to make money out of it, as if culture was just another commodity? If the institutional left continues to ignore social movements, if it refuses to break away from a script written by the financial and economic elites and fails to come out with a plan B that could lead us out of the crisis, it will stay in opposition for a very long time. There is no time for more deferrals: either they change or they will lose whatever social legitimation they still have to represent the values they claim to stand for.

Thirdly, the 15thMay Movement reveals that far from being the passive agents that so many analysts take them to be, citizens have been able to organise themselves in the midst of a profound crisis of political representation and institutional abandonment. The new generations have learnt how to shape the web, creating new ways of “being together”, without taking recourse to ideological clichés, armed with a savvy pragmatism, escaping from pre-conceived political categories and big bureaucratic apparatuses. We are witnessing the emergence of new “majority minorities” that demand democracy in the face of a war “of all against all” and the idiotic atomisation promoted by neoliberalism, one that demands social rights against the logic of privatisation and cuts imposed by the economical powers. And it is quite possible that at this juncture old political goals will be of little or no use. Hoping for an impossible return to the fold of Estate, or aiming for full employment––like the whole spectrum of the Spanish parliamentary left seems to be doing––is a pointless task. Reinventing democracy requires, at the very least, pointing to new ways of distributing wealth, to citizenship rights for all regardless of where they were born (something in keeping with this globalised times), to the defence of common goods (environmental resources, yes, but also knowledge, education, the internet and health) and to different forms of self-governance that can leave behind the corruption of current ones.

Finally, it is important to remember that the 15thMay Movement is linked to a wider current of European protests triggered as a reaction to so-called “austerity” measures. These protests are shaking up the desert of the real, leaving behind the image of a formless and silent mass of European citizens that so befits the interests of political and economical elites. We are talking here of campaigns like the British UKUncut against Cameron’s policies, of the mass mobilisations of Geraçao a Rasca in Portugal, or indeed of what took place in Iceland after the people decided not to bail out the bankers. And, of course, inspiration is found above all in the Arab Uprising, the democratic revolts in Egypt and Tunisia who managed to overthrow their corrupt leaders.

Needless to say, we have no idea what the ultimate fate of the 15thMay Movement will be. But we can definitely state something at this stage, now we have at least two different routes out of this crisis: implementing yet more cuts or constructing a real democracy. We know what the first one has delivered so far: not only has it failed to bring back any semblance of economic “normality”, it has created an atmosphere of “everyman for himself”, a war of all against all. The second one promises an absolute and constituent democracy, all we can say about it is that it has just begun and that is starting to lay down its path. But the choice seems clear to us, it is down this path that we would like to go.

Tomás Herreros and Emmanuel Rodríguez (Universidad Nómada)
(hurriedly translated by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez)
please feel free to distribute, copy, quote…
1 Dation in payment or datio in solutionem, the possibility of handing in the keys to a property in lieu of paying the debt accrued on its mortgage.”

So, I've been keeping track in my mind of the connections between Qadhafi and the Third Way, since it turned out that Blair and Mandelson were tight with the dictator's son. This morning, I found out that Qadhafi's international lobbying operation, involved Richard Perle, Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, Dick Cheney and ... Anthony Giddens. Which would explain this:

I would like to think that Giddens would be embarrassed by this sort of thing, but this is the man who wrote The Third Way. He clearly lacks the capacity for embarrassment.

The Gadaffi regime is prepared to fight to the last drop of blood to crush the revolution. This isn't new. He and his Free Officer allies have always hammered opposition with ruthless efficiency - the public execution has been a centrepiece of the regime's repertoire since serious challenges first emerged in the 1980s. What is new is the level of escalation demanded of the dictatorship. When they couldn't rely on the police and army to crush the protesters, they turned to mercenaries to butcher them in their hundreds. The massacres have continued today, just enough to keep the regime entrenched in the capital, even as large swathes of Libya are declared liberated. To deal with those liberated and nearly-liberated populations, the regime ordered the army to carry out air strikes. The divisions in the state have been sufficient to send soldiers and police to the protesters' side, and a number of soldiers who refused to carry out air strikes have taken their planes to Malta and sought refuge. The army has abandoned the border, leaving it to the control of People's Committees. Benghazi, where the regime had been totally defeated and sent packing, was set to be the target of vengeful air strikes tonight - except that two of the planes ordered to attack reportedly landed in the city, the pilots refusing to drop their payload. The city has been declared safe for now. Even at the Libyan embassy in London, staff joined anti-Gadaffi protests.

The surreal atmosphere in the presidential palace is communicated in dispatches from defecting officers. "I am the one who created Libya," Gadaffi reportedly said, "and I will be the one to destroy it." Last night, one of Gadaffi's thuggish sons - an alumnus of the London School of Economics, as well as a close friend of Prince Andrew and Lord Mandelson - threatened civil war if people didn't go home and stop protesting. They've cut off the internet and the landlines, and banned foreign journalists in order to be able to carry out massacres under the cover of secrecy. This is a catastrophic lashing out by a regime in mortal freefall. It is seeking, in effect, a blood tribute in compensation for its lost authority.

Even at this late hour, it would be foolish to underestimate Gadaffi's ability to just hang on, to clench Libya in a rigor mortis grip. As crazed as he manifestly is, he has demonstrated considerable shrewdness in his time. For example, as soon as the Islamist opposition started become a real threat to his regime in the late 1990s, he started to look for ways to be accepted by the US-led caste of 'good guys'. The collapse of the USSR as a supplier of military hardware, trade, and ideological and moral leadership for Third Worldist states, would also have had something to do with this. The transition was made easier after 2001, and completed in 2004 partially at the best of Anglo-American oil. Gadaffi went so far, in his attempts to win over his erstwhile opponents, as to participate in anti-Islamist counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines with international support, lavish intelligence on US agencies and even compensate the victims of Lockerbie for a crime that Libya had not committed. The Bush administration might still have resisted such serenading were it not for the eager rush of European capital into Tripoli. So, Bush and Blair turned it into a story of Gadaffi seeing the light and giving up his non-existent WMD programmes, which charade Gadaffi duly participated in. This whole sequence of events was bizarre and improbable, but it worked: the subsequent oil contracts, amid a global oil price spike produced by Bush's wars, made him and his regime very wealthy. He was also able to hang opponents in public under the pretext of a fight against 'radical Islamists'. Joining the camp of American client dictatorships enabled Gadaffi to survive until this moment.

It has also ensured that the big guns are on his side now that he faces this potentially fatal challenge to his regime. Because the trouble for the US and UK governments in this revolt is that they really, really don't want Gadaffi to fall. Gadaffi is someone with whom they can do business. By contrast, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, long a leading element in the resistance, is less likely to be so pliable. They US and UK invested too much in Gadaffi to lose him now, not least military hardware, the very weapons of repression which they knew full well would be used for the primary goal of keeping him in power. That is why the phrases on the lips of US and European ambassadors and statespersons are so mealy-mouthed. Hillary Clinton's berating of Libya's government for "unacceptable" levels of violence has approximately the same passion and conviction as a school marm telling off a child for running with scissors. These people, the caretakers, intellectuals, politicos and lackeys of empire, have spent more than two decades telling us that they were outraged by every drop of blood spilt by dictatorships, that they were if anything overly eager in their solicitations for democracy and human rights, messianic to a fault. This never had a moment's plausibility, but it has never looked as vile and sinister as it does now, amid a genuinely heroic revolutionary democratic struggle.

I was just writing a lengthy post about the uprisings in the Bahrain archipelago, going into the history of Anglo-American imperialism and the oil frontier, with some comments on the relationship to the Saudi kleptocracy. The regime has been struggling to keep it together for some time, and has been facing protests and working class rebellions at least since the invasion of Iraq, which gave birth to a germinal new left in the region and is itself a tributary to the current revolutionary wave. This latest convulsion may well finish off the Sunni monarchy. But it seems that Libya is the surer bet for an overthrow in very near future. All of the ingredients are there. The state is cracking down with extreme brutality. In Benghazi, mercenaries shipped in by Gaddafi are carrying out random killings, with dozens reportedly dead so far. The regime is intent on terrorising the population into submission and has even, predictably, shut down the internet. The electricity has been shut off in insurgent areas. Yet it says a lot that Gaddafi is so lacking in authority over his own state structure that he's having to hire mercenaries to come in and put down the revolt. This is happening in part because, so I understand, sections of the army and police have gone over to the protests. This is in contrast to Bahrain, where the regime instructed the army to shoot at peaceful protesters and paramedics, and the soldiers obeyed. The protesters have successfully taken over airports and shut down cities. Eastern parts of the country appear to be effectively liberated from the state's control. Benina airport has apparently had its runways sabotaged to stop the landing of mercenaries from overseas, and "clashes" between protesters and the authorities are reportedly taking place there at this very moment. Al Jazeera reports that in Benghazi, army tanks have been taken over by protesters. If a fraction of what is being reported, tweeted and youtubed is accurate, then it seems implausible that the regime will hang on. It would seem that the US and UK made their peace with the dictatorship in its dying hours.

The revolution in Tunisia that began on 18th December went from being almost completely ignored in the British newspapers to being a sensational story of bloodbaths, gang violence, Israeli worries about "stability", and pleas for "restraint" from the foreign secretary in the space of a few days. At the top of the agenda for many newspapers has been the implications for tourism, Tunisia's number one growth industry, and thus for holidaymaking Britons. No surprises here. Whitey's travelogues in Arabia form a mainstay of the Orientalist canon, and the reduction of Tunisia to scenery and troublesome natives is in keeping with tradition.

Tunisia's development since the Bourguiba days has been of interest to Euro-American journalists and academics principally in terms of how well its elite has been trained by enlightened tutelage, how reasonably it has imitated the white intellect and internalises and articulates 'Western political concepts' such as constitutional sovereignty, democracy, and free markets, with the emphasis strongly on the latter. Bourguiba was approved for aligning with the US during the Cold War, opposing Nasser's leadership in the region, and for attempting to maintain a space for economic liberalism (ie private capital accumulation) even when the state had to constantly intervene to make up for a weak bourgeoisie. If he ultimately failed in his attempts to reform Tunisia's economy along neoliberal lines, and defeat the growing Islamist opposition, he is nevertheless fondly remembered, where he is remembered at all, in the newspapers and scholarly journals of the West. Ben Ali has been the recipient of benediction in the US and Europe first for his role in using state terror to break up the old corporatist order, and brutally forcing neoliberalism on a recalcitrant working class, and secondly for his pro-American stance in the context of the 'war on terror'. With Ben Ali overthrown in a revolt led by the organised working class, those ruling class forces that have hitherto feigned an interest in Middle East democracy are worried by the potential consequences for Algeria, Egypt and the other pro-American dictatorships in the region, a concern they choose to express in the idiom of 'stability'. And their fear is justified. For it concentrates within it the elements of the twin crises of global capitalism, and of US imperialism.

***

Ben Ali's dictatorship, as the above suggests, took power as part of a global reconfiguration in capitalist property relations, as well as in response to specific domestic problems for the Tunisian ruling class. The latter have roots in the weaknesses of the state and the corporatist system built up under the Sahelian lawyer Habib Bourguiba, with the Neo-Destour party at its apex. The Neo-Destour emerged in 1934, as a competitor to the liberal-constitutionalist Old Destour in resisting French colonialism. The Old Destour was too moderate, and too effectively contained by the colonial powers, to be effective. Bourguiba did not himself initially seek full independence. Autonomous government and equality between Arabs and Frenchmen would have been his preference, but this was not a policy that was commensurate with the colonists' ends. Every effort at moderation on the part of anticolonial elites, every attempt to form a rapprochement with the colonists, seems to have failed. Thus, more often than not, the nationalist leadership was forced into militancy that it did not really want.

As with most nationalist parties resisting colonial rule in the Middle East, the leadership of the Neo-Destour was initially comprised of a small section of the intelligentsia, university graduates who resented the colonial jackboot and the Tunis-based grand familles who connived with the colonists. These educated elites were offspring of the emerging Sahel bourgeoisie, who needed to mobilise the peasantry and the emerging proletariat, without fundamentally altering the relations of subjection and exploitation in which the latter were held. As usual, there was an emphasis on regenerating national culture, and modernising the better to resist colonial domination. But, there was also the particular element of hatred for the crusading policy of the French Catholic church under Cardinal Lavigerie, the French empire's supernal advocate. Thus, the Neo-Destours emphasised the protection of Islamic traditions, attempting to mobilise them as elements of the national identity they sought to 'restore'.

From this nucleus grew a mass party, incorporating the Tunis proletariat, the emerging bourgeoisie and peasants from the interior. By 1937, the party had 100,000 members. The full-time cadres tended, like the leadership, to be university graduates. But while the leadership were products of the Franco-Arab education system, the intermediate cadres were graduates of the Zaytuna mosque-university. The new mass party out-manouevred its old Destour rivals, and participated in mass anti-colonial riots in 1938 alongside the CGTT, the pro-Destour trade union federation set up in opposition to the CGT which was dominated by the French Socialists. The alliance between the Neo-Destour and the trade union movement resulted from the routine discrimination against Tunisian workers by colonial powers, thus giving their demands a nationalist aspect. This alliance would last well into independence. The riots were met with extreme violence, as colonial police shot dead 112 people and wounded 62 more. Aside from repression, one feature of colonial life that made resistance difficult was the designs of the Fascist power Italy on Tunisia. Mussolini had been encouraging Italian agents to scope out the prospects for hijacking nationalist resistance to French rule, and the Destourians were wary of such predation. One of the sordid betrayals of the Popular Front government of France was to refuse to free the colonies, arguing that it could not do so in the case of Tunisia because it would immediately be taken over by Mussolini. Bourguiba arued that a free Tunisia would readily make an alliance with the French against fascism. And while the betrayal of the French socialists and communists led many rank and file Destourians to sympathise with the Axis, the Neo-Destour leadership's hostility to the Fascist powers prevailed throughout WWII. This ensured that even after the Italian Fascists had freed Bourguiba from a French jail, he spoke out against any illusions in an alliance with the Axis powers to defeat colonialism. Instead, he declared his support for France, and called for an alliance with the Allied powers.

It should be said that this stance did not hasten the end of colonialism when the war ended. The colonial powers continued to repress the anticolonial front. Bourguiba sought and gained the support of the newly found Arab League, but otherwise diplomatic initiatives yielded little. The French authorities made minor concessions, such as forming a new government with an equal number of French and Tunisian ministers under the formal sovereignty of the bey (monarch). But this was in keeping with the treaty of protectorate, not a deviation from it. The Destourists were compelled to launch a guerilla war against the French, beginning in 1952. Coupled with joint action by the trade union movement, the struggle finally won independence in 1956.

***

The new regime under Bourguiba and the Neo-Destour would be a self-consciously modernising, secular, republican one. Though it introduced some redistributive measures, the new regime was bourgeois reformist rather than socialist. The trade union leadership supported the regime, but on the basis of principles of tadamuniyya, essentially cross-class solidarity in the interests of the nation. This was in no way inconsistent with widespread capitalist support for Bourguiba, or with the general trend toward corporatist rule in much of the world, or with the version of nationalism which the Neo-Destour propagated. Bourguiba's education had inculcated in him a romantic view of French nationalism, which he venerated and sought to reproduce in Tunisia. His conception of the rational state was Napoleonic in most respects, with the single exception that it was to be non-militarist, as Bourguiba and his confederates could see no way in which Tunisia could be an effective military power, even regionally. Its foreign policy alliances would be pragmatic but tend toward support for the US and Europe, as Tunisia's ruling class generally stood aloof from the Arab nationalism sweeping the Middle East and North Africa at the time. Bourguiba worked hard to rebuild relations with the old colonial power, even after the emergence of the European Common Market started to raise barriers to Tunisian exports.

The Neo-Destour party's platform initially consisted of a series of reforms designed to overcome the weaknesses inherited from France's predatory rule. The aim was to establish an independent centre of capital accumulation in Tunisia and, as had been the case with late coming capitalist powers in Europe, this required strong state intervention to cultivate and nurture the very bourgoisie that would become the new ruling class. French colonists singularly uninterested in such goals, had declined to develop an industrial base in Tunisia, instead focusing their surplus-extraction activities on agrarian and mining economies. So, the immediate course was to try to combine the necessary state control over utilities and direction of key assets, as well as the incorporation of organised labour into the state, with a certain amount of economic liberalism.

This was interrupted by a brief period of 'socialism', modelled on the experiments in Egypt and Algeria, during the Sixties. The party was renamed the Parti Socialist Destourien (PSD). A new minister of planning was appointed in 1964, with responsibility for creating a new economic policy based on agricultural cooperatives and industrialization led by the public sector. The minister in question was Ahmed Ben Salah, former UGTT leader. The trade union leadership, which had longed pledged its support as a crucial element in the power base of Bourguiba's government, had always been happy to participate in corporatist rule, and these reforms promised to raise the bargaining power of labour as well as improving social welfare. In truth, as in much of the Middle East and North Africa, such avowedly socialist measures would have accelerated the development of a bourgeoisie, albeit one integrated into the state. But those elements of the capitalist class and mercantile elite that had formed another crucial component of Bourguiba's coalition were aghast, and the reforms came to little. In 1967, Israel delivered a knock-out blow to Egypt and its allies, and a lynchpin of radical Arab nationalism was devastated. Globally, neoliberalism was starting to emerge as a plausible solution to the existing impediments to capital accumulation. Ben Salah was dismissed in 1970, and eventually jailed. Thus, the 'socialist' experience came to an end - but the corporatist order remained in place.

In the 1970s, the regime embarked on a bid to liberalise the economy and pursue export-led growth. Import-substitution programmes didn't stimulate growth due to weak domestic demand, and capital fared poorly in international markets. Foreign direct investment was in capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive sectors, so did not tend to improve employment. The country was suffering from a serious balance-of-payments deficit, only overcome by the temporary expedient of borrowing and rising hydrocarbon revenues. Demand for well educated, skilled Tunisian labour in Libya and the Gulf also meant that labour remittances boosted national incomes. This was the reason for the attempted liberalisation programme. But as in other corporatist societies, a radical left-wing was emerging in the trade union movement, challenging the wage freezes agreed by the union bureaucracy through the 'social progress Charter', and potentially posing a serious threat to the regime's hegemony. Left-wingers in the party and elements of the state bureaucracy were also hostile to the reforms for different reasons. Thus, the neoliberal reforms foundered on resistance led by organised labour. A general strike in 1978 had to be put down by the armed forces. Further confrontations included the food riots in 1983 and 1984. As oil revenues dried up, demand for Tunisian labour fell, and Tunisia's debt credibility collapsed, the class basis of Bourguiba's corporatist state was fracturing.

The International Monetary Fund intervened in 1986 with a 'stabilization' programme predicated on structural reforms such as privatization. To achieve this liberalisation, the trade unions would be politically neutralised, and the state's relationship to labour would take a bureaucratic-authoritarian turn, in order to break the possible sources of resistance to the new order. But it would require the dictatorial rule of the former military officer, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, to impose this agenda. Ben Ali thus took power when a couple of medics attending Bourguiba conveniently declared him medically incompetent, and thus constitutionally incapable of continuing to rule. The former head of the Italian military secret police claims the credit for having organised this smooth succession, on behalf of Bettino Craxi's Socialist administration. But it could not have worked if Ben Ali didn't have the backing of a powerful faction within the state and, on the face of it, a saleable agenda. That agenda was democracy.

***

From the second his 'bloodless coup' was consummated on 7 November 1987, Ben Ali pledged that under his rule, the country would be democratised - just as he has been promising for the last few weeks until his final flight to the welcoming arms of the Saudi monarchy, a long-standing refuge for beaten despots. He would respect human rights, he said, and insist on the rule of law where Bourguiba had flouted it. This was his serenade to a country, and a region, on the brink of change. It seemed at the time that Algeria was about to go through a similar process of democratisation. Ben Ali revamped the ruling party, which he now called the Rassemblement Constitutionel Democratique, and amnestied thousands of political prisoners in his first year. He ratified the UN convention on torture, abolished the presidency for life, relaxed laws on the formation of parties and associations, and formed a new National Pact with the leading political and social organisations in the country. This period of relative laxity lasted for less than the two years it took for Ben Ali to coordinate rigged elections in 1989, from which his party emerged with 100% of the seats.

The UGTT, meanwhile, was effectively coopted again. Worse than that, it was subjugated. Union salaries had long been paid for by the state, but one source of independent action was the autonomous budget, paid for by a 1% tax on workers' wages, given to the unions each year. This budget was withheld after the 1984-5 food riots. The leadership around Habib Achour was removed, the old guard purged. Under Bourguiba first, then Ben Ali, the union effectively became a technocratic partner of the government in a bureaucratic process of implementing policy, rather than a labour union bargaining over wages and conditions. Politically, the left-wing was defeated in favour of a centre-left slate, reflecting an accomodationist attitude after 1989. The old union leadership was coopted, but could still put up a fight if pushed. The new union bureaucracy under Ismail Sahbani was not even capable of that. They were the Blairites of Tunisian trade unionism. The 'National Pact' itself, though MERIP reports it as an example of inclusion in the early days, was part of this subordination. It required that the unions accept new conditions that would dramatically weaken their power, exposing their members to wage loss, insecurity and price rises. Only a union that had been suitably beaten could be incorporated into such an agenda.

Aside from the trade unions, the two main potential sources of opposition to the new regime were the Communists and the Islamists, and the government did not waste any time in tackling them. MERIP reports that the state "stepped up its repression against an-Nahdha and the Tunisian Communist Workers' Party (POCT). Late-night raids and house-to-house searches became commonplace in some neighborhoods. Stories of torture under interrogation and military court convictions multiplied. The campaign to crush an-Nahdha intensified in 1991 following an attack on an RCD office in the Bab Souika area of Tunis and after the government claimed that security forces had uncovered a plot to topple the regime. Susan Waltz reports that the government's extensive dragnet hauled in more than 8,000 individuals between 1990 and 1992".

Vilifying their political opponents as 'terrorist' was a singularly effective way for the state to disarm criticism of its repressive measures. Dyab Jahjah has written that protesters in Tunisia fear the state will unleash its repertoire of false flag techniques today - indeed, even today there are rumours (more than rumours now) of agents being captured in the capital. The internal security apparatus was also continually expanded, long after any plausible threat had been neutralised. Opponents were hounded with the use of phone-tapping, threats, beatings and assassinations. Torture was practised systematically, with hundreds of cases documented by domestic and international human rights agencies. Despite this, Ben Ali still claimed to be interested in democratising Tunisia, over time. After the 1994 elections, again held in rigged circumstances that guaranteed the continued control of the ruling party, Ben Ali argued that democratic transition had to be done gradually, in order to make it compatible with the country's long-term development and to avoid letting the Islamists in. But, he insisted, democracy was still on his agenda.

Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions, acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the war against 'terrorism' throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah.

The results of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism for capital were impressive in their way: GDP on a par with the European periphery, low public-sector deficit, controlled inflation and renewed credit-worthiness. The financial sector was reformed and initially experienced a mini-boom. Significant sections of the public sector were turned over for profitable investment. A total of 160 state owned enterprises have been privatised. The stock market capitalisation of the 50 largest companies listed on the Bourse de Tunis was worth $5.7bn by 2007. Ben Ali's famously, corruptly wealthy family also made a mint from the boom. He himself became a darling of the EU and the US, conferring global prestige on his regime. The cost of all this to the working class, though concealed in some of the official figures, was just as significant. High unemployment, growing inequality, the removal of subsidies for the poor, rising housing costs and weaker welfare protections are among the added burdens of the Tunisian working class in the neoliberal era.

This does not mean that the average working class person has experienced an absolute decline in income throughout this period. In fact, the development of the cities has meant more people moving from the poorer rural areas to cities and towns where absolute poverty is less common. What it means is that wage growth has been suppressed by the government, and made conditional upon productivity rises. In the private sector, liberalisation means that the discipline of the market has been used to extract higher productivity from the workforce. The total effect is that more of the wealth that has been generated has gone into the pockets of the very rich. In simple terms, it means that the rate of exploitation has been increased. For as long as the political opposition was effectively suppressed, and for as long as the trade union movement was effectively subjugated, the old order could continue. But that in turn depended on the regime's ability to boast that it was creating a wealthier economy that would eventually benefit everyone. That is, the viability of the regime rested on the viability of neoliberal institutions, both domestically and globally - and that is exactly what has taken a knock.

***

The first real signs of an independent civil society movement with trade unions operating separately from the state came on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Then, the trade union movement organised antiwar demonstrations - relatively small in scale, due to repression and widespread arrests. There has also been activism in solidarity with Gaza, where some space to organise has been made possible by the regime's traditional two-state position. US power in the region has experienced a crisis with the occupation of Iraq and, to an extent, with the failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Had these ventures been successful on their own terms and at low cost, then the US might already have new client dictatorships in place in Iran, Lebanon and Syria. But this crisis helped rebuild oppositional movements across the region, and contributed, alongside domestic factors, to the emergence of a mass, militant working class movement against Mubarak in 2007. It started to weaken the chain of pro-American rulers across the Middle East.

However, it was to be the global capitalist crisis, and its concentrated regional effects, that was to do for Ben Ali. The riots began in Sidi Bouzid when Mohammed Bouzazi poured petrol over his person and set himself on fire in protest at the police's confiscation of his fruit and vegetable cart. He was unemployed, and trying to make a living the only way he could. Unemployment was already high during the boom - it has exploded since the crisis began. In 2009, unemployment was officially estimated to be around 14%, far below the real rate. The suffering has spread beyond the working class and affected the growing layer of university graduates. The khobzistes (unemployed) responded to the suicidal protest of this poor man, saw their own fate in his, and exploded. Food prices have also been driven up by a number of factors - wheat droughts, soaring oil costs, speculative bubbles. Millions of workers have been affected by this, another source of the growing protests.

But it is the intervention of the trade union movement, its bureaucracy hitherto prepared to act in conjunction with and as a tool of the regime, that decisively changed matters. The repressive response of the police to the protests, which had resulted in dozens of killings, was the immediate cause of the trade unions' involvement. The clampdown provoked the unions to embark on a general strike, contributing to the protest which resulted in Ben Ali's flight. But the repression itself highlighted all of the complex social conflicts that, with the application of bureaucratic violence, the police had been trying to solve. And it also exposed the weakness of the regime, especially when Ben Ali began to pose, once more, as a tireless friend of democracy, who was just about to bring about this new era of freedom if only people would have patience. The trade unions thus demanded not only the freedom to organise, which is a huge step in itself, but also a 'national dialogue' on the necessary economic and social reforms - in other words, organised labour was asserting its right to have a say in the future development of the country in light of this crisis. You can say this is harking back to its Bourguibist days, but it's becoming far more significant than that. Finally, sections of the military rank and file began to defect, and the rapprochement between the soldiers and the protesters indicated that the ruling elite was losing the battle. The social base beneath the Ben Ali regime had shattered, leaving him with only his security personnel and the super rich to support him. Probably, at that point, the ruling class pulled the plug, and Ben Ali escaped.

Now Jordanians and Algerians have joined the fight, motivated by many of the same issues. Palestinians are expressing hope and praise over this rebellion, as well they might. The forces of their oppression have been shaken, their regional allies emboldened. It can't be long before Mubarak has to face down another surging rebellion. The Tunisian ruling class, however, is still in power. It is weakened, afraid, hesitant. But it is in power. US imperialism and its Zionist client retain the capacity to act, as does Saudi Arabia, one of the vanguards of reaction in the region. Ben Ali's internal security apparatus is unlikely to have disintegrated (looks like they're fighting with the army on his behalf even now), and it seems likely that he was forced out not only by elements of the state bureaucracy, but also by international players with an interest in Tunisia's development. Still, the protests continue, and the 'acting president' probably won't be acting for long. The revolution has an organised core of trade unionists and left-wing activists, not to mention some of the Islamists who have arrived late on the scene, but it has not yet convoked a new political leadership. What it has done, potentially, is begin the process that will clear out the repressive apparati, opening the way for the emergence of the kinds of mass movements that can overthrow not just America's row of dictators, but also the system which they uphold.

“Never mind, Renee,” replied the marquise, with a look of tenderness that seemed out of keeping with her harsh dry features; but, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman’s nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the desert of her heart, and that is the shrine of maternal love. “I forgive you. What I was saying, Villefort, was, that the Bonapartists had not our sincerity, enthusiasm, or devotion.”
“They had, however, what supplied the place of those fine qualities,” replied the young man, “and that was fanaticism. Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitious followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality.”
“He!” cried the marquise: “Napoleon the type of equality! For mercy’s sake, then, what would you call Robespierre? Come, come, do not strip the latter of his just rights to bestow them on the Corsican, who, to my mind, has usurped quite enough.”
“Nay, madame; I would place each of these heroes on his right pedestal — that of Robespierre on his scaffold in the Place Louis Quinze; that of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendome. The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe,” said Villefort, smiling, “I do not mean to deny that both these men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and the 4th of April, in the year 1814, were lucky days for France, worthy of being gratefully remembered by every friend to monarchy and civil order; and that explains how it comes to pass that, fallen, as I trust he is forever, Napoleon has still retained a train of parasitical satellites. Still, marquise, it has been so with other usurpers — Cromwell, for instance, who was not half so bad as Napoleon, had his partisans and advocates.”

David Cameron demands that the "mob" must be punished. The Metropolitan police are in trouble with the "party of order", who are aghast, simply aghast, that the royal Daimler has been scuffled by oiks. The Met blames and condemns "the outrageous and increasing levels of violence that some of the protesters are now involved in". Now there is casual talk of using firearms, as if it is only the virtue and "restraint" of armed officers and security officials that prevents those protesters from getting their heads justly blown off. The frenzy has been as relentless as it is familiar. The established players know their lines well. Their royal we-ness maintain a dignified, somewhat bemused silence, while the rottweilers go to work, ostensibly on their behalf. Yes, you have a perfect democratic right to protest, they say with patronising assurance, but violence is intolerable and will not be tolerated. Yes, most people were peaceful, but there were some people determined to restort to destruction. And those who flout the law must be exposed to the full penalty of the law. And, well, under difficult circumstances, some officers may lash out to protect themselves and their colleagues, and someone may be injured or die as a result. And the state will, if anything, err obsessively on the side of probity, subjecting those poor officers to investigation before finding them completely innocent.

We are probably witnessing a move to re-tool the state, the better to cope with civil disobedience and strikes. Police have deployed a strategy of provoking violent confrontations with small bands of protesters. By using pre-emptive kettling, by charging at protesters with mounted police, by staging baton charges, and by lashing out at peaceful protesters with almost lethal force, the police have set up physical confrontations. They have then attempted to use their overwhelming superiority of organisation and force to coerce protesters into retreating into preemptively kettled territory. This would galvanise a small minority who would physically seek to break out, but would be effectively held back. Thus intimidated and physically coerced, they would come to resent the minority isolated as 'professional troublemakers' and wait meekly to go home in the late hours of a chill December evening, resolving never to attend a protest again. This strategy is based on the assumption that protests break down into a well meaning but duped and passive mass, and a nefarious, organised conspiracy of upstarts, and that the police can prise the two apart.

But it didn't actually go down like that. Most of those protesters who did end up in direct combat with the cops are, as Paul Mason points out, working class sixteen and seventeen year olds from Britain's banlieues. They are not the committed anarchists that the law and order mob are braying about, and they were not resented by other protesters. More worryingly for the police, when they did attempt to baton charge, they were often effectively resisted. Using whatever ad hoc instruments were at their disposal, large numbers of protesters physically out-manouevred police on numerous occasions. Sometimes, for example, they used the same crowd control barriers that were intended to pen them to push back ranks of baton-wielding, helmeted and shielded riot police. And when the police attacked people, they often fought back. They were not cowed, despite the physically imposing stature and superior weaponry of the cops, and despite the horrifying record of the Territorial Support Group. So, far from protesters blaming a small minority of troublemakers for the violence, they are almost unanimous in reporting that the police engineered the violence. And because the police didn't get it all their own way, the FT's headline today was: "Police lose control of street protests".

Now the language of the 'mob' is back in vogue, and the prospect of lethal violence against protesters cheerfully bruited. Now the state is worried that the protests have started to be effective, and might become even more effective in future. Now they're worried about what might be unleashed. The technologies of repression and containment need to be updated for an age when it isn't as easy to fabricate a serious division among protesters, between cunning manipulators and a gulled majority. The government is having to play a game of catch-up. It introduced 16% cuts to policing in its spending review, suggesting that it anticipated a relatively easy ride over the cuts, and that it wouldn't need the particular loyalty of police departments. And if these protests were flash-in-the-pan, localised, and self-contained, that calculation might have a modicum of realism to it. But they have proven to be anything but. They have accelerated, and spread, and added new energy and vigour to every anti-cut campaign, every left-wing party and coalition, every meeting and rally in the country. Now a Conservative leadership that hasn't had a serious fight on its hands since the early-to-mid Nineties is having to run to the police for help, and I suspect that means the police are about to get a lot of new powers and perhaps a relief in some of the cuts coming their way.



***

Inevitably, the 'mob' - the subject of official invective - is depicted as an opponent not merely of a policy, but of "democracy". But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy. Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express. Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure, by the threat of dispruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy.

Frances Fox Piven (along with her late partner Richard Cloward), has long argued that the electoral-representative system is most democratic when the working class and the poor are deliberately disruptive - when they are organised, but not institutionalised. This distinction is made in a particular way that it's important to get right. By 'institutionalised', Piven means incorporated into the state. Thus, the lesson of the 1930s, she argues, is that the working class was most effective when it withdrew its participation, went on strike, took wildcat action, performed sit-ins, etc. The bosses of the big steel companies and car manufacturers responded, just as the Federal government did, by trying to institutionalise industrial action, turning it into a regulated, far more predictable and manageable occurrence, and incorporating organised labour into a deliberately de-escalating machinery. But there are other examples of being institutionalised in this negative sense - being incorporated into a parliamentarist or electoralist machinery, for example. Or you might add being coopted by conservative NGOs, wherein politics becomes a kind of showmanship, a spectacle where the main thing that counts is media reception and public relations. Whatever happens, you become absorbed into the tacit rules that actually reproduce social power, rather than effectively rebelling against it.

By contrast, what Piven calls 'disruptive power' is that which shuts down processes and events that make capital and the state run efficiently. Closing down a main road with a sit-down protest is an example of this. Occupying a public building, or flash-mobbing a retail outlet, or blockading a nuclear facility, are also examples of disruptive power. Withdrawing one's labour is another, and picketing to obstruct the effective utilisation of the means of production is another. This disruptive power doesn't have to be particularly noisy or violent or attention-grabbing in and of itself. Nor is it necessary that it should be meek, amiable and nonviolent. Any question of noise and street theatre is a secondary tactical question, and any violence is a matter of exigency rather than principle. But what 'disruptive power' exploits is the fact that economic and political power in complex capitalist societies rely on a series of intricate interdependencies and specializations, which distributes the capacity to disrupt the system rather widely. Different agencies will be better placed to exploit this than others, because they are differently endowed with the relevant structural capacities, and each situation involving this capitalist or that state authority will open up different opportunities. And there will always be subjective difficulties in adapting the repertoire of learned methods of resistance to any new situation. But the exercise of this disruptive power has been the hallmark of the 'mob' throughout history, and it has also accompanied every democratic breakthrough.

We are now in a situation where the ruling classes are uneasily realigning their forces, scrutinising their techniques of dominance, restless about their ability to hold the line in the new situation. Meanwhile we are coming out of a generation that has spent many years going through defeats, and only occasional and partial victories, and we are trying to find out what works and what does not. Listening to protesters, you hear people say that the lesson of the last decade is that the tactic of the big march and rally didn't work, even with over a million people and more in attendance. The media spectaculars didn't work either, even with Snoop Dogg in attendance. So now people are trying out occupations, sit-down protests, flash-mobs, and other forms of disruptive protest. They are learning what their legal position is if they do protest, and if they're arrested. They're learning how to handle the press. The question of what kinds of industrial action is most effective looms over us again. The one day general strike? Sustained, indefinite walk-outs by strategically important groups of workers? Recurring strikes of lengthening duration? And what kind of picketing is effective? How to handle the media and the police? What to accept in negotiations? And so on. The mob is re-learning, applying and reinventing the principles of democracy. And the law is having once again to prepare itself to resist the threat of democracy.

In chapter three of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek lays out of the neoliberal conception of 'progress'. In this, he was consistent with previous rightist thought by conceiving of 'progress' not as a movement toward a desired end, but as the constant, rapid accumulation of capital in its various forms, with no agreed end - change for change's sake, as he put it. Hayek called this essay 'The Common Sense of Progress', and if we listen to politicians we can see just how influential this conception is among elites, how it has indeed become a kind 'common sense', as Hayek vaunted. What follows is a step-by-step outline of Hayek's argument with some context supplied, the better to appreciate what this notion of 'progress' is for, and what kind of assumptions are embedded in it.

***

Hayek sets out his stall by outlining a defence of the idea of historical progress (particularly during 'the last two hundred years') against some of the more sceptical inquiries, which doubted that the twentieth century of Nazism, colonial genocides, Stalinism, imperial famines, and nuclear annihilation was an uncomplicated advance. Hayek grants that much of what has been claimed for 'progress' has been hubristic, and deterministic, that not all change has been necessary or beneficial. Nevertheless, "civilization is progress and progress is civilization". Modern "civilization" (he means capitalism) depend on "the operation of forces which, under favourable conditions, produce progress". Without these forces, we would lose "all that distinguishes man from beast". What does separate man from beast? Well, Hayek routinely decried "primitive instincts" of group solidarity, the basic human impulse to put the collective ahead of the individual. For a methodological individualist, who holds that there is no collective, that all corporative entities are fictions which boil down to discrete, self-sufficient individual units, the idea of putting the group first is undoubtedly scandalous.

Thus in the chapter we're considering, he complains that "in some respects man's biological equipment has not kept pace with that rapid change, that the adaptation of his non-rational part has lagged somewhat, and that many of his instincts and emotions are still more adapted to the life of a hunter than to life in civilization. If many features of our civilization seem to us unnatural, artificial, or unhealthy, this must have been man's experience ever since he first took to town life, which is virtually since civilization began. All the familiar complaints against industrialism, capitalism, or overrefinement are largely protests against a new way of life that man took up a short while ago after more than half a million years' existence as a wandering hunter, and that created problems still unsolved by him." So, what distinguishes man from beast is the suppression of primitive instincts in favour of market "rationality", the willingness to accept the "artificial rules" of the marketplace which produce a "spontaneous order" and thus make progress possible. Interestingly, Hayek's quirky anthropological assertions do not support the classical fiction of homo oeconomicus. On the contrary, it is stated again and again that the principles of a "rational economy" are "artificial", at variance with our instinctive predilections. The neoliberal assumption, grounded in bitter struggle, is that human beings are not naturally disposed to living in a market based system, and will tend to rebel against it and seek to abbreviate it by various means. Indeed, Hayek later queries whether people even want most or even all of the results of "material progress". It seems a most "involuntary" affair. Thus, people must be somehow coerced or 'educated' into accepting it, and it must be upheld through effective political combat.

A little context here. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek very clearly draws out the political point he is making about social solidarity and the demands for 'social justice' which it produces. The market order depends upon the law being neutral, with everyone subject to the same rules. But legislation in the name of social justice meant that the law was 'socialised', giving special privileges and exception to certain classes for the purposes of ameliorating their situation. He cites 'New Deal' legislation in the US among his examples. This is, as William Scheuerman and Renato Christi have pointed out from different perspectives, remarkably similar to the legal critique of social democracy that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1920s, when - so Christi argues - he an authoritarian liberal, rather than the counter-revolutionary conservative he had been during the 1918 revolution and would become again when he bedded with the Nazis. (Christi's analysis suggests that the difference between the two is purely one of context). So, this is an important punctuation point: Hayek's ideas concerning progress and civilization are directly drawn from radical right political thought in the interwar years, which sought to rephrase classical liberalism in light of the challenge of mass democracy and socialism. If we hear Hayekian ideas of progress espoused by politicians, we know that they are not neutral, but were fashioned as weapons in a hegemonic struggle. Let's continue.

***

Progress is not, for Hayek, characterised by advances toward a fixed aim - say, equality, or liberty. He rejects such teleological conceptions. Rather, progress is "a process of formation and modification of the human intellect, a process of adaptation and learning in which not only the possibilities known to us but also our values and desires continually change. As progress consists in the discovery of the not yet known, its consequences must be unpredictable. It always leads into the unknown, and the most we can expect is to gain an understanding of the kind of forces that bring it about." Hayek's preferred metaphor here is the scientific process, the gradual accumulation of knowledge and power over nature, and the consequential transformation of our desires and intent.

A corollary of progress being unpredictable, is that it is unplannable. One cannot really master the forces which produce progress, bend them to any design or end goal, only come to understand them a little bit better in order to maximise their potential. It is not incidental that Hayek has used the example of scientific progress to make his case. Hayek's concern with the problems of knowledge is central to his outlook. In arguing against economic planning (see 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', The American Economic Review, September 1945), he maintained that a "rational economic order" could not be brought about by any single intelligence, because knowledge of the circumstances of which those who would construct such an order must make use is not concentrated but distributed in "bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" among "separate individuals". For this reason, the best system is one in which individuals act on their own self-interest, disregarding traditional morality, civic responsibility and so on, responding only to price signals. In doing so, by blindly obeying artificial rules and paying no attention to any greater end, they assure progress.

Hayek does pause to acknowledge that progress in this sense may not by itself leave human beings better off than they would have been had all progress halted a century, or a millenium, ago. He says that the question is "probably unanswerable", but that the answer "does not matter". He goes on: "What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable. It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement's sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence. The enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly."

If this seems an unsatisfactorily peremptory way to dismiss imposing questions of political justice, it can be explained by recalling Hayek's twist on what is called "preference utilitarianism". For Hayek, the society which promotes the general welfare is that society which maximises an anonymous individual's chances of obtaining his or her unknown preferences. Thus, whether we're materially better off or happier is less important than whether as many people as possible have the maximum number of chances to strive for their own ends. Only a society in its "progressive" state offers that possibility. Hayek credits Adam Smith this insight, but as usual distorts him entirely. Smith's defence of agrarian capitalism depended on it continually improving the employment and wages of "the labouring poor, of the great body of people". This was a crucial ethical argument for the system and it was tied to a moral philosophy that was as far from posessive individualism as Hayek's is from socialism.

***

And here we come to another area where Hayek differs from Smith, and that is the former's belief in the virtues of hierarchy. In The Road to Serfdom, and The Constitution of Liberty, roughly the same case for inequality is made. The rapid economic advance that enables the greatest number to satisfy their preferences depends upon inequality and would "be impossible without it". Progress so rapid "must take place in echelon fashion, with some far ahead of the rest". The rich, therefore, are not exploiting anyone. They are simply the farthest ahead. But the reason why there must be some far ahead of the rest is that the growth of income that enables individual achievement depends on the growth of knowledge. This is more important than the accumulation of capital because, while material goods will always be subject to relative scarcity, knowledge, once created, is "gratuitously available for the benefit of all". (Hayek was not writing before the invention of intellectual property, so it is safe to call this a disingenuous observation). The production of that knowledge depends on the outlay of resources equal to many times the share of income that, were resources distributed equally, any one person would enjoy.

Thus, progress, civilization itself, requires a wealthy class, a leisure class. It requires that there are luxury goods for the exclusive enjoyment of a few, because it is only through first having been luxury goods that new inventions eventually are made available to the majority - be they airplane trips or refrigerators. The wealthy who enjoy luxury goods are thus like "scouts" who "have found the goal" and made the same road easier for "the less lucky or less energetic" (whose contribution may merely have been to produce the luxury goods in question). A progressive society is a highly unequal one. The more unequal the society, the faster progress is achieved, and the better the eventual lot of the poor.

Moreover, the rich stand as an example to the rest of us. In the tradition of conservative polemic from Burke onward, Hayek maintains that the things we strive for are things that we want because others already have them. These desires act as "a spur to further effort". The "progressive society" must recognise the spur, but disregard "the pain of unfulfilled desire". To sidestep the inevitable charge that he is engaging in "cynical apologetics", which he is, Hayek attempts to show that even a planned society, which he cannot help but think of as a stagnant society, a kind of "serfdom", must have a few who try out the latest goods before they are widely available. There must be production for some before there is production for all, and if there is to be growth, there must be the incentive of desiring what others have and what one does not have. The only difference would be that inequalities would result from authority rather than the market, "and the accidents of birth and opportunity". Rather than deepening the persuasive power of the argument, however, this merely restates the same set of axioms, which contain the same set of implied observations about human behaviour.

***

The commitment to inequality poses a problem for Hayek's commitment to liberty, inasmuch as he does not want anyone's progress to be inhibited by unfair and arbitrary advantage or disadvantage. But he maintains that as long as there no large gaps between the rich and the rest, so long as the income scale is well graduated, with each step along the scale well occupied, it can "scarcely be denied" that the advance of some benefits the rest. Of course, the income scale has never quite looked like a well graduated pyramid. These days, a more applicable metaphor is the L-curve.

Nonetheless, Hayek is convinced that we will see the justice of this if we only abstract a little from our immediate circumstances and look at the global situation. Yes, we are all interdependent, but the advancement of some has not deprived others of anything. "Although the fact that the people of the West are today so far ahead of the others in wealth is in part the consequence of a greater accumulation of capital, it is mainly the result of their more effective utilization of knowledge." And that more effective utilization of knowledge has been made possible by internal class distinctions: "a country that deliberately levels such differences also abdicates its leading position - as the example 0f Great Britain so tragically shows." And he goes on to lament the decline of the British empire. There is thus no injustice or exploitation, either globally or domestically, for the rich are not claiming exclusive title to something that would otherwise be widely available. They are pioneers, who have simply used their knowledge more effectively in the market place, and thus given us all an example to imitate and learn from. (Here, as elsewhere, Hayek deals with contentious observations not by acknowledging their contentiousness, but by asserting their certainty all the more forcefully - "there can be little doubt that", "it can be scarcely denied that", "it is worth remembering", etc.).

Hayek's conception of progress is naturally anti-traditionalist. Having acknowledged the resistance of populations to markets and the changes they bring, he explains that even the conservative peasant, happily enjoying a "way of life", owes her mode of existence to "a different type of person", the innovators and wealth creators of the past who forced the static, peasant farmer mode of living on the previously nomadic people. The "changes to which people must submit are part of the cost of progress", and every such change is involuntary. Indeed, picking up on a point earlier, Hayek states: "I have yet to learn of an instance when the deliberate vote of the majority (as distinguished from the decision of some governing elite) has decided on such sacrifices in the interest of a better future as is made by a free-market society." But in their own self-interest, people must be coerced into accepting such changes, because the things they actually want, not just material goods but even the social improvements they desire, depend on them being so coerced. They must be compelled to abandon their happy little ruts, their traditional morality, and their primitive instinctual desire for social solidarity.

***

When Mrs Thatcher declared of The Constitution of Liberty that "this is what we believe", she embraced a set of ideas consciously fashioned for rightist political struggle. And she engaged in that struggle with gusto, and was as ideologically combative as she was politically authoritarian and repressive. Her ideology mandated her anti-democratic, inegalitarian politics as being essential for progress and civilization. When the neoliberals, who presently enjoy a near monopoly over our parliamentary system, speak of progress, I think it is just this conception above that they have in mind. Blair's "forces of progress" were those of neoliberal globalization, while his "forces of conservatism" were those who indignantly upheld traditions of trade union solidarity, welfare, employment protections, regulation, economic interventionism, grassroots democracy, and so on.

However, the fact that the political advocates of the British ruling class do not today have the self-confidence to declare themselves open Hayekians, to embrace the principle of inequality - quite the reverse! - suggests that their ideological position is weak. That they have to adopt a 'fairness' criterion while attacking us, that they have to claim to be egalitarians interested in rebuilding social solidarity, that this is the only way they can cobble together a viable political base, is an index of just how much the initial popular base of Thatcherite neoliberalism, always a minority but at first a large one, has crumbled since the late 1980s. If neoliberalism is hegemonic in that its assumptions are reproduced in all the dominant institutions, from business to parliament, to the media, and the academe, this is not because these assumptions coincide with the views of the majority, who remain stubbornly primitive.