Class struggles.

The 19^th century saw the abolition of the slave trade and, progressively, of slavery and serfdom. It also saw the rapid development of machines and the rise of the industrial entrepreneur. These two processes changed the nature of class struggles. Previously labour had been in bondage, and the opposition had been between the land owning aristocracy and the burghal artisans and merchants. Quite suddenly labour was freed and mechanisation was replacing craftsmanship. The opposition was no longer between the rural raw materials and their urban transformations, it was between the coalition of property and the propertyless, between capital and labour. At the start, the struggle was one sided, but labour organised and slowly bettered its condition. Soon seen as a threat to property, these labour movements were repressed. Free labour fought back, and the violence escalated as the military backed the police. By the turn of the century the working class was classified as dangerous and was treated accordingly. So organisations went underground and armed themselves. Robbery and murder became political acts. Then a first war, followed by a second wider one, put everyone in uniform.

Society had become bipolar, property and its mercenaries were face to face with labour, without intermediaries. It was an accident of history, a consequence of the new forms of production. Armies, however, had kept the three-rank system. Officers were born gentlemen, but corporals and sergeants were promoted on merit. Armies still had a social ladder and a middle-rank between command and execution. They had avoided the direct confrontation of high and low, with the buffers of NCOs. The total wars that engulfed first Europe then most of the Northern hemisphere had a levelling effect. Valour and virtue took precedence over wealth and lineage. Total war concentrated power, both political and economic, in the hands of governments and of their officials. After 1945 the fighting and, to a lesser degree, the production of weapons dropped in intensity. Armies demobilised but a new middleclass had been created by the turmoil. Nurses, teachers, liberal professions, engineers, government employees, the armed and security forces had run the country in war and would continue in “peace”. For the next two decades middle became the dominant ideology.

During the 1960s the middle was attacked on both sides. Civil rights and national liberation fronts (women and gays) contested the white man’s rule, and voices were raised against leviathan governments. Slowly pressured by developing nations and state privatisations, the middle-class has lost its dominant role, and its model of social mobility no longer applies. The Dream has become a déclassé nightmare. Society is sliding back to where it was a hundred years ago. But this time the face off between property and propertyless is on a global scale. Another middleclass revival through mass conscription and a war of nations is unimaginable, because of technology and America’s preponderant military power. So what will the growing violence of class struggles lead to this time? Is there some other way to reconstruct the buffer zone between capital and labour, and get the trickle of social mobility going again, or is this the last showdown, the final struggle, the synthesis of a contradiction, with liberty, equality, fraternity, and the pursuit of happiness for all humanity?

Property is possession, control and power. It owns and decides the production of goods, services and ideas, and has military might to protect it. It can choose, like Septimius Severus, to enrich the army and ignore the rest. It can, like Constantine the Great, adopt a popular movement, empty it of its social content, and use it as a totalitarian ideology. (Both have been imitated countless times). In the past, property has been destroyed and has changed hands. But after wars, conquest and financial collapses it has always rebuilt its dominion. A century and a half ago, a few dreamers claimed that property was the inheritance of labour, arguing that labour made property productive and that this was the basis of value. It seems that their logic is shared by an ever growing world community, who have nothing to lose but their debts.

Cause and effect.

What could have motivated the French and British governments to obtain a Security Council vote that allowed them to use air-power against Gaddafi’s armed forces? The humanitarian aspect was the strongest argument put forward, and there was the Kosovar precedent. But Kosovo was a breakaway region of Serbia with an ethnic identity. Whereas the division of Libya was never envisaged, though ethnicity and regional oppositions were preponderant in the conflict. The overthrow of a tyrant and regime change might have been justified morally, but both were strongly denied till the end, as they were not included in the Security Council resolution. Libyan oil and gas probably played a role, though the uncertain policies of future Libyan governments and the actual consensus on keeping production down and prices up should have argued against intervention, as an embargo would have sufficed. Attacking the Libyan army with an important deployment of air power gave Cameron and Sarkosy the political statures of Commanders in Chief. It was also the opportunity to show off the effectiveness of the Tornado, the Rafale and other high-tech killing machines, all of which are commercial disasters.

Now that Gaddafi is dead and the National Revolutionary Council has taken executive control of Libya, what is the balance of all these motives? Aircraft sales have not improved, and yesterday’s comrades in arms are at loggerheads over Europe. As intensive bombing, both aerial and terrestrial, have badly damaged Libyan infrastructures, Libya will not be influencing the oil and gas markets for a while. A new government is in place, but the divisions remain, between Tripoli and Benghazi, between Arabophones and Berberophones, between the coast and the vast interior. Can these different factions unite to form a nation, and why should they? Why should the arbitrary lines drawn on maps by European diplomats decide what nations are for all eternity? Why should colonial borders continue to divide up humanity as though there was no history, obliging existing cultures and languages to disappear or amalgamate inside imposed geographical limits? Whatever may be, the only uniting factor in Libya to-day is Sunni Islam, which is practiced by almost everyone. Given its borders, Libya’s existence as a nation has been enforced by the violence of an autocrat, but it might also be possible to reach a religious consensus. Libyans may follow the path taken by Tunisia and Egypt. If they do, their joint momentum will inevitably push East and West. So, whatever their intentions, Cameron and Sarkosy will have consolidated a movement that has the potential to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The Moslem world is beginning to experiment alternatives to absolute monarchy and autocracy, just as the Christian world did four centuries ago. Then as now, this quest has a strong element of religious fundamentalism. Confronting absolutism needs strong convictions, and faith builds convictions more easily than reason, so that the fundamentalist element may be unavoidable. But European precedents (the Dutch and the English, recently the Poles) show that religious fervour is quickly secularised by the realities of government. However, the Arab Spring could be the premise of something much bigger, such as East and West coming together to produce something new. The decline of Western imperialism opens alternative paths, and syncretism is one of them.