BEIRUT — Washington’s formal announcement of its plan to hold an economic workshop in Bahrain in June to kick-start a promised Palestinian-Israeli peace process — “the deal of the century” — brings us all face-to-face with a momentous decision. Do we dance or stay home?

We will find out soon if Bahrain is the first stop on a serious journey towards peace with justice for Israelis and Palestinians, or merely Jared Kushner’s social secretary confusing this event with his children’s slumber party in the desert. The vexing problem for Palestinians and a few others is that they cannot possible accept an invite to attend such an insulting fantasy event that tries to buy off Palestinian rights with promises of material life improvements. Yet they also should not simply reject the invite and not go. What to do?

Critics of the Bahrain weekend workshop must figure out how to transform this offensive and nonsensical opening act of “the deal of the century” into a more credible and constructive negotiating process that serves the interests of all. One option is for Palestinians and their supporters to muster world support for a counter-offer two-day seminar — a step up from a mere ‘workshop’ — in which the Bahrain gathering would be one segment, perhaps even the first one, if it is organically linked and leads into a political and legal rights process that respects the conflict’s core elements of land, sovereignty, dispossession, refugeehood, security, recognition, normal relations, and national political rights — all of which only make sense if they apply equally to Palestinians and Israelis.

We must now wake up from the Arab region’s collective old men’s slumber and reaffirm to the world three simultaneous points: 1) we are willing to participate in any credible opportunity to negotiate a fair peace that addresses all the core issues seriously, such as we offered in the 2002 Arab Peace Plan; 2) we are prepared to be pragmatic and flexible on procedural logistical and sequencing issues, as long as the core substantive issues are on the table; and, 3) any negotiations must be anchored in existing international legal/political principles and consensuses.

The fundamental point we must make in both rejecting and conditionally accepting the Bahrain invitation — which is now essentially a weekend cookout and slumber party — is that we will not enter into a process that only reflects the power imbalance on the ground that the Israeli and American governments are using to force the Palestinians to surrender (just as the U.S. also tries to force the entire world to abide by its laws and wishes).

The current U.S. government’s actual deeds and words to date on Israel/Palestine show Washington to be working according to Israel’s rightwing government’s interests and the wishes of its colonial-settler community — to which Jared Kushner and the two top officials working with him are directly linked. This follows the string of recent Trump decisions that gave Israel what it desired and ignored Palestinian and Arab rights, on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, aid to Palestinians through the UN and directly, and Palestinian diplomatic representation in the United States, among others.

Washington’s Bahrain weekend invite also affirms the more sinister and dangerous legacy of U.S. policy-making on Israel/Palestine: For the entire last century from Balfour to Kushner, the United States largely perpetuates a steady colonial mindset that has seen white men in London and Washington toy with the Palestinians and stay close to the Israelis, largely for their own domestic political interests but also for other perceived short-term reasons (like fighting Communism or terrorism, making money, seeking technological-strategic gains, and others).

That colonial/imperial mindset in London and Washington, from Balfour to Kushner, has allowed Israel’s dominance to prevail in the region. It also reflects a dominant perception in Washington that the Palestinians, like African-Americans in the U.S. in the 1940s, exist neither as a national people with collective sovereign rights nor as individuals who should enjoy the same political or civil rights as Western white men or Israelis.

The double pain is not only that we must endure the increasing American pressure to crush Palestinian society until it surrenders or dies; it is also that we have not found a way to stop the United States under Trump from dictating its terms of conduct to the entire world, including its European allies and powers like China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey.

Can our response to the Bahrain invite start to change this unbearable situation that will soon start pummeling other Arab countries beyond Palestine?

Can we transform the Bahrain gathering into the initial step in a UN-managed meeting at the Security Council that would launch substantive negotiations based on the extensive existing international consensus for a two-state peaceful solution?

The Bahrain weekend invite is a silly idea offered by politically immature men with a century-long history of colonial meanness and cruelty — which will be heightened if we simply refuse to attend Bahrain. We must suggest a better way to enter into a credible and equitable negotiating mechanism that could be phased to include a weekend cookout, a slumber party a few days after that, and end with a full-fledged square dance hootenanny a week later.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 May 2019
Word Count: 856
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We all want to know what the future portends for us about anything important. We all tend to believe the future will be what the present is. If the polls show we shall make a certain decision, deciding if something looks good now, it will continue to look good as the future goes on. At the same time, it is a well-tested phenomenon we can’t remember decisions more than six months ago. What is a result of combining these two seeming facts? Let me try to explain how a combination works.

An example would be a decision most people are most concerned with — the election of the United States President in 2020. While we think the present is a favorable outlook for Donald Trump, it seems to me that it is more complicated.

Every day and every morning new elements enter the picture and by a small amount the present prediction is less valid. This continues over time. Think of it as a slow train pulling away from the accuracy of our prediction. By the time six months have passed, accuracy is reduced to almost zero.

So, it might be most sensible to start where we were six months ago and emphasize new things! And say that this predicts what will happen next. We are, therefore, urged to learn what it was six months ago. How can we do that?

There is first our memory of it, and second public evidence of it taken six months ago. If things favored Trump six months ago, he will be reelected. If things were less good six months ago, he will not be reelected.

How good are our assessments of whatever we felt six months ago? Six months for whom? Voting in the state of Oregon is completed and nothing that has happened since then can affect those votes.

There are other states with different rules about when a vote is taken in their state or at a local level. So, to know what people felt six months ago we have to combine an estimate of six months ago for different groups of people. This is, of course, a very difficult mathematical exercise and it is not likely people will do it well.

In addition, in the United States the vote is taken in a body called the Electoral College. This Electoral College is not in the computer but something that actually meets. When it meets, most electors have made promises how they would vote. They are not legally required to keep those promises. Some have violated them in the past and others may do so in the future. Now we realize what a hard time it is to predict today the vote in the Electoral College tomorrow. Some will then say the whole thing is not worth trying to see what will happen.

How do they then predict? Some do it by guesswork; some give up entirely. How can we know what will happen? Is there any way? It seems doubtful.

We may then enter a world totally cynical in which everyone does what they feel like doing.

So, decisive moment! But also decisive moment? There may not be a decisive moment.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 May 2019
Word Count: 530
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BEIRUT — The ongoing street demonstrations in Algeria and Sudan and the high-level changes in leadership they have sparked include political developments that are very different from the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11 (the so-called “Arab Spring”). We should watch two dynamics, in particular, to find out if this is genuinely a historic moment of change, or another re-run of previous uprisings and some toppled leaders of Arab authoritarian states that did not fundamentally change how power is exercised or how citizens are treated.

The two dynamics to watch are: 1) the demonstrators’ insistence that the entire political leadership and its security appendages be removed or reformed, rather than just deposing the president; and that they be replaced by a civilian authority to assume power across the government, without any disproportionate role for the military and security agencies in governance; and, 2) the early discussions about holding accountable those across the power structure, and not just in government, that should be charged with crimes against the citizenry, abuse of power, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

These dynamics represent an important new dimension to Arab popular rebellions against authoritarian rule; they are being implemented to some degree already, and should not be brushed aside as romantic wishes of naive young men and women. In the last two weeks, in both countries, demonstrators and citizens at home who support them have learned to focus the immense immediate energy of their collective power on the one issue that has been the single most important impediment to decent governance and sustainable and equitable human development in the Arab region over the past half century: the absolute power of military and security officers who seized executive authority in Arab countries starting as early as the 1936 coup by General Bakr Sidqi in Iraq and the 1952 coup in Egypt led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and fellow officers.

Ever since then, military and security officers steadily assumed power across all Arab “republics” like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Algeria and others, and expanded their powers to dominate the legislative and judicial branches of government. Military rulers spurred rapid state-led growth and state-building in the early decades of their rule in the 1950s-70s; but by the 1980s these systems started to stagnate and decline, as they became corrupted due to lack of accountability and the distorting lure of oil-generated wealth flowing across the region.

The citizens of the Arab region rebelled against these autocratic and authoritarian systems for decades, to no avail. In the past decade of massive popular uprisings, however, they showed that they understand their central national weakness to be the military’s unchecked dominance of governance and control of political-economic power. The insistence of the citizenries in Algeria and Sudan on a genuinely civilian authority to oversee the transition to a fully democratic governance system has been importantly manifested in the past ten days by two telling developments: the demonstrators’ repeated rejections of interim leaders from the old power structure, and negotiations with the military to shape a transitional authority that is dominated by civilians.

In other words, following the lead of the Tunisian people in 2010-14, we may now be witnessing the transition of two of the largest and most important Arab countries to systems that respect the principle of “the consent of the governed,” and that genuinely vest political authority in the people. If this happens in Algeria and Sudan, we are likely to see it expand steadily to other Arab lands.

The second important and related issue beyond the demonstrators’ demand that the military stay out of government is that all individuals who abused the citizenry or engaged in criminal or abusive acts be held accountable, including, significantly, private sector individuals who formed part of the ruling power structure. A few have already been detained or prevented from leaving the country in Algeria and Sudan, but it will take time for the transitional authorities to structure credible judicial mechanisms to bring to justice the alleged war criminals and abusers of powers. Changing the president is a meaningful achievement in the uprising’s initial stage, but it is meaningless ultimately if it does not eject from authority the rings of crony capitalists, security appendages, and ruling family-linked associates who monopolized power and ran the country and its economy into the ground.

The past ten days are especially important and impressive for revealing how firmly the populist demonstrators in Algeria and Sudan maintained their focus on these two central demands, kept insisting on them both, and to date have been able to push the military to make concessions. This is a tangible change from the 2011-14 transition in Egypt that remains the emblematic example of how not to allow the military to remain in power in the face of popular demands for democratic pluralism and civilian rule.

Genuine civilian-led governance in large Arab countries is the right of their citizens. It is likely to happen soon, and it will be a sight to behold, to celebrate, and to protect.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 April 2019
Word Count: 833
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BEIRUT — The nationwide street demonstrations that have now toppled two long-serving and ageing dictators in Algeria and Sudan are particularly poignant, because they occur in two pedigree countries in the modern Arab struggles for freedom and dignity.

Much instant commentary around the world will speak of the arrival of Arab Spring 2.0, following the 2010-11 popular rebellions that achieved mixed results in half a dozen Arab countries; it will also note the armed forces’ continued hold on power, or at least on transitional political mechanisms, hinting that Arab societies are doomed to be ruled by military officers.

Such short-sighted and incomplete views of what is actually going on across most of the Arab region should be juxtaposed against the Algerian and Sudanese people’s reaffirmation of Arab citizens’ longstanding desire for a life of political dignity and socio-economic equity — and their willingness to risk their lives to achieve those rights.

Algeria has long been appreciated across the Arab region for its epic struggle for independence from French colonialism over nearly two centuries, and its support for Arab nationalist and progressive movements since the 1960s. Its decades of military rule reflected similar trends in most Arab lands, while the brief democratic breakthrough of the 1992 elections that were won by local Islamists was quickly and viciously quashed by the armed forces who were supported by Western governments.

Sudan is especially noteworthy because this will be the fourth time since its independence in 1955 that its citizens install a democratic system of government — the first three having been overthrown by military coups. Two other popular uprisings overturned military rulers and briefly restored democratic rule in1964 and 1985.

So far from being sudden, isolated, and delayed revivals of the 2010-11 Arab Uprisings (or “Arab Spring”), Algeria and Sudan’s populist ejections of military rulers more accurately affirm a century-long quest for democracy and human dignity that has defined Arab societies since their late 19^th Century stirrings for freedom from European or Ottoman rule.

Algeria and Sudan today should remind us of how deep, wide, and continuous has been the struggle for human rights and political decency across the Arab world, not how erratic or episodic it is. The historical reality is that every conceivable configuration of Arab citizens has struggled day and night, week after week, year after year, from century to century, to achieve the rights they expect as human beings, first, and as citizens of their states, second. They face prison, torture, and death. They are ridiculed and humiliated, marginalized and exiled, beaten, bought, and disappeared — but they persist because they know their own humanity is both invincible and universal.

So they march, write, speak out, challenge, organize, mobilize, vote, go to court, and try every available means to break through the authoritarian chains that bind them to empty political systems, drowning in gutted economies, on the surface of ravaged natural environments, supported by cruel and uncaring Arab and foreign governments.

Everybody beyond a handful of wealthy families and their guards in the power elites struggles in one way or another — sometimes silently, only in their hearts — in this legacy of Arab demands to achieve one’s humanity and rights: individuals, political and professional groups, women’s and student groups, lawyers, street artists, media figures, singers and dancers, local religious and cultural leaders, businessmen and women, high school and university students, local fruit and vegetable sellers, global high-tech magnates, mass movements anchored in religion, ethnicity, or ideology, garbage collectors and school teachers. These and hundreds of other categories of citizens have always challenged their own disdainful  authorities, foreign occupiers and invaders, and a global capitalist elite that works closely with ruling governments.

These activist Arab men and women never stopped, even when the foreign television crews went home. They only occasionally laid low when death and imprisonment were no longer useful options to achieve their goals. But they always revived after brief interludes of rest, planning, re-grouping, and re-strategizing, when they sought the most effective and non-destructive way to remove their hollow regimes of old men with guns who routinely go to London, Paris, Washington, Moscow and other faraway capitals to secure praise and more guns.

I feel this viscerally because for the past 50 years, I have personally experienced, reported on, analyzed, and marveled at this legacy of modern Arab struggle for decency, democracy, and dignity, and not just once every seven years when it rears its head and waves to the television crews who drop in from New York, London, and Paris for a few days to marvel at the suddenly restive natives dressed in flowing robes who peacefully but relentlessly demand to live free, or not at all.

The meaning of Algeria and Sudan in this long, uninterrupted legacy of human struggle that has toppled dictatorial rulers recently is in three main causes: citizens who no longer fear their military regimes but challenge them peacefully in the streets; economies that have been turned into wastelands by the regimes that can no longer feed, employ, or house the population, two-thirds of whom have become poor, vulnerable, and desperate; and, the massive security systems the regimes created to protect themselves in the end refused to shoot and kill their own brothers and sisters.

Most honest people in the Arab region understood in their bones that the 2010-11 uprisings were a milestone on a very long and hard road to the three goals that teased — but ultimately eluded — Arab people a century ago, when the modern Arab state system was formed: statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship. Those three prizes, we learned finally, would not come from the generosity of colonial rulers or brutal indigenous autocrats, no matter how many troops they have or how much money they spend.

Statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship emerge only from the persistent toil of honest citizens who respect each other, love their country, and dare to battle homegrown or foreign tyrants to live in freedom and dignity. Arabs have done this for many, many decades, and Algeria and Sudan are the latest examples of this ongoing legacy.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 April 2019
Word Count: 1,006
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For a worldwide struggle to capture the surplus-value there is always a choice.

One can give priority to short-term gains. Or one can give priority to middle turn gains. One cannot do both.

Whoever seeks short-term gains will always win out in the short-run. It is the road of apparent selfishness. Pursue one’s own gains, no matter what happens to the others.

However, after a few years, the short-turn gains are exhausted. Preferences shift. Suddenly, it is middle term gains as a result of class struggle that matters.

Now, the selfish are the losers, the sacrifices rewarded.

Because we are in the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy, there are constant fluctuations. We go back and forth between the short-term and the middle-run as the only thing that matters.

At the moment, a major actor, President Trump, has opted for a short-run priority. It looks good for him.

But he and others will soon have to shift for a middle-run emphasis.

It will soon look bad for him.

Since what he cares about is re-election in 2020, the timing of the shifts is crucial, but also unpredictable.

Those interested in winning the class struggle should concentrate on that struggle as the only sensible option.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 April 2019

Word Count: 204

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Two of my regular readers sent me indications that I was not clear in my explanation of what I was talking about when I spoke of unacceptable compromises.

I shall attempt to answer their queries and objections. Let me start by reproducing what they sent me.

The first was a query from Alan Maki who had one concern which was the word: “compromise“. I reproduce it here: “What are you talking about compromising on?”

The second email was from Mike Miller whose query was much longer.

Let me respond to each of them. I know that the author of this query was an activist in the Ontario Labour Party and devoted much energy to obtaining the victory of the Labour Party, which he saw as a rejection of the parties of no change. They rotated between the Center Left and a Center Right version of changeless policies. Analytically my correspondent interpreted the electoral victory of the Labour Party as a demand for significant change.

Mike Miller said that the successful creation of a strong union called The International longshore and Warehouse Union ( ILWU) over the past twenty or fifty years, despite all the attempts to crush it, is evidence that change is possible.

The victory of the Ontario Labour Party and the ability of the ILWU to beat back all attempts to crush it are evidence that change is possible and cannot be called unacceptable.

Both objections miss the point. I do not deny that the electoral victory of the Labour Party was a great achievement. I salute it and do so publicly as a wonderful achievement. I do not deny that the ability of the ILWU to resist all the many attempts to crush it is a great achievement. I salute it.

This is precisely the point why these  compromises are unacceptable. Not everybody who lives in Ontario, Canada, will benefit by the achievement of the electoral victory of the Labour Party. There will be losers. There are those who are outside this party’s structure in Ontario or outside any party structure whatsoever. They gain nothing and may lose something by the victory of the Ontario Labour Party.

I do not deny that the ability of the ILWU to beat back all the many attempts to crush it was a great achievement. Nonetheless it is unacceptable because persons who are not members of the ILWU are excluded from its benefits and therefore are not included in the favorable results of the ILWU.

So, I repeat, every achievement involves militancy, but also short-run compromises as can be seen by reading the history of the ILWU (see in the network for the item entitled The ILWU Story).

The achievements in both cases were enormous. The benefits were and will be enormous. But precisely for this reason benefits have to be assessed against the balance of the exclusions that the benefits brought.

Following the situation in each case shows that to achieve what they did achieve involved compromises. This may be the benefits of the struggle, but the necessary compromises were part of the achievement and those necessary compromises made possible the achievements that are unacceptable because they exclude others.

 

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2019
Word Count: 529
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BEIRUT — It is remarkable that peaceful street protests and demonstrations critical of the government have taken place simultaneously in recent weeks and months in at least 11 Arab countries. Ordinary people from all walks of life, but especially unemployed young men and women, continue to take to the streets in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco.

Disgruntled citizens also would be marching if they could in other Arab autocracies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, but the draconian measures those governments have used to jail, torture, and bludgeon their citizens into a state of pacified and dehumanized fear have minimized public protests — for the moment. Yemen and Libya are in states of war, but their people already rose up in protest eight years ago during the great Arab Uprisings of 2010-11.

Clearly, almost every person and institution in power across the Arab region has learned almost nothing since 2011. For the poor Arabs who are a majority of citizens in our region, conditions have steadily worsened in every sector of life — jobs, income, education, water, housing, health and transport services, inequalities and disparities, clean air, and others.

The Arab governments and elites refuse to acknowledge that something is very wrong across our region, when a majority of states are at war or engage in bitter internal standoffs with their own people. Many ask today whether we are witnessing a revival or continuation of the 2011 Uprisings. Today’s protests match up against the Uprisings in some but not all ways.

First, the drivers of both eras are almost identical. These are a combination of socio-economic stress on a growing number of families, more and more of whom sink into poverty and lose hope for a better life, while they totally lack any credible political power to change things for the better.

Second, the Arab governments, private sectors, and their foreign donors and patrons continue to respond in exactly the same way they did eight years ago. They fail to expand economic activity enough to generate enough decent jobs to lower poverty and unemployment. Politically, most Arab governments have become more repressive, and narrowed ordinary citizens’ ability to organize, mobilize, speak out, and participate politically in their own societies.

Third, the fundamental dysfunctions and deficiencies in Arab societies that sparked the 2011 Uprisings have worsened virtually across the board, in politics, economy, free expression, the environment, and basic human services. The resurgence of region-wide demonstrations today should not surprise anyone who knows the region.

This is because, for example, as many as two-thirds of the 400 million Arabs today suffer daily indignity and despair because they are poor or vulnerable to poverty. The poor and marginalized citizens grow, while the middle class shrinks. This is partly because most Arab workers toil in the informal sector, characterized by low pay and no protections in health, minimum wages, or retirement.

The difference today from a few decades ago is that an Arab family that becomes poor will remain poor for several generations, because our economic systems cannot create enough decent jobs to reduce poverty and unemployment. The few jobs that are created tend mostly to go to the children or friends of the plugged-in crony capitalist elite or state bureaucrats.

The non-stop peaceful marchers in the street are asking for nothing more than food, water, housing, education and jobs — and to be treated decently and as human beings by their governments. Most people feel their governments treat them with disdain — such as Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s plan to run for a fifth consecutive term when he is in nearly a comatose health condition and cannot carry out the functions of either the presidency or even a full-fledged and active human being.

For those who wish to understand both the collective failure of Arab governance and the resulting nonstop violence and popular protests, I suggest comparisons to two other cases in our lifetimes when people elsewhere erupted simultaneously in mass uprisings and resistance movements. Those two mass movements when people challenged systems that oppressed politically and economically, and robbed them of their human dignity, were the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, and the anti-Soviet revolutions in the late 1980s.

Arabs in the streets today feel the same deadly combination of three elements that also drove the Civil Rights and anti-Soviet uprisings: socio-economic stagnation, lack of political rights, and a degraded humanity that refuses to remain degraded or relinquish its humanity.

I lived through the last years of the Civil Rights movement during my university days in the United States. So I think sometimes that “Free at last, free at last, Allahu Akbar, we will be free at last” could be imagined as the combined drumbeat and heartbeat that now motivates tens of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who — as happened to African-Americans — have been turned into little more than beasts of burden by their own power structures and governments. When they complain, they are offered more of the same economic, political, and security policies that brought them to this sorry state during the past 40 years. So, they refuse to keep walking on command, in quiescent, silent lines, like donkeys. Instead, like Birmingham and Selma, like Berlin and Prague, they march, like humans.

It will go on and on for generations, in different forms at different times and places, until someone in authority wakes up and admits that repeating failed policies is a sign of utter and inexplicable stupidity, cruelty, and incompetence.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 March 2019
Word Count: 919
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Every compromise has losers.

Every compromise has dissenters.

Every compromise includes a betrayal. Yet no political struggle can end without a compromise. Compromises do not last forever and often only briefly. Yet there exists no alternative to making them in the short run.

In the short run we are all seeking to minimize the pain. Minimizing the pain requires a compromise so that assistance to those who need it can be given. But the compromise does not solve any problem in the long run. So, in the middle run (more than three years) we have to pursue a solution without compromise. It is all a matter of timing – the very short run versus the middle run.

If we don’t compromise in the short run, we hurt the people who are weakest. If we do compromise in the middle run, we hurt the people who are weakest. It’s an impossible game which we all have to play.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 March 2019
Word Count: 156
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Class struggles are eternal, but how they are fought depends on the ongoing state of the world-system in which they are located.

World-systems have three temporalities. They come into existence and this needs to be explained. Secondly, they are stabilized structures and operate according to the rules on which they are founded. And thirdly, the rules by which they maintain their relative stability cease to work effectively and they enter a structural crisis.

We have been living in the modern world-system, which is a capitalist world-system. We are presently in the third stage of its existence, which is that of structural crisis.

During the previous phase, that of stabilized structures or normality, there was a grand debate within the left about how one could achieve the objective of destroying capitalism as a system. This debate occurred both within movements created by the working class or proletariat (such as trade-unions or social-democratic parties) and within nationalist parties or national-liberation movements.

Each side of this grand debate believed that its strategy and its alone could succeed. In fact, while each side created zones in which it seemed to succeed, neither did. The most dramatic examples of presumed success stories that turned out to be unable to avoid the pull to a return to normality was the collapse of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the collapse of the Maoist cultural revolution on the other.

The turning point was the world-revolution of 1968, which was marked by three features: It was a world-revolution in that analogous events occurred throughout the world-system. They all rejected both the state-oriented strategy and the transformative cultural strategy. It was a matter they said that was not either/or but rather both/and.

Finally, the world-revolution of 1968 also failed. It did however bring to an end the hegemony of centrist liberalism and its power to tame both the left and the right, which were liberated to return to the struggle as independent actors.

At first, the resurrected right seemed to prevail. It instituted the Washington Consensus and launched the slogan of TINA (or there is no alternative). But income and social inequality became so extreme that the left rebounded and constrained the ability of the United States to maintain or restore its dominance.

The return of the left to a premier role also came to a swift end. And thus began a process of wild swings, a defining feature of a structural crisis. In a structural crisis, the left needs to pursue a policy of seeking in the very short run both state power in order to minimize the pain for the lower 99 percent of the population AND in the middle run to pursue a cultural transformation of everyone.

These seemingly contradictory pursuits are very disconcerting. They are however the only way to pursue the class struggle in the remaining years of the structural crisis. If we can do it, we can win. If not, we shall lose.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2019
Word Count: 492
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BEIRUT — A great menace hovers over the Arab region and its people, and has started to nibble away at their societies and countries. Our region now is made up mostly of poor and vulnerable families, and it is corroding and fragmenting from within. Unlike the popular media images abroad of vast Arab wealth, the reality is the exact opposite. The Arab region is fracturing and disaggregating into a small group of wealthy people, a shrinking middle class, and masses of poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people who now account for 2/3 of all Arabs. Some 250 million people, out of a total Arab population of 400 million, are poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, according to important new research by Arab and international organizations.

The most significant new evidence for this trend comes from Multi-Dimensional Poverty studies conducted by Arab and international organizations. They give us a more accurate and complete picture of the actual conditions of our ravaged populations. This is complemented by annual region-wide surveys by Arab and U.S.-coordinated academic groups, especially the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the U.S.-based Arab Barometer (a consortium of U.S. and Arab research institutes) that show that on average some 70% of surveyed Arab families cannot easily or at all meet their basic monthly needs.

The Multi-Dimensional Poverty (MDP) figures indicate that poverty rates are as much as four times higher than previously assumed. This is because the MDP measure of poverty and vulnerability that has been applied by economists at UNDP, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), the World Bank, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and other institutions has given us a much more accurate picture of poverty than the previous reliance on measures such as $1.25 or $1.90 expenditures per day. The main reason for the greater accuracy is that MDP poverty measures capture the very rich and very poor that previous studies had missed, and also define poverty more accurately in terms of families’ core needs and capabilities.

In ten Arab states surveyed by ESCWA, 116 million people were classified as poor (41% of the total population), and 25% were vulnerable to poverty, according to Dr Khalid Abu-Ismail, chief of the Economic Development and Poverty section of UN ESCWA, based in Beirut. The “vulnerable” families live right on the edge of poverty, but they simply cannot afford any increase in prices, taxes, or fees, which would immediately plunge them into poverty.

This may explain why tens of thousands of people have demonstrated against their government policies recently in Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Sudan, and other Arab countries, with a strong emphasis on resisting new taxes and price increases.

Even when the World Bank’s poverty measure of less than $1.90 daily expenditure per capita is used, in the period 2011-2015 extreme poverty in the Middle East increased from 2.7% to 5% — and the Middle East was the only region in the world where this indicator increased in that period. Consequently, the middle class in non-oil-producing Arab states has been shrinking from 45% to 33% of the population, according to ESCWA economists who have analyzed this issue. Greater inequality seems to be moving alongside greater poverty and vulnerability.

Not only are Arab poverty and vulnerability much higher than previously thought; the poor and marginalized also are destined to suffer for generations, for two reasons. First, because early childhood development conditions and a family’s highest attained education level are two credible predictors of life-long poverty — and both are problematic in many Arab areas.

Second, because Arab economies in today’s conditions cannot generate sufficient quality jobs to increase family incomes and reduce poverty rates. Dr Abu-Ismail explained in several interviews here that in recent decades most Arab families experienced social and economic mobility that would reward them for their educational or employment efforts by improving their income and well-being. More recently, however, he said, higher social capabilities in health and education often did not translate into better lives, mainly because not enough decent jobs were available. So many people panicked about their and their children’s future prospects.

To complete the ignominious circle of misery that plagues the hundreds of millions of stressed, often desperate, poor Arabs who are a majority of their populations, these people also lack the political rights to credibly express their grievances or to participate meaningfully in decision-making that could turn around their imperiled countries.

The political consequence of all this is that many Arabs have become increasingly marginalized and alienated from the economic mainstream, and also, in many cases, from the political and national institutions of their own country. Citizen alienation from the state combines with rising disparities in every dimension of life that are now well measured both quantitatively and qualitatively, such as gender, ethnicity, rural-urban location, education, health, security, wealth and poverty, self-confidence, trust in government, and others.

As a result, the citizens of once homogeneous Arab states have fractured into several distinct groups: a small wealthy class, a shrinking middle class, and a big majority of poor, vulnerable, and desperate people. Perhaps a majority of Arab citizens no longer feel they can rely on their states and governments for their identity, security, opportunity, voice, basic needs, and other critical factors that shape both healthy citizenship and a dignified human life. Such men and women who become alienated from their state seek identity and allegiance in institutions beyond the state that meet their needs, such as religion, tribalism, ethnicity, criminal networks, or militancy.

The existing Arab governments and private sectors simply cannot generate the number of new jobs needed to reduce poverty in the decades ahead; the IMF and others say we need 60-100 million new jobs by 2030, and 27 million jobs in 2018-2023, to meet the needs of new graduates, reduce existing unemployment, and raise family incomes.

This means that Arab labor markets will continue to be defined heavily by informal labor, which is now estimated to account for some 50%-60% of all workers. Labor informality, due to its lack of worker protections, is a major cause of poverty and vulnerability, and thus a guarantor of permanent poverty for the informal worker’s family.

The widespread poverty, vulnerability, and inequality that threaten our current and future well-being are consequences of the bad policies of widely incompetent Arab elites — but also aided by important contributions from aggressive regional and international powers that support those elites and stoke the many wars in the region.

All these issues now form a single destructive cycle of low-quality governance, stagnant economies, deteriorating education and health services, insufficient quality jobs, and widespread warfare — not to mention degrading environments, water shortages, food insecurity, incoherent urbanism, and rampant corruption. This bundle of factors is perhaps the greatest shame of a modern Arab region that is failing its people, because it is failing its century-old tests of statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 February 2019
Word Count: 1,143
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