The Dialectics of Radical Social Change and Global Capitalist Order: Evidence from

the ‘Arab Spring’

Govand Khalid Azeez

ABSTRACT1
The global capitalist order is premised on the impossibility of change. Under the veneer of a
harmonious oneness, capitalist totality spreads in predatory motion—its expansion as
commensurate and homologous with the deep environmental, economic, and socio-political
contradictions and crises. Contrary to its ideological assertion of the ‘end’ of history and ‘death
of politics’, recent social ruptures have demonstrated that global capitalism is haunted by anti-
status quo social forces and movements.

This article examines the possibility of social change at the crux of the global system. Social
change is envisaged as a dialectical continuum formed apropos three interconnecting, fluid
topological nodes: ubiquitous, significant, and transformational. Grounded on this materialist
ontology, the article argues that the structural-conjunctural contradictions and agential
interests congealed in the Arab Spring may present the qualitative emergence of new, unknown
possibilities. Possibilities that reveal that global capitalism is a site of ongoing struggle, and
history an open-ended process.

Keywords: Capitalism, Marxism, Hegel, Revolution, Resistance, Arab Spring, Middle East

INTRODUCTION

Today, the capitalist statist system has engulfed the planet on a whole. There are fundamental
ecological, economical and socio-political contradictions and antagonisms. At each frontier,
the apparatuses of big money and capital have hit a threshold. In the process the two driving
forces of life, human-activity and nature, are exploited and exhausted to a catastrophic end.
Despite this, the collective labour, thought and desire to regulate or cease the system is at
odds with the power and the persistent subjective and objective violence of this structure. A
precursory look at the composition of the collective consciousness and condition of humanity
demonstrates this. It seems the political spirit of our world, directed by or corrupted by
property owners and hoarders of power, is split between a sharp antagonistic duality.

On the one hand, we have the liberal capitalist system and its dogma. This religion decrees and
enforces the holiness of private property, the supremacy of the market over social life and

1
To Cite this paper refer to:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03017605.2024.2312646?src=exp-la
Azeez, G. K., 2024, In: Critique. 51, 4, p. 565-585.

1
nature, the normalisation of unprecedented forms of inequalities (class, ecological, gendered,
racial, sexual, etc.). In Alain Badiou’s words, this hegemonic metaphysic denies the existence
of Truth, or an alternative world. Instead, the postulation is that there are only ‘bodies’ and
‘languages’ in the capitalist order.2 And what is the formal solution for the unabashed savage
‘spectacle of extravagance and misery’3 of the Market, to use Hegel’s words? It is the further
hegemonization of the bourgeois state, law and civility adorned by the empty signifiers of
‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘democracy’ and ‘humanitarianism’. And if certain forces fail this
civilizational test then imperial democratisation, or the Neo-Kiplingian civilizing ‘burden’,
enforces itself via the old repressive state apparatuses. And as William I. Robinson contends,
this state is no longer operational just locally, but also globally. From Thatcher to early-
Fukuyama, this ‘democratic materialist’ postulation that ‘there is no alternative’ and that ‘we
are at the end of history’ is a mutation of Leibniz’s axiom. One that ridicules the past and erases
future possibilities. It declares that all we have is the existing socially determined framework,
and that liberal capitalo-parliamentarianism is the ‘best of the worst possible worlds.’
Existentially this hollow universalism makes inevitable the petty band-aid formal legalistic
solutions, the ‘abundance of meaningless positivity’, demand for transparency, narcissism and
‘excision of the Other’4, and condemns anything other as parochialism and provincialism. But
as Vivek Chibber correctly points out, in the ‘past few years, it has become pretty clear that
people aren’t buying the message anymore’, and that this ‘pragmatic’ and ‘lofty moralist’
ideology with its liberal architecture is now in ‘shambles’.5

On the other hand, we have the subjective reaction to this systemic condition. Here the
response is an obscurantist oppositional ideology that we can call ‘Western Salafism’. Its
worldview is Burkean and decrees that there is no ‘posterity’, and we ought to ‘look backward
to [the]ancestors’ and past worlds. This reactionary social and political response attempts to
avoid the concrete contradictions of the system. Against the instrumental rationalism, the
bureaucratic pseudo-scientific count of life, the rapid destabilisation even destruction of
traditional collective life, and the economic and political ailments of our age, it emphasizes
traditionalism, tribalism, anti-scientific superstition, patriarchal religious dogma or some kind
of postmodern nihilistic paganism. Its political forms, represented in the likes of Benjamin
Netanyahu, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Jair Bolsonaro, to Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi,
Trump, Steve Bannon, Heinrich Reuss (Reichsburger), urges us to embrace culturalism,
sectarianism, irridentism, even fascism. The aim here is to close each social demography and
political entity to the Other and ensure, what Byung-Chul Hun calls, a ‘gapless Sameness’.
Politics is directed from panopticon to ‘banopticon’6 , a monochromatic identity caught in an
endless ego-loop inside the confines of walls, barriers, boundaries and borders. We have then

2Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 1-15.
3 George Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B Nisbet (Cambridge
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 222.
4 Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).
5 Vivek Chibber, Understanding Capitalism (Brooklyn: Catalyst, 2018), 7.
6 Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, 12.

2
the ‘Age of Restoration’ and war. Khalifa, Shah, Hindutva’s ‘Bharat Mata’, ‘Great America’, Pax
Britannica, Pax Romana, etc is resurrected in neo-feudal and technologically-advanced
societies with new means of neoliberal digital wars, gamified bombers and algorithm-driven
social communication.

Change erased, limited or made impossible and yet the world burns and capital seeks to expand
infinitely despite hitting a material and social threshold. Against this, in the last four decades
certain pockets grassroots social movements and revolutionary forces have continued to
challenge both: 1) the capitalist system and its enduring crises, imposed by Transnational
Capitalist Class (TCC) and its local circuits; and 2) the abovementioned liberal multicultural-
capitalism and identitarian-romanticist ‘alternative’ to it. For their part, these social and
revolutionary movements (like the Arab Spring or Rojava revolt, like in the Chilean social revolt,
Zapatistas, EPR and Occupy Movement), as well as social and natural crisis have demonstrated
that all structures are necessarily haunted by underlying absolute cleavages and contradiction
and intentional goal-directed anti-status quo subjectivities. In other words, these movements
inside and outside the Global South embody change of some kind.

In light of the above contradictions and antagonisms, this paper examines the possibility of the
development of change in the capitalist system. It argues that the diverse synchronic social and
revolutionary moments from the Arab Spring can be examined as instances of different types
of ruptures and changes in the modus operandi of a system that is in motion. That workers and
mass revolts can make a hole in structure and time and have the potential to be
transformational conjunctures that can spread discord and shift the tectonic plates of the
system. And that other forms of agential and conjunctural changes (ubiquitous and significant)
are either ephemeral ruptures that are soon re-digested by the metabolism of the capitalist
structure or a possible stepping stone to transformational changes. This paper is divided into
three sections. Through an ontology of change, the first section demonstrates that forms of
change are dialectically situated within a spectrum consisting of three topological nodes:
ubiquitous, significant, and transformational.7 For its part, the second section breaks down the
different determinations and conjunctures that comprise the ‘totality’ of the global capitalist
structure. That is, through a dialectical anthropology, it assesses how the interaction between
states, geopolitical struggles, transnational corporate control, local and global production,
capital in circulation, technological advances, socio-cultural relations, and ideological positions,
creates a global apparatus and index of exploitation, expropriation and alienation. Finally, the
third section demonstrates that this event we call the ‘Arab Spring’ is nothing but the dialectical
antagonism and contradiction between the capitalist systemic conflicts, interpellation,
commodification, and fetishism and, the grass root revolutionary will, egalitarian desires,
sentiments, and praxis of the universal working class of the region.

7 R J Jones’s names for these categories is being used. R. J. Jones, "Globalization and Change in the International Political

Economy," International Affairs 75, no. 2 (1999).

3
 CHANGE AND THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST SYSTEM

Dialectical Change between Necessity and Order

It is almost next to impossible to speak of the structural crisis of the system without invoking
the concept of change. The globality of capital resides on the premise that the political is dead
and transformational or revolutionary change is an impossibility. In this sense, any serious
examination of politics requires engaging with, incorporating or contrasting epistemological or
methodological conceptions of change. The transnationalisation of global structures of
accumulation; the appearance of transcendental social forces outside or in conjunction with
archaic and native class circuits; the emergence of new global state apparatuses; the rise of
new forms of inequality; and the fermentation of resistance and agency outside and across
traditional boundaries and borders, all necessitate acknowledging the presence and
commensurability of change.8 Robinson presses the significance of this point further:

A critical focus of [politics] should be exploration into the

dynamic of change at the local, national, and regional levels
in tandem with movement at the level of the global whole.
The concern should be about how movement and change in
the global whole are manifest in particular countries or
regions, but with the focus on the dialectical reciprocity
between the two levels….9

Change is accounted apropos the three fundamental laws of Hegelo-Marxian dialectics. The
first law registers how all elemental parts, phases or moments are inherently relational. Their
interaction, opposition and/or synthesis quantitatively leads to their qualitative
reconfiguration. As such, each part limits, influences, and constitutes other parts. In this sense,
the first law theorises change as the aggregation or disaggregation (relationality) of these
quantitative and qualitative moments.10 Stemming from this relationality, the second law
situates differences, antagonisms, and contradictions in a context of unified-disharmony—
hence Lenin’s reference to the dialectics as the ‘doctrine of unity of opposites.’ Although
political change is contextual and relative in the capitalist-statist world, there exist open-
ended, incongruous yet directed subjectivities that process micro and macro transitions in a
determined contradictory manner—Sartre called it not ‘pre-determined’ yet guided and
patterned nature of a cyclical-like action. In the capitalist system, praxis in openness, in a
totality-driven determinacy ensures that political acts and change are always formed along a
topological and topographical sphere.11 That is, spheres made roughly of three dynamic yet

8 William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York Cambridge University Press 2014).
9 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 9.
10 Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Books, 2012).
11 Engels, Dialectics of Nature.

4
substantially congealed or determined contradictory and conflictual vantage points 1)
ubiquitous change; 2) significant change; 3) transformational change.

Empirically, ubiquitous change constitutes micro-transitions on everyday life and the basic
variations in ‘commonplace conditions’ i.e., change of season, a local demonstration or a strike,
hiring a union member or a communist, writing a post against some grand power, workers
ousting a boss in a local plantation, whistle-blower programmer exposes algorithmic dangers,
etc. In contrast, significant change encapsulates circumstances, situations or events that shift,
redirect or halt systems and mass number of participants. Examples include prolonged nation-
wide protests and strikes, indigenous ousting of the state and take over territories,
nationalisation of multiple industries by the government, transnational treaties signed,
recession, war, collapse of a state, the fleeing of a president, etc. For its part, transformational
change12—what Polyani terms ‘Great Transformations’ or Kuhn ‘paradigm shift’—refers to
grand structural and systemic shifts and developments that span a longer timeframe. That is,
entire epochs, organisational frameworks or social formations can change in totality i.e.,
change from capitalist state to a worker state (Bolshevik Revolution), change from feudalism
to capitalism, or from Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the bourgeois revolutions, the
emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, etc. These three open and fluid moments of
the dialectic are in a perpetual and often bidirectional tense relationship, like the unity of the
commodity via the dual aspect of exchange and use-value, or value via concrete (actual) and
abstract (socially necessary) labor, or the triadic relationship between commodity, value and
labor. It is not the concept or moment in isolation but their unfolding relation and perpetual
synthesis-less transformations that matters. This transformation moves the dialectical nodes
and real concrete processes from moments of ‘simplicity to greater complexity’, at the last
instance: a decentred porous totality of some kind.

For its part, the third law ensures the erasure of rigidity, eschatology, teleology and mechanical
linear change. Here, the internal (primary) or underlying contradictions lead to new ruptures.13
This ‘negation of negation’. This way we can conceive of change as a way of losing innocence
of Origins or the loss of substantial beginnings. The change of Change is constant because
things are pregnant with internal and external contradictions, antagonisms, dissonances, and
differences.

Capitalist System and the Macrosociology of an Order

In Volume I of Capital, Marx demonstrates that the kernel of the capitalist mode of production
is constituted of productive forces (instruments of labor, communication and transports,
buildings and storage sites for objects of labor) and certain relations which are stratified
apropos modes of ownership and different forms of labor (intellectual versus physical, skilled

12 Jones, "Globalization and Change in the International Political Economy," 357.

13 Engels, Dialectics of Nature.

5
versus unskilled, abstract versus concrete, etc.). Capitalist production is a collection of
heterogenous forms, types of laborers, machinery, land, raw materials, etc. that ensures the
exploitation of labor and extraction of surplus value.14 Yet, due to the necessity and
contradictions of the process, Marx unravels in Volume II, that capitalism must be an expansive
and widening ‘process of circulation’. One that must go beyond immediate production of
commodities and the motion of exchange-value. In this process, production is the integral
moment since it allows for self-renewal of capital. Capital in circulation, which includes political
forms of expropriation, is a corollary effect (secondary). It sits in conjunction and opposition to
production. Yet, it fulfils production. This dualism, of tension and aggregation, paves the way
towards a different moment. Circulation is transition, transcendence and incorporation of
other spaces and industries, commodities, finance and capital, production and reproduction,
social and natural. Circulation as in and through different supply, production, and consumption
chains; exploitation of national and global labour (waged and unwaged), money and finances;
transformation of money into capital and capital back into money (M') of altered value;
reproduction of production; etc., allows for the expansion of production and circuits of value
chains. It is only through the realisation of value via a cycle of expansion of production and
circulation that we get the emergence of the capitalist whole.15 This way, Marx demonstrates,
in Volume III, that the ‘capitalist production process, taken as a whole’, is a unity of the
production and circulation processes .16 Concrete totality then expresses the postulation that
capitalism is the largest of constructed structures that ‘integrates into itself the irreducible
other determinations.’ This way, capitalism becomes a ‘single, articulated social totality’17
which is formed by heterogenous distinctive determinations and historical conjunctures.

As such, the genesis and unfolding of this totality along with its constituent parts are the very
competent of its determinations. Capitalist totality, ‘concretises itself in the process of forming
its whole as well as its content’.18 We have the appearance of a harmonious oneness and
reconciliation covering multitude of different forms of fragmentations, antagonisms and
contradictions. Each moment or process of this totality has its own historical formation and
trajectory and underlying social characteristics, practical life, identities and ideologies. Unlike
the totality of the system, the circuits can shift by contingent conjunctural processes and
arbitrary subjective impositions. As Harvey, Christopher J. Arther and Geert Reuten
demonstrate that the capitalist socio-economic and environmental system subjected to value
production and profit motif can only operate via multiple determinations and relations
(dependencies) with other circuits and spaces.19

14 Karl Marx, Capital Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, (London Wordsworth Editions, 2013).
15 Marx, Capital
16 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1992).
17 Marx, Capital: Volume III.
18 Xinruo Zhang and Xiaohan Huang, "The Ontological Dialectic and the Critique of Modernity: Based on the Interpretation

of Kosik’s Concrete Totality," in Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Jan Mervart Ivan Landa, Joseph Grim
Feinberg (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2021), 169.
19 Christopher J. Arthur and Geert Reuten, The Circulation of Capital (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1998); David Harvey,

"Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination," Annals of the Association of American Geographers
80, no. 3 (1990); David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

6
The two laws of Uneven-Combined theory demonstrate the dialectical-material expansion of
the different cycles, patterns, and processes into the whole of global capitalist system. The
laws unravel the nature of the materiality of the interconnection of different circuits of
production and circulation. The first decrees that socio-economic systems develop unevenly
and that the most ‘general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly
in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity of their
backward culture is compelled to make leaps’.20 There is unevenness and there is a direction
and inertia in the changes. The second, the law of combined development’ posits that ‘multiple
societies do not simply exist hermetically side by side, but interactively coexist, which by
necessity (to varying degrees) determines their collective social and geopolitical development
and reproduction’. The uneven and combined state relations, developed structure of
production and circulation, constituting of multiple sub-systems, becomes an intersocietal
plane that reaches its highest form via finance capital. ‘The archaic and modern, the settled
and disruptive, overlap, fuse, and merge in all aspects of the social formations concerned in an
entirely new and unstable way’.21

In other words, the global capitalist system is a hollow or decentred concrete totality consisting
of conjectures made of ‘infinite variety of mixture’, sitting, and mixing with tectonic structural
processes .22 Hence, capitalism is a developing social formation that is constantly in motion. It
reproduces and expands according to how the system digests or incorporates internal
dependent conflicts and political, economic, and social conditions. This totality is neither
‘determined nor teleological in its movement, but, rather overdetermined’.
Overdetermination does not imply a one-directional overwhelming simple plurality of causes.’
But as Alex Callinicos posits, the ‘necessary, internally related plurality of “causes/effects”
needed to affect the reproduction of capital as a necessarily totalizing (contradictorily
differentiating, dialectically moving) culture’ and system .23

In this manner, the global owners of production and private property and the monopolist of
brute political, cultural, and military power integrate and control all social relations and
processes directly or indirectly. This totality, this transnational circuits of production,
marketing, and finances liberated from yet leeching on state power, national territories,
identities and local structures of accumulation is materially directed and steered. The circuits
of capital accumulation, the national production, and state legal and political apparatuses all
function in unison for the benefit of the local ruling class and what Robinson, Harris or Leslie

20 Robert Jackson Alexander, International Trotskyism: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991), 7.
21 Alex Anievas and Kreem Nisanioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto

Press, 2015), 48,49.

22 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 12.
23 Alex Callinicos, "What is living and what is dead in Althusser’s Marxism?," in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E.A. Kaplan and

M. Sprinkler (London: Verso, 1993).

7
Sklair call, the ‘Transnational Capitalist Class’ (TCC). The TCC is a ‘class group that has drawn in
contingents from countries around the world, north and south, and has attempted to position
itself as a global ruling class’. Robinson sees the TCC as the ‘hegemonic fraction’ of the national
and international bourgeoisie. This includes the owners of a few thousand multinational and
financial companies, the investors, the CEOs of transnational corporations and financial
institutions . 24 The TCC also dictates the system in a way that all is organised, structured and
counted for its own objectives. The centralization and concentration of ‘capital is understood
as the amassing of many capitals into fewer capitals and as ever-greater control by fewer
capitals’.25 Robinson makes this point by giving the example of a 2011 report on the share
ownership of 43,000 transnational corporations. Three system theorists at the Swiss Federal
Institute found that approximately 1318 TNCs are owned by 147 entities. This small group of
elites, that is 1% of the total companies, control most of the total wealth of our planet. The
first fifty in that list belong to major financial institutions like Godman Sachs Group, JP Morgan
Chase and Barclays Bank .26 From 2020 onwards, this monopoly and inequality has further
heightened. Oxfam reported that for every dollar earned by those in the poorest 90 per cent
of humanity, the billionaire class earned 1.7 million. That 63 per cent of new wealth generated
in 2020-2021 ended up in the hands of the 1 per cent and that 860 million people live in
poverty, ‘a figure that increased for the first time in the past 25 years’.27

For both Robinson and Sklair (2010), the TCC is increasingly a class-in-itself and for-itself. So
much so that the advocators of capital decree that there are and ought to be no changes. If
there is, then it is the TCC that must be a ‘manifest agent of change’. The monopoly over levers
of global policy making, the weakness of the state, and control of structures of accumulation
ensures that the concrete totality of the capitalist system—though ‘decentred’—is becoming
increasingly structured and absolutist. It is ‘clear that that such an extraordinary concentration
of economic power in pursuit of common global corporate interests exerts an enormous
structural power over states and political processes. To maintain and intensify the conditions
of global capital accumulation, the TCC has begun running the system apropos two different
methods: on the one hand there is extractivism and financialization; on the other, the
emergence of a ‘global police state’28 which functions alongside and for imperial states’
repressive apparatuses (RSAs). It is through militarization, imperial interventions, and
repression that this global RSA oversees accumulation. Consent and coercion, digital
algorithms, and accelerated technological advancements (information-tech, robotics, AI,
bioengineering, etc.) are central for both processes.

24 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 23.

25 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 12.
26 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 12.
27 Oxfam International, "Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two

years," news release, 2023, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly-twice-much-wealth-rest-world-

put-together-over-past-two-
years#:~:text=A%20billionaire%20gained%20roughly%20%241.7,over%20the%20last%20ten%20years.
28 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 12.

8
A note on consent and the global interpellation of humanity to the ruling class metaphysics is
central if we were to have a concrete map of what change looks like today. The ‘omnipresent
systems of mass social control, repression and warfare promoted’ by TCC via its global police
state and Transnational State Apparatuses (TNS-a loose network of trans and supra-national
organisations) can only function via a certain metaphysics. A metaphysics whose primary
objective is to stop or obscure the possibility of change. For Badiou, this TCC metaphysics can
be called the ‘democratic materialism’. Its axiom decrees that:

There are bodies and languages .29

It is this global ideational narrative that negates all forms of radical change. Firstly, by reducing
life into the crass ‘existence of bodies’ in the local and global circuits of capital. Here, humanity
becomes an augmented version of animality, whereby ‘human rights’, progress and
development and law require a regime of subjection to the raw power of RSAs. But, as Badiou
contends, this subjection of humanity into animality requires the counting of the diversity of
its sub-species and the ascription of democratic rights to these diverse groups. ‘Communities
and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and clerics, producers and customs, disparate
sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate’: Everything and everybody must
be counted, recognised, taxonomized, and subjected by the laws and power of the TCC and
TNS. We have a totality that is materially and ideologically locked, it has a counter, a
‘transcendental regime’ that first envelopes, intercalates and then indexes (surveils and
controls) all objects, bodies, communities, ideas, social processes, relations, and interactions.
30

But as Badiou decrees, the global capitalist statist system does have a ‘global halting point for
its multiform tolerance’. There are forces, peoples’ movements and groups that do not
recognise the ‘universal juridical and normative equality of languages’, the liberal capitalist
statist logic of the TCC and the metaphysics of stasis. The system names these forces
‘dictatorial and totalitarian’, regressive, radicals, and or forces of dead ideals. They are at best
ignored, at worst they are subjected to the wrath and intolerance of the system. Legal
punishments, cultural demonisation, economic sanctions and, if need be, military intervention
is justified under the hegemonic democratic materialist ideals. ‘Bodies will have to pay for their
excesses of language’, or their demand for change or truth. 31 But as Badiou illuminates, that
dialectical materialism is the law that ‘understands that the essence of all difference is the third
term that marks the gap between the two’. If democratic materialism of the global capitalist
system decrees there is stasis and order, state and market, subjection and recognition, body
and languages, and not more. Then ‘materialist dialectic’ decrees that the ‘three supplements
the reality of the Two’:

29 Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 1.

30 Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 100-25.
31 Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 3.

9
 There are bodies and languages, except that there are truths. 32

These truth reveals the absolute contradiction of the system. They are the subjective and
symbolic representation (names) of real material forces and relations. These forces and their
truth announce both the arbitrary nature of the count of the material and ideal index of this
capitalist totality and the limitation of its political and metaphysical order. It negates the
proposition that the political is dead and innovation (change) is invalid or impossible.

ARAB SPRING AND THE DIALECTICS OF CHANGE

Now that an ontology of change and a macrosociology of the order has been presented, the
task is to empirically unravel how change, as a sociological and anthropological phenomenon,
and as a product of praxis of social labor stemming from the composition of ensemble of
relations, haunts this global structure. Let us travel to a December day, on the Seventeenth,
and in the year of 2010. The time is roughly 10.00 am. In the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid,
about 150 kilometres from south of the capital Tunis an event triggers a cycle of micro-
transitions that led to significant shifts in the region. A ubiquitous change in the quotidian
everyday life in Sidi Bouzid, with a certain social metamorphosis intensified into something
grand and nearly-transformational. The ensued conflict snowballed into a revolt spreading
from Tunis to Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Bahrain.

On that day, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi was harassed, assaulted
and spat on by a forty-five-year-old municipal inspector, Faida Hamdi. The inspector proceeds
to confiscate Bouazizi’s goods and fines him for not possessing a permit to work in the square.33
Fifty witnesses saw Bouazizi weep and cry out in the market, ‘why are you doing this to me?
I’m a simple person, and I just want to work’.34 In this scene, we have the horrifying act of a
battering, a victim ‘slapped’35 and his goods and means of labor stripped of him. At surface
level, we see a local micro-antagonism between a ‘simple’ atomised street vendor and a low
ranked municipal inspector with little power. However, a deeper analysis demonstrates the
scene is determined and organised by the fundamental contradictions of the system.

The infrastructural component of the moment immediately hints at the positionality of

Bouazizi as a street vendor within the ensemble of relations. It points at the form of
competition or the lack of, the historically developed social division of labour, extraction of the
labour-power of the masses, and finally, at the status of highly privatised and accumulated
means of production and private property. All these factors are locally and internationally

32 Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 4.

33 Kristina Graaff and Noa Ha, Street Vending in the Neoliberal City (New York City: Berghahn Books, 2015), 1.
34 Marc Fisher, "In Tunisia, act of one fruit vendor sparks wave of revolution through Arab world," The Washington Post

(Washington), March 26, 2011 2011.

35 Karim Fahim, "Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia," The New York Times (New York), Jan, 21, 2011 2011.

10
determined. It is also a sign that the supposed neoliberal ‘free market’ may heavily be
regulated by the state apparatuses for private interests. The form and content of labor
(physical, intensity, duration, location, etc.), the type of trade and exchange (agricultural as
opposed to technical goods), the ownership of commodities and tools of labor is overseen by
the repressive elements of the state. This unassuming market transaction, the selling of apples
and pears by a street vendor, is directed by the iron will of a class, capital and the state, at the
last instance, global capitalism and TCC.

Bouazizi was operating within the informal economy. In the Middle East, like in other parts of
Global South, street vendors are a group of workers who tend to be pushed into this informal
sphere due to their low levels of skills and education; making it easier for the masses to take
this position within the market than find formal jobs. The jobs pay little or very low income;
and these workers are mostly immigrants or outcasts from the formal economy and
mainstream society .36 Tracking the incident, Hamid Alizadeh points at how the division of
labour allocates life chances within a confined matrix of capitalist relations of production and
consumption. He writes that Bouazizi was ‘the sole provider of his family of 9 since the age of
16’. Having had all his ‘job applications rejected,…he even tried to enlist in the army, but to no
avail’ (2011).37 Analysing the shrinking and casualisation of the formal economy in the context
of the ‘Arab Spring’, Alizadeh states:

More than 60 per cent of the 350 million Arabs in the world
are under 30. A great majority of these have slim prospects of
finding jobs or building a prosperous future. Youth
unemployment is about 40% and in some regions it reaches
80%. … in 2005, there were 700,000 new graduates in Egypt,
but only about 200,000 jobs for them to fill . 38

According to a UN survey of Economic and Social Development and ILO estimates, Arab
countries had ‘the highest unemployment in the world…40% of the people here live for less
than $2 a day’ (UN report in Alizadeh). Twelve years after, in 2022, this ailment remains, as
unemployment reached 12 percent, with less ‘than 20 percent of women participating in the
labor force’.39

The informal economy is in the ‘outlier’ of the division of labor yet central for not only
production/exploitation but reproduction of production, expropriation and social relations. In

36 Keith Hart, "Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana," The Journal of Modern African Studies 11,
no. 1 (1973).
37 "One Year Since Bouazizi’s Death — One Year of Arab Revolution," InDefence of Marxism 2011, accessed Auguts 31,2023,

2023.
38 Alizadeh, "One Year Since Bouazizi’s Death — One Year of Arab Revolution."
39 WorldBank Group, The Private Sector amid Conflict, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Washington,

2020), 45.

11
his seminal text, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis demonstrates that whether in Mumbai, Mexico
City or Lagos, the street vendors are refugees, internally displaced migrants, former nomads,
forcedly urbanised peasants or small farmers, laborers who escape violence and crimes in their
native regions, unemployable university graduates, or simply, lumpen proletariat seeking to
survive the day to day .40 They are an excess and a ‘supernumerary population’ which live in
overcrowded, substandard and illegal shacks with little or no access to education, healthcare,
government services, clean water and sanitation. As the likes of Bhowmik, Saha, Garcia and
Graaff and Ha demonstrate, the street vendors tend to sit outside of state and market
representations yet often battle for the presence of their labor and life in the public spaces.41
This battle to be incorporated into the system and space is occurring within the context of
systematic privatisation of urban areas that directs expropriation and exploitation of the
masses. Neoliberal capitalism is a structured hierarchical world indexed by capital, property
and social prestige. There are no locals, natives or community just alienated spaces and socially
dead but capital-friendly environments. To belong is to be either a capitalist entrepreneur, a
labourer that produces a certain grade and type of value or a consumer. The multitude
belonging to the informal economy are estranged and disconnected, their world in Harvey’s
words is ‘an individualistic society of transients’, and no more. It is a dystopian universe, and
the expansion of the slums and informal economy becomes the only ‘fully franchised solution
to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity’.42 This outside is
what Nancy Fraser calls ‘background conditions of possibility’of capitalist social production.
The wealth extraction and underpaid labor of the likes of Bouazizi not only stabilises the inner
mechanics of production and circulation but it is the engine that propels the whole of the
system forward.

Despite this contradiction, the Hobbesian state regulating the inner and outer boundaries of
the market is ever present. In the case of Bouazizi, it came with the confiscation of two crates
of pears ($15), a crate of bananas ($9), three crates of apples ($22) and an electronic weight
scale ($179, second hand)—the confiscated goods amounted to $225, including his working
tools. Division of labor is about the unequal distribution of income, distinction in labour
conditions and accessibility to instruments and raw materials of labor. To be in the informal
economy is to subject oneself to a condition of being at the bottom end of accessibility in this
nexus. A day after his death, media in the Arab world reported that all of his goods were bought
or accessed via credit. Bouazizi, like all street vendors, had no salary and was indebted to
moneylenders who often extract predatory interest rates. The loss of goods and inability to
pay back his debt meant that Bouazizi’s reputation as trustworthy administrator of goods is
vanquished. Economic and social capital evaporated in an instance. The loss of $225 equates

40 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).

41 Sharit Bhowmik, Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy (London: Routledge 2019); Graaff and Ha, Street Vending in
the Neoliberal City; Debdulal Saha, "Working Life of Street Vendors in Mumbai," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics 54,
2, no. 2 (2011); Debdulal Saha, Informal Markts, Livelihood and Politics: Street Vendors in Urban India (London: Routledge,
2016).
42 Davis, Planet of Slums, 201.

12
to loss of labor and life. It indicates the ‘accumulation by dispossession’, neoliberal capitalist’s
tool to deal with late-capitalist crisis of accumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to
fall (TRPF). For Harvey, this instrument of usurpation of value and expropriation intensifies
traditional means of extraction (i.e., primitive accumulation, etc). That is the traditional looting,
destruction, pillage, and privatisation pushed by neo-colonial and imperial means is
supplemented with these forms of wealth extraction.43

This process is the historical outcome of the restoration of the class monopoly of power and
wealth in the Middle East. 1980s brought about the destruction of labour laws, the
reformulation of labour-relations, the selling of state assets, the encroaching of capital into
new spaces, and the total redistribution of wealth in favour of the capitalist ruling classes. The
outcome being that the majority in the Middle East, like Bouazizi, were denied the right to
work—or the opportunity to be a ‘budding entrepreneur.’ Thereby, ‘archipelagos of wealth in
oceans of poverty’ abounded in the region. The surplus humanity forced into a privatised and
militarised ‘public space’ and into the chaotic unstable informal economy at the edge of
collapsing non-productive urban markets with ever decreasing demand for labour-power.

Let us now direct attention to the political element of the moment—the ‘slap’, the spitting by
the police officer and the ‘begging’ by Bouazizi.44 Many years ago, when I worked as a refugee
street vendor in a small city in North of Iran, an elderly poet told me that ‘if one gets slapped
in this square, in small town like ours, or any like it in the Middle East, then it has something to
do with some power from Paris, Berlin or Washington.’ The point the old poet was making
stands true today. The slap is a conditioned, determined and a structured act. The ‘slap’,
whether in the Kurdish city of Oshnaveya or Sidi Bouzid or in San Cristobal or Temuco, is a
ubiquitous violent act, one that crystalises and clarifies history and reality, it stems from and
aggregates numerous currents of interrelated objective conjunctural violent processes. An
organic outcome of the RSA, the slap is a mechanism of this authoritarian capitalist structure,
of imperialism. The other is the humiliation Bouazizi faced upon showing up at the local police
station, to collect his cart and goods. He was turned away twice, one by the police and one by
the local governor.45 The slap and the consequent police and political impositions indicates
strict physical ostracization, disciplining and control of bodies and actions in the market. Every
moment of this process clearly sits in opposition to democratic practices or the supposed
freedom of civil-society and market. Rather, the process requires direct violence and
mechanisms of exclusion by the police, military, judiciary, legal system, and the government .46

43 Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic reason.

44 Graaff and Ha, Street Vending in the Neoliberal City, 1.
45 Elizabeth Day, "The Slap that Sparked a Revolution," The Guardian (London) 2011.
46 Salwa Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2018); Ozlem Kaygusuz, "Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Regime Security in Turkey: Moving to an ‘Exceptional State’ under
AKP," South European Society and Politics 23, no. 2 (2018).

13
Now let us move beyond this vulgar abstraction and dialectically connect the two elements of
the moment, after all the infrastructure and superstructure are locked in dialectical tension to
reproduce the existing regime of production, property, and power. The Fanonian
lumpenproletariat and the street vendor, like the precariat, under-employed, even the ‘formal-
worker’, often make a living via being in friction or even at war with the impositions and strict
regimented organisation of the formal market, the norms of bourgeois civil society, and state
laws and its security apparatuses. As such, the very placement of Bouazizi in that geographical
site, in that node of the division of labor, in that unequal power-saturated interaction with the
RSA speaks of how the neoliberal historical conjuncture has created social categories,
processes and agencies that determines his presence. A presence in a public space that is
historically determined even necessary yet proclaimed ‘un-natural’ and ‘unwanted’ even
illegal. The interaction of Bouazizi and the police officer is a relation that is formed by two
opposing social forces that together unite to make one organic interaction in the system. Or
simply, the slap, spitting and stopping of the labour of the street vendor guarantees the daily
paycheck of the officer who was ‘only doing [her] job’ .47

The above deep historical socio-economic contradictions are organically located in and linked
to the global crises of the neoliberal moment. But to be properly dialectical here is to ascertain
that the neoliberal conjuncture, like all previous capitalist synchronic phases, is built on
multiplicity and mixture of structural/diachronic contradictions and antagonisms. In this
instance, the simple social conflict, stemming from boom-bust cycles, core-periphery
polarisation, global and local division of labour, labour-capital contradiction, production-
reproduction, exploitation-expropriation, the state-market, entrepreneurial exhibitionism
versus local collectivist traditions, runs to its extreme end. The intensity of the antagonism
changes over from quantitative differences (a street vendor vs. an officer) into a qualitative
clash (the working people vs. the regime). What is the proof of this substantialisation? Bouazizi
comes back to the market at about 1.00 pm and burns himself to death. The act is not an
individual one, it is instantly presented as behalf of the people and against the regime. For
dialectically Bouazizi’s condition of alienation, repression and exploitation is universal, or class-
wide in the region. There are Bouazizis and Faida Hamdis from Tunis to Iraq, Iran, and Bahrain,
even beyond. And we can confirm the universality of this case because the friendliest of
sources to the global capitalist market, an outlet like the Financial Times reported immediately
after the incident that ‘50 per cent of all working Arabs [were] on the margin of law’48
occupying this aspect of the informal economy.

We can understand the historical intensification of the crisis when we place the above in the
historical shifts in relations of production and re-distribution of capital upwards. The street
vendors and their kins are part of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of former peasants in

47Day, "The Slap that Sparked a Revolution."

48 "The free market secret of the Arab revolutions," 2011, accessed 2nd of April 2023,
https://www.ft.com/content/653fab0e-0a00-11e1-85ca-00144feabdc0.

14
the region. Their soaring population earlier had to deal with colonial powers’ brute
appropriation of fertile lands (especially in Tunis, Algeria and Palestine), the destruction of the
indigenous peasant agricultural crops for monochromatic commercial agriculture, large
estates devouring small farms, and colonial governors siphoning of labour to other non-
agricultural areas (imperial wars, counter-revolution, policing, colonial-state infrastructure
building), the destruction of conditions for animal herding, new urbanisation and forced
sedentarization projects, to name a few .49 The aim of the post-colonial state was to counter
the colonially imposed measures using tariffs, land reforms and industrial policies to build an
autonomous national economy. But as the likes of Mahfoud Bennoune and Saïd Amir Arjomand
demonstrate, in post-independence, planned industrialisation and further centralisation of the
population in the urban cities led to further unequal land distribution which produced more
urbanized wretched populations. In Egypt alone, the construction of urban areas consumed
nearly 640, 000 feddans of highly fertile, advantageously situated and intensively cropped land
between 1955 and 1977, and 250, 000 feddans between 1978 and 1990’ Field studies in Egypt,
Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Syria also demonstrate that government officials turned ‘a blind
eye to violation of existing laws and regulations by influential larger landholders’50 who had
previously worked in tandem with the colonial powers.

In early 1990s, the local class circuit and subsequent governments under the behest of the
neoliberal structural adjustment impositions submitted agricultural development models that
were more and more market-friendly, industrialized, technological, ‘science-based’,
technocratic and professionalised with ‘good governance’ rhetoric .51 Agro-neoliberalism,
despite ‘free market discourse’, was supported by the states in the region that were hijacked
by global capital. This hijacking occurred either through coups and other imperialist
intervention by US and European powers, or via neoliberal policies imposed on them by IMF
and WB. The aim and outcome were the maximization of surplus by large local and global
private TNCs. These forces mostly operated under and through the protection of TNS
organisations like WTO, Bretton Woods and regional treaties and institutions i.e., US-MEFTA
.52 In return, TNS had to prioritise ‘short-term capital accumulation strategies and the
globalisation of agri-food markets’ 53, at the expense of the local peasants and small farmers.
There was also further state centralisation and surveillance, military conscription, and
heightened taxation.54 Those tenant farmers, small landowners, peasants, and agricultural
workers who survived in the rural areas then had to also deal with heightening or rent, violent

49 Peter Beaumont, Gerald H. Blake, and J. Malcolm Wagstaff, The Middle East: A Geographical Study (London: John Wiley,
1976), 460-78, 513-27, 45.
50 M. Riad El-Ghonemy, Affluence and Poverty in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 1998), 71.
51 Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris, "Water Scarcity and the Exclusionary City," Water International 41, no. 1 (2016); Antonio

A R Ioris, "The politico-ecological economy of neoliberal agribusiness: displacement, financialisation and mystification," Royal
Geographical Society 48, no. 1 (2015).
52 John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, Alternatives to Economic Globalization:

A Better World is Possible (Berkeley: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002).

53 Ioris, "The politico-ecological economy of neoliberal agribusiness: displacement, financialisation and mystification," 85.
54 Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

15
crop failure, drought, heightened food prices and taxes, fluctuating international prices for
goods, machinery and food and the high level of food insecurity since the GFC.

A combination of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession. We have sheer

pillage, plunder and robbery in the underdeveloped, ill-equipped, badly organized highly-
stratified and zonified cities. The wretched condition of these underpaid and unpaid workers
synthesized with the urban reality of the neoliberal capitalist regime. The privatisation of entire
industries and assets, the abolishing and cutting of subsidies (bread, rice, oil, petrol), high
inflation and the stagnation of wages, the erosion of social infrastructure (services, education,
healthcare, welfare), characterised the dismantling of the developmental-state model.

Achar rightly name this historical socio-economic condition which transferred capital and
wealth to the ruling class and corporations and destroyed the working and farming population,
the ‘Bouazizi Syndrome’.55 This moment Chris Harman wrote, had emerged because of the
‘enormous pools of bitterness’ in the region (Harman, 10).56 And what sustained and deepened
this crisis was the militarisation and authoritarianism of the neoliberal moment directed. As
opposed to the western model of subjective-hyper-individual internalisation of the neoliberal
ideology, this governmental regime was defined ‘by the calamitous marriage between an
overly bureaucratic form of state-capitalism and a dogmatic adherence to neoliberal economic
policy’.57 Two forms of violence feeding one another into a violent crisis point.

We are back to where we began at the start of our logical exposition, the macro level. The
structural transformation and intensification of capitalist pathologies and class differences
were directly organised and determined by the global system. One of the outcomes of this was
the establishment of a coherent for-itself TCC faction amongst the ruling class in the region i.e.
take the relationship between the Barzani-Talabani mob in Iraqi Kurdistan with the Erdogan
regime and the Sheikhs in the Gulf, or the Saudi Wahabis and the state of Israel. A tautological
process began where in the one hand transnational organisation such as WB, IMF and OECD
began to disseminate and implement further austerity measure, deregulation, debt-
restructuring, corporatization, financialization, digitalisation, privatisation and ideological
reconfiguration of the social fabric and civil society. This in turn led to the establishment and
education of chic and suave western-educated market gurus, neoliberal evangelical pro-capital
globalizing Muslims and scholars, technocratic and political factions (let us call them the
‘Middle Eastern Chicago boys’ and more and more middle class ‘women’). The neoliberal
‘expertocracy’ and ruling class with their bourgeois idealist culturalist-traditionalist closet-
fascist intellectuals who defended the ‘nation’ or ‘ummah’, in turn acted as the local unit of
the TCC and its democratic materialist metaphysics. All of this ensured the production of a

55 Gilbert Achar, The people want : a radical exploration of the Arab uprising trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Berkeley: University of
Calinfornia Press, 2013), 22.
56 Chris Harman, "The Prophet and the Proletariat," International Socialism Journal 2, no. 64 (1994): 10.
57 Jethro Norman, "Neoliberal Globalisation and the “Arab Spring”; One Facet of a Global Movement?," (September 11, 2014

2014).

16
system that maintained archaic superstitions below, at civil society it was bounded to liberal
democracy whilst functioning definitively as a suction that removed capital, resources and
income. The outcome was the ongoing operation of global structures of accumulation that
increased appropriation and accumulation of wealth at one end and wretchedness,
redundancy, alienation and pathology on the other end.

The Bouazizi syndrome was a moment produced by a certain conjunctural rupture and the
structural capacities of a population caught up in it. It was an instance that fired up the
underworked/working classes that was ripe for resistance and revolutionary activity.
Structures are interconnection of personal matrixes, dispersion of material resources and
supra-individual entities functioning for the power and interests of a social force .58 Resistance
is the counter-pressure that aims to redirect that interest to a different social force. This
moment was ripe for it was haunted by the interests and wants of a mass whose existence
contradicted that of the neoliberal authoritarian capitalist social force and the local comprador
class. The contradictions were fuelling sentiments and emotional psycho-social energies that
soon led to the possibility of a collective mobilization that countered this hegemony. The
people demanded ‘bread, freedom, dignity’. That required breaking from local and global
exploitation and repression but firstly, it necessitated the overthrow of the TCC’s local agent,
the authoritarians state at home. Hence the slogans ‘Food, Freedom, and Human Dignity’ and
‘the people want to bring down the regime’. These ends required not ubiquitous, but
significant change. Hernando de Soto vividly captures this contagious counter-hegemonic
subjectivity:

One day after he [Bouazizi] set himself alight, thousands of

people in his town and neighbouring villages took to the
streets. Before a few weeks passed, many of the 180 million
Arabs who work in and around the informal markets in the
Middle East and north Africa were identifying with his
disempowerment and sending their shouts to heaven.59

Heaven? It was not the heavens they were sending their shouts to but the state and capital.
And their demands were one of change and upturning of the existing system.

New instruments of production, and cultural and information dissemination (mobiles,

computers, internet, blogs, emails, news outlets, social media platforms, etc.) had not only
been a tool of neoliberal digitalisation and financialization. From 2005 to 2011, the ‘number of
mobile subscriptions in the region had quadrupled’.60 Every moment of the uprising and

58 Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory, Historical Materialism, (Chicago:

Haymarket Books, 1979).

59 Soto, "The free market secret of the Arab revolutions."
60 Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren, The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New

Era (London: Yale University Press, 2012).

17
protests, beginning in Sidi Bouzid and onward, was captured by mobile phones, shared by
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. Millions of tweets containing the hashtags
#Sidibouzid, #ArabSprings, #Tunis or #Egypt, #Iraq, etc. broadcasted instantly each moment of
the uprising and struggle for the whole world to see .61

A set of imperial and state counter-revolutionary discursive mechanisms were in place to

ideologically mystify the uprising and ‘outsource the agency’ of the people of the region.
Immediately, the Western orientalist representations associated the uprising with the
information and digital tech revolution. Early in the uprisings when they were peaceful, the
discourse linked the mass rebellion to ‘a shy U.S. intellectual’. The narrative was that the
‘vanguard for democracy’, the middle classes had adopted technology and the works of Gene
Sharp for advancing the region towards liberal capitalist democracy. Elsewhere, the source of
the revolution was attributed to the new impact of Google Earth, the know-how of a Serbian
organisation, or the U.S government and the international civil society and NGOs had nurtured
revolutionaries and instigated the uprisings (Azeez).62 The revolution we were told was a Von
Clauswitzean pendulum that was suspended between the Western-liberal-influence and the
Islamic-racial-soul of the ‘Oriental’. Democracy or progressive politics deemed an impossible
outcome. Simply, the official idealist accounts of the revolution could simply not grasp the
materialist historicity of its cause.

In chapter 13 of Capital, Marx lays out the secrets to rebellion and mass uprising. For Marx,
the capitalist system’s productive power was in the private extraction of the value produced
when ‘large number of labourers’ cooperate. When ‘numerous labourers work together side
by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes’ then
the magic of ‘work in co-operation’ occurs. Capitalism apropos absorbing science
(thermodynamic, laws gravity, factory machinery) and labour had a ‘new power’. Its magical
productive power came ‘from the fusion of [these] many forces into one single force’.
Cooperation creates both commodity and unity in labour, life chances and alienation. But this
fusion and unity is transmittable even infectious. It spreads to social spheres outside of
production and circulation. Marx writes that there is ‘an emulation and a simulation of the
animal spirits that heightens the efficiency of each individual workman’. A dozen humans
working and doing the same thing do more than a dozen isolated humans. Collective labour,
allowing humans to ‘be occupied together at the time on the same, or the same kind of work,
yet labour of each as part of the collective’, and the ontological attribute that all humans are
both ‘political, at all events a social animal’ ensures sooner or later the private control of power
and property is threatened by this cooperation .63

61 Axel Burns, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess, "The Arab Spring and Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users

and Their Networks," American Behavioral Scientist, 57, no. 7 (2013).

62 Govand Khalid Azeez, "The Thingified Subject's Resistance in the Middle East," Middle East Critique 24, 2, no. 119-135
(2015).
63 Marx, Capital 226.

18
The ‘pent-up anger and frustration’ of thousands of Bouazizis led to a wave of protest engulfing
the entire country .64 Social production of cooperation, the harmonious amassing of labor-
power by the many and oriented towards rebellion led to nation-wide strikes, demonstrations
and marches. It was clear that the capitalist organisation of production without the concrete
labor of workers would collapse sooner or later. As the uprising spread, nurses, teachers, junior
doctors, civil employees, transport workers, fire fighters, drivers, gas and petroleum operators,
engineers of all sorts, textile and dock workers, security officers, gardeners, maids, janitors,
and finally soldiers left work. Across the region, traditional unions, who were out-dated
instruments of the postcolonial authoritarian regimes, had become neoliberal vessels .65 As
such, official unions like ETUF [Egyptian Trade Union Federation] in Egypt and others that were
associated with the state ordered their workers not to take part or face consequences. Yet
other unions like UGTT, the 100-union strong federation of union EFITUS in Egypt, Bahraini
Trade Union, ITF, etc. joined the mass street demonstrations. Tens of thousands of individual
workers who had joined the uprising already left the orthodox unions to create new heterodox
radical unions. As the number of cooperating workers increased so did the resistance.

The workers and unions shaped the form of the rebellion by giving it consistency, stability, and
fuel. The discipline of the workers balanced the often subjective, messy and affective
horizontal efforts of the youth and the rebellious crowd. Through rational praxis, the working
class had begun acting for-itself. The transcendence from ubiquitous to significant change
required the working peoples tapping into the ruptures and contradictions between the people
and the system. Reification, commodification, expropriation, and exploitation on the one hand.
On the other, praxis and the survivalist instinct by workers like Bouazizi to reduce discrepancy
between labor and production, starvation and decadence. And, in this instance, the rebellion
by workers saw the state apparatuses and capitalist production as the target of change. As one
Tunisian worker pointed out:

We are seeing every… [form of resistance] nowadays. Workers

who get rid of officials they don’t like, citizens who do not
recognise any authority in court decisions and even a
government which is not even capable of saying “no” to the
streets .66

In less than a few months the rebellion led to the ousting of first President Zine al-Abidine and
soon after Hosni Mubarak. This marked the qualitative emergence of a new possibility. The
questioning of relations of productions and overpowering of the ISAs and RSAs demonstrates
that, symbolically, this social force had in mind the possibility for significant change. Whether
it could materially organise itself and push back the material structures that is another

64 Khalid A. Al-Sayed, GCC and Arab Spring (Newport Beach: The Peninsula Publishing, 2013), 4.
65 Ian M. Hartshorn, "Labor’s Role in the Arab Uprisings and Beyond," Current History 115, 785 (2016): 349.
66 Sandra Bloodworth, "Marxism and the Arab Revolution " Marxist Left Review, no. 2 (2011).

19
question. Social forces in charge of the old regime were no longer in control of the body, minds,
wants and desires of the masses, in particular the workers, the youth, women, etc. With the
breakage and loosening of the old structural restrictions and forces, the rebellion spread across
the region, achieving a similar outcome: Ali Abdullah Saleh and Muammar Gaddafi had fallen.

A ubiquitous change led to a possible transformational change named, the ‘Arab Spring’. The
naming announces the congealing of ambiguous, messy, and contradictory material relations
and processes congruently operating to bring down the system. Consciously or unconsciously,
by design or accident, the fragmented subjectivity mobilised towards this new end. The site of
struggle and the energy of the counter-pressure had expanded to a level that began to shake
not only the material foundation of the state but the legitimacy and ideological index of the
ruling class. The parallels are great when it comes to 1848 European revolutions. Just like
Europe, across the Middle East, the cries echoed in capitals from Cairo to Baghdad. As though
replicating the European revolutions, ‘one by one, leaders who once seemed invincible fell like
flicked dominoes. More remarkable still, they did not fall before armies; they fell before
common men whose only real weapon was their plentiful number’.67 Dictators had fallen,
armies defanged, security forces were tamed, statues upturned, institutions delegitimized. A
significant change was objectively in the making.

In hindsight, as Gilbert Achar points out, we now know that the material and ideational
contradictions and forces did not sufficiently aggregate to complete the substantialisation of
this significant change, let alone a transformational one. The fall of Arab Spring came soon
after its rise. Foreign and imperial intervention; large capital’s manipulation of the political
process; geopolitical resistance from ‘forces of regression’ that included states (Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, GCC, etc.) and non-state actors, incorporation of former elites and social forces
into the mix (i.e. in Tunisia); the ill-organised youth, lack of powerful socialist and communist
political parties and proletariat vanguards; confusion and contradictions in ideology and
philosophy, archaic discourses (tribal beliefs, regionalism, provincialism, sexism, racism, etc.);
failed attempts in presenting a proper democratized and inclusive participatory constitution;
not detaching the political from the religious, etc. Then there was the obvious case of Islamic
reactionary forces from Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda and ISIS hijacking the revolutionary
impetus. The ‘Arab Spring’ was seen to have failed nearly everywhere, warranting its re-naming
as the Arab Winter’ .68 And the uprising left ‘death, destruction, and capsized rickety boats that
carried now-drowned refugee children’.

The suffering, humiliation, sorrow and deaths linked to this event may no longer be subject of
media’s attention or be at the forefront of public imagination, but it has been entrenched in
the social relations and collective consciousness of the future political subjects. To put it in the
words of historian A. N. Wilson regarding the 1848 European Revolutions, ‘history does not

67 Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), 121.
68 Gilbert Achar, "The seasons after the Arab Spring," Le Monde diplomatique 2019.

20
eliminate grievance; it lays them down like land mines.’ No transformational change. We are
back to the ebb and flows of historical contradictions. But we ought to remember history
moves forward even when it is seemingly stagnant or regressing. At the tectonic pillars of the
social formation the contradictions and antagonisms had increased immensely after the failed
uprising. And two signs demonstrated the re-emergence of the continuum of change in the
region: The People’s Defense Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) establishing the
Rojava self-governing cantons, and the rise of tens of new unions with tens of thousands of
Arab and Middle Eastern workers who in Amr Adly’s words were driven by their memory of the
events and ‘gained significant amount of experience’ during the revolution.

CONCLUSION

Today, it is an epoch of reaction, of stasis and conservatism. We are told that our time is a
moment where history has ceased and subjectivity radically negated or extinct. In the words
of Peter Hallward, ‘ours is a moment in which inventive politics has been replaced with
economic management, in which the global market has emerged as the exclusive mechanism
of social coordination. Ours is a moment in which effective alternatives to this mechanism find
expression in the bigotries of culturally specified groups or identities, from ultranationalism to
competing fundamentalism’.69 As a consequence, we are led logically to Herbert G Reid calls,
the 'ontological issue’ of change or what Robinson calls ‘exploration of the dynamic of
change’70 , namely, what type, taxonomy, or size or character constitutes the phenomenon?

Having mapped out an ontology of change and its dialectical interconnection with the totality
of the global capitalist system, it is clear there are foundational and relative contradictions that
haunt these processes. In fact, this ontology of change in the Arab Spring demonstrates that
the topological interaction between deep-structural determinations and conjunctural shifts
and subjective contingencies are not as deterministic or uni-directional as the system would
have us believe. Dialectical change apropos its triadic fluid topology ensures a form of subject-
conjuncture-structure relations that is dialectically bi-directional and anthropologically praxis
sensitive. In fact, the empirical analysis of the ‘Bouzizi moment’ demonstrated that concrete
revolutionary praxis is where the structure-conjunctural contradictions and agential interests
congeal into a collective subjectivity that confronts the objective world. This then leads us to a
concrete definition of change: that there is an ontology of change that qualitatively appears
and substantialises once the subjective aggregated social forces mobilise and impose
themselves materially, practically point by point on the status-quo institutions and structures,
that depending on aggregation and dispersion of social energy these movements impose
counter-pressure, hence change or fail. This allows for a structuralist, materialist and a
dialectical depiction of change as a part of a network of contingent social relations, praxis and

69
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A subject to Truth (London: University Minnesota Press, 2003), xxxvi.
70 Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity.

21
larger sedimented historical processes which are always impeded by the system. Anything
other than this then is only an idealist speculation, it is to see the ‘froth on the surface of the
historical torrent’ and nothing more.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my colleagues and friends who have generously taken the time to read,
examine, and comment on this paper or the ideas reflected in it. In no particular order: Dr.
Alejandra Gaitan-Barrera, Jose Francisco Gaitan Neme, Dr. Jonathan Symons, Dr. Noah Bassil,
Ihab Shalbak, Karim Pourhamzavi, Ziryan Aziz, and Dr. Lloyd Cox. I would also like to thank all
the students and members of the Marxist Praxis Group whose commitment, passion and
labour for radical change and transformation is a key source of hope and drive for me.

22