Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda.  Tahrir Square has been retaken.  This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday.  Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight.  They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square.  The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square.  Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military.  Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places.  The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime.  There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas.  The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in.  The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events.  Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate.  The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity.  The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order.  Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated.  Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF.  The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small.  Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end.  Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979.  Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one.  Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal.  They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants.  Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded.  Abstraction governed their responses.  Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence. 

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers.  We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play.  They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation.  But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations.  The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation.  In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists.  The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday.  The level of brutality is shocking.  I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry.  Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return.  Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative.  As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

Tunisia's armed forces are fighting street battles with armed members of Ben Ali's sinister 'internal security' apparatus. Their decision to turn against the dictator was a decisive final blow forcing his resignation. Hamma Hammami, the recently freed leader of the Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (POCT) acknowledges the centrality of the army and calls on them to guarantee the safety of the people. It's not unprecedented for the armed forces in non-imperialist countries to play a progressive role - the Free Officers led the overthrow of British client monarchies Iraq and Egypt, for example. But this has tended to be in the absence of a developed bourgeoisie or working class, which situation gives them a unique degree of autonomy. In the Bourguibist regime, and afterward, it can hardly be said that the army has played a consistently progressive role. It's therefore vital to understand the real social role of the military in Tunisia and its relationship to the contending classes.

First of all, as mentioned yesterday, Bourguiba self-consciously eschewed militarism as a realistic option for Tunisia. This is true of all Maghreb states, in fact. Tunisia spends 1.4% of its GDP on the military, which is lower than Morrocco (3.4%), and Algeria (3.9%), but slightly higher than Libya (1.2%). Compare to Israel (7%) or Saudi Arabia (11%), and you see how minute this is. Such spending has fluctuated depending on the perceived security situation - rising after the Yom Kippur war, falling after the end of the Cold War - but such fluctuations are Lilliputian. In absolute terms, Tunisia spends the least amount of dollars on its military than any other North African state. Military projection is just not a realistic goal of any of North Africa's Arab states. The main role of the military in these states is the long-term security of the regime in power, and thus the maintenance of the class relations that the regime embodies, and which sustain its long-term development agenda.

Tunisia's military has its origins in the French colonial army, in which Tunisian troops fought both in colonial wars in Indo-china and in WWII. In addition, the Beylical guard, which protected the monarchy until its dissolation, was integrated into the national army that was established with independence in 1956. The army's foreign ventures have been limited to UN operations, such as in the Congo, Cambodia and Rwanda. These services to imperialism are slight, but have been highly regarded by those involved. The military under Bourguiba was carefully integrated into his distinctive state-building project, more so than the working class whose left-wing led the rebellions in 1978 and 1984, and more so again than the rural poor and the petite bourgoisie whe rallied behind the Islamists when the Bourguibist state proved incapable of advancing their promised social and economic advancement.

Bourguiba conscientiously set about creating a military establishment supportive of his secular, republican nationalist ideals. The army officers were disenfranchised, enjoyed no freedom of association and played no direct role in decision-making. Their armaments were limited to prevent independent political interventions. And they were not permitted to directly intervene in public conflicts. A separate set of paramilitary organisations was created within the military, and charged with the direct maintenance of public order. Thus, Bourguiba built a gendarme, a Public Order brigade, and a national guard, which today has some 12,000 troops. It is members of the national guard who have been deployed in the streets and killed protesters. The officer corps was thus chiefly a civic institution, a guarantor of Tunisian nationalism, there to act only against direct threats to the Bourguibist state, as such. Its unique social position insulated to some degree from the polarization that resulted from the crisis of the state in the Seventies and Eighties, while its elite pedigree (in terms of social background, the officers tended to come from the same wealthy suburbs in coastal Sahel and Tunis as the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie) ensured that it did not suffer from economic failure.

So the armed forces were there to guarantee the Bourguibist project, with the military establishment upholding the state in its civic capacity and the paramilitary brigades upholding public order. Just as the state intervened to build and direct the nation's economy when the bourgeoisie was too weak to do it, so the armed forces protected the class structure before the capitalist class became a viable ruling class in its own right. As such, when the public order brigades, national guard and gendarmes failed to cope with rebellions, the military had to assume a direct role in public life. It was the military that was called in to restore public order during the crises of 1978 and 1984, for example, because the state had no other means of resolving the labour rebellions and food shortages. Similarly, the military was a bulwark against the Islamists when they began to challenge not merely the personal rule of Bourguiba but the foundations of his authoritarian, republic. In fact, the military elite strongly resented having to step in and take over public order functions, as this seemed to compromise their outwardly apolitical, nationalist role. The fact that they had to be directly involved in such disputes was part of the crisis of sovereignty that would lead to Bourguiba's overthrow.

The military's role was transformed by the IMF structural adjustment programme and the subsequent Ben Ali coup. Under Bourguiba's corporatist, embedded neoliberalism it upheld a Destourian state based on social pacts for the national good. But under neoliberalism, the state increases its authority in national life while withdrawing from the economy. Indeed, in part the state's authority derives from its apparent separation from that sphere of civil society. Justin Rosenberg points out in Empire of Civil Society that sovereignty is a specifically capitalist political form, setting the state over and against civil society. Thus, state sovereignty is to an extent abridged when it is engaged in the widespread public ownership of industry and interventionism. Then industrial struggles, prices, wages, and the appropriation of surplus become explicitly political issues, and the state is dragged into disputes where it must perforce act explicitly for one class or other. When the state withdraws, it acts as a coercive guarantor of existing class relations and as such its authoritarian (as opposed to potentially democratic) capacity is enhanced. So, when the Tunisian state embarked on neoliberalism, it both privatised industries, relaxing trade and market controls, and bolstered its repressive apparatus - such that under Ben Ali, the scale of repression reached levels hitherto unknown in Tunisia since the defeat of the French.

The military elite was already losing faith in the Kemalist ideals that Bourguiba had promulgated by the time his regime was ailing in the mid-Eighties. Its French-trained officer corps was more technocratically minded, and it was also less inclined to believe that a properly rationalist state could coordinate uninterrupted, unilinear progress. Its wider assessment was that the nationalist project was falling apart, that economic failure would guarantee long-term social dislocation, and that the threats to the state emerging in the form of communism and, more pressingly, Islamism, would not abate. The idea of a compact between the classes was finished. Moreover, there was the beginnings of a worrying development for this elite - Islamists were beginning to penetrate the lower and middle ranks of the army itself.

Under Ben Ali, senior military officials came to have a more important role in policy formation, as they dominated the new, streamlined political bureau created by the dicatorship. Ben Ali was himself a senior officer who had directed the army's response to the 1978 crisis, and had also run internal security arrangements under Bourguiba's instruction when the Islamists started to become a real political force in the 1980s. But his incorporation of the military into policymaking was driven by two needs. The first was to prioritise counterinsurgency, the logic of which unfolded in his dirty wars against the Islamists in the early 1990s. This helped the state suppress demands for democratisation, contain political opposition to its neoliberal reforms and enable a new wave of capital accumulation based on intensified labour productivity and financialisation. The second was to halt the spread of Islamism in the armed forces, by seeming to incorporate the aspirations of those layers. But the overall effect was to make the state a more brutal force, over and against civil society, such that until recently there wasn't much scope for civil society, notably the working class, to organise in opposition. In tandem with this, a new paramilitary force in the form of a bloated internal security guard emerge. Spending on this far outweighed any clear and present danger to the president, but it was a necessary accompaniment to the narrowing of the social base of the regime, and to the new relations of neoliberal class rule and authoritarian government.

The current crisis has thus seen: 1) the paramilitary forces fail to keep public order; 2) the military dispatched to assume police functions as the president went into a flap, and started promising concessions; 3) the defection of the military itself, as it no longer believed that Ben Ali could control the country. The army elite is undoubtedly jockeying for position within a new arrangement, but I suspect that there's also real sympathy with the protests among the footsoldiers, which the officer corps would have been wary of. At the moment, it would seem that the Tunisian military elite is reluctant to get dragged into direct conflict with the mobilised masses. There may be a residue of the old Bourguibism operating here, but more likely is that they just don't know if they could take the rank and file with them. This means that the armed forces cannot be counted on as an ally in the struggles which will ensue. Given the obvious crisis of neoliberal class rule, they may be susceptible to demands for a new social compact, but such demands will perforce come from without.

What the army does is vital, because the bourgoisie is weak. I suspect this is why the communists are aiming their propaganda partly at the armed forces - not because of illusions in the military establishment, but because winning over the rank and file will decisively change the balance of forces in the country. That's my rough and ready assessment of the role of Tunisia's military in this revolution.

The shady international arms dealer and warlord, Gordon Brown, wants kids to get weapons training:

Controversial plans for pupils in comprehensive schools to sign up for military drills and weapons training are being backed by Gordon Brown in an attempt to improve the relationship between the public and the armed forces.

A major review of the military's role in British society says that encouraging more state secondary school pupils to join the cadet corps would improve discipline among teenagers while helping to improve the public perception of the army, navy and air force.

Forgive me first of all, for finding this ominous development funny. Like many of the kids in the Proddy ratholes of Northern Ireland, I was briefly in the Air Training Corps - which is to the Royal Air Force what the Army Cadets are to the British Army - as a teenager. As a result, I can only giggle at the idea that exposure to this kind of silliness is likely to 'improve discipline'. They certainly did like to march us about in various directions - you know the drill, "left, right, left right, turning about, about turn ... left, right, left right ... right wheel", etc. And the shoe-polishing, and the lectures about NATO, and the shouting, my God, the shouting - how they loved to bellow! The higher the rank you had, the more you could shout. I think there was a chart depicting the rank-to-decible ration - or did I dream it? I suppose if you were already being raised in a controlling, militaristic environment, all this would seem natural. I'm afraid in my case I rather undermined morale by breaking into tears when I couldn't put the gun together or when some flight sergeant bawled in my face. This was often quite deliberate, as I could turn it on and off like a sprinkler. Luckily, I escaped before civilian life started to seem too constraining - imagine if I'd gone up a rank to corporal and was only allowed to shout at someone in the confines of ATC base? Imagine if I tried to pull rank on the teacher? Although I suspect many of the older members of this institution were seriously damaged, controlling people prone to seething rages and domestic violence, the children who do best in this kind of environment are conscientious, obedient and serious. I was lazy, sneaky and whimsical, more of a barbarian and a brute than an agent of civilization. If I had been given successful weapons training, there might well have been carnage like If... at the end of it all.



That to one side, it is plain to see that the government are onto something here. As I have suggested, they know full well that martial values are in terminal decline. The kids don't respect war any more. Instead of reading comic books about killing Jerry, they're playing computer games about car-jacking (which is why the US military recruits video gamers - the next war of conquest will be called Operation Grand Theft Auto). Instead of spit-polishing shoes, they're wearing hoodies and smoking weed. I've seen them do it. Or they're bunking off school to protest against the war. So, the government keeps trying out new intiatives, one after the other. The MoD targeted seven-year-olds with their propaganda drives. They've particularly targeted kids failed by the education system. One of their cunning tricks was to change the order "At Ease" to "Chill". They even paid the marketing agency Kid's Connection, whose evil remit is to specifically manipulate children before they can develop a sophisticated defense, to come up with ways of selling war to the yoof, and came up with some intriguing ideas for the class room:

Part of a module entitled ‘Promoting peace and security in Iraq’ it instructs classes to hold a vote on the war, and to produce a piece writing arguing for or against the withdrawal of soldiers from the Gulf.

The teachers’ notes state: "Most students will vote against the ongoing maintenance of troops. Ask students to justify their opinions."

It continues: "Throughout the lesson, students should come to understand that this activity is representative of democracy on a micro scale and by voting, they have exercised their democratic right, a right that is newly available to Iraqis."

How fortunate that the NUT asserted the law in this case. The current plans will have cadet structures set up in comprehensive schools across the country, which will expose children to arms training, target practise, and a dose of rugged virility and British fair play. The NUT has pointed out that previous efforts at recruitment in schools disproportionately target poor areas, almost as if the government considers working class people particularly expendable. The government's desire to glamourise international gun crime, particularly in poor areas where local gun crime is a problem, is just one of the little oddities of 'war on terror' culture. It also reflects one of the ways in which the projection of violence overseas filters back into the brutalisation of domestic culture.