History might foretell the future

Is it just the non-democratic , mostly despotic rulers of the Middle Eastern Arab world that needs to fear the uprisings rolling through that part of the world or could this be a revolution that might go global?

It might in fact be a serious miscalculation to interpret what is happening in the Arab world as a pro-democracy revolution. It would seem to be much more of an uprising against what the majority of the population experience as an oppressive socio-economic dispensation.

Some, mostly left-of-centre analysts see some parallels to the underlying factors that drove previous revolutions in history.

In an article published by the Information Clearing Hous-website Ted Rall writes that while

the present protest action is portrayed in Western media  as “an Arab thing", it would not be for long.

“ The problems that triggered the latest uprisings, rising inequality of income, frozen credit markets, along with totally unresponsive government, span the globe. To be sure, the first past-due-date regimes to be overthrown may be the most brutal U.S. client states--Arab states such as Yemen, Jordan and Algeria.

“Central Asia's autocrats, also corrupted by the US, can't be far behind; Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, who likes to boil his dissidents to death, would be my first bet. But this won't stop in Asia.

“Persistent unemployment, unresponsive and repressive governments exist in Europe and yes, here in the US. They are unstable. The pressure is building,” he argues.

According to Rall’s take on things, a global revolution is imminent.

“The first great wave of revolutions from 1793 through 1848 was a response to the decline of feudal agrarianism.

“During the 19th century European elites saw the rise of industrial capitalism as a chance to stack the cards in their favour, paying slave wages for backbreaking work. Workers organised and formed a proletariat that rejected this lopsided arrangement. They rose up. They formed unions. By the middle of the 20th century, a rough equilibrium had been established between labour and management in the US and other industrialised nations. Three generations of auto workers earned enough to send their children to college.

“The uprisings we are witnessing today have their roots in the decline of industrial production that began 60 years ago. As in the early 1800s the economic order has been "reshuffled,” he writes.

"While industry in the First World was supplanted by the knowledge economy, which instead of bringing “the global economy in for a soft landing after the collapse of industrial capitalism …  the ruling classes chose to do what they always do: they exploited the situation for short-term gain, grabbing whatever they could for themselves.

“Revolution will come. When it does, as it did in Tunisia and Egypt, it will follow a spontaneous explosion of long pent-up social and economic forces,” he writes.

Even the IMF warns

While Rall might come across as some extent, campaigner for a radical change in the global situation, it is however not only from him and his ilk that there are red flags going up.

From the ranks of the IMF, which can hardly be accused of being  a revolutionary force, there were also warning words in recent times.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said rising food prices could have "potentially devastating consequences" for poorer nations, and warned that Asia's fast-growing economies risked a "hard landing".

Overall, he told an audience in Singapore, widening imbalances across and within countries were sparking tensions that threaten to derail the fragile global economic recovery -- and could even spark armed conflict.

In response to a question he said he did not want to comment on the political turmoil in Egypt, "… but clearly the situation in Egypt is the kind of situation that could have been expected not only in Egypt, when you see the problem created by the high level of unemployment.

"Now the question is how to rebuild this. That's not only true for Egypt, (it) can be true also for countries where you didn'thave this kind of unrest but are almost in the same situation.

"As tensions within countries increase, we could see rising social and political instability within nations -- even war," he said.

Seeds of next crisis

He also noted two “dangerous imbalances” that he said could sow the seeds of the next crisis.

The first is the unbalanced recovery across countries, as emerging nations grow much faster than developed economies and can possibly overheat.

The second was the social strains within countries with high unemployment and widening income gaps.

Over the next decade 400 million young peole would join the global labour force, posing a daunting challenge for governments.

“We face the prospect of a lost generation of young people, destined to suffer their whole lives from worse unemployment and social conditions,” he said.

The UN food agency also said last month that global food prices hit record highs in December of last year --  well above levels in 2008, when riots broke out in countries as far afield as Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Mozambique.

Politics not the main driver

Many and varied analyses of what  is happening in the Arab world bears out the reality that at its core it is not political, but rather socio-economic factors that are driving the revolution.

One clear illustration of this is a recent article in openDemocracy by Vicken Cheterian under the headline The Arab crisis: food, energy, water, justice.

“The explosive combination of mass unemployment and rising food prices threatens social explosions in other parts of the Arab world,” Cheterian writes.

Although the focus in this article is on the Arab world, it also points out that the  “… demographic revolution of the past century was paralleled by a green revolution in agriculture, whereby technological innovations and the industrialisation of agvriculture increased food production. The availability of oil was crucial to the green revolution's success.

“A number of factors now suggest that this progress has reached its limits. Rising oil prices were a majror cause of the global food-price spike in 2008. An International Energy Agenct report published in November 2010 says that peak oil could already have been reached.

“Yet while global supply seems to be approaching its ceiling, global demand is still on the rise.”

With regard to land and water resources, the article comes to the conclusion that the situation is a little better, but points out that as a “result of industrialised agriculture, massive use of pestcides and the loss of topsoil has been the the degration of land quality and lower yields.

“Global water resoures are also heavily invested: most major rivers are already dammed for irrigation and hydropower, their number currently being 45 000 and with only limited further capacity for harnessing more rivers.”

It adds climate change as an additional source of uncertainty, Some climate change models predict that several rivers might simply disappear.

Conclusion

Taking all the factors into account, one might not fully agree with Rall and similar prediction that a global revolution is at hand. It would however seem clear that the calm and stability most of the world has become accustomed to since the end of the Cold War, is something of the past for now.

To what extent the present economic dispensation and its underlying systems of trade and finance will survive only time will tell, but that there will be some fundamental structural amendments seems inevitable

In the meantime governments across the globe, what ever political system they are based on, will do well to keep a very close ear to the ground to stay in tune with the needs and concerns of their ordinary citizens.

Piet Coetzer