Oligarchs, Demagogues and Mass Revolts … against Democracy
In ancient Rome, especially during
the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob violence to block,
intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant faction in the
Senate. While neither the ruling or opposing factions represented the
interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or slaves, the
use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of
representative government and the republican form of government laid the
groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers)
and the transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.
Demagogues, in the pay of
aspiring emperors, aroused the passions of a motley array of disaffected
slum dwellers, loafers and petty thieves (ladrones) with promises,
pay-offs and positions in a New Order. Professional mob organizers
cultivated their ties with the oligarchs ‘above’ and with professional
demonstrators ‘below’. They voiced ‘popular grievances’ and articulated
demands questioning the legitimacy of the incumbent rulers, while laying
the groundwork for the rule by the few.
Usually, when the pay-master oligarchs
came to power on a wave of demagogue-led mob violence, they quickly
suppressed the demonstrations, paid off the demagogues with patronage
jobs in the new regime or resorted to a discrete assassination for
‘street leaders’ unwilling to recognize the new order’. The new rulers
purged the old Senators into exile, expulsion and dispossession, rigged
new elections and proclaimed themselves ‘saviors of the republic’. They
proceeded to drive peasants from their land, renounce social obligations
and stop food subsidies for poor urban families and funds for public
works.
The use of mob violence and “mass
revolts” to serve the interests of oligarchical and imperial powers
against democratically-elected governments has been a common strategy in
recent times.
Throughout the ages, the
choreographed “mass revolt” played many roles: (1) it served to
destabilize an electoral regime; (2) it provided a platform for its
oligarch funders to depose an incumbent regime; (3) it disguised the
fact that the oligarchic opposition had lost democratic elections; (4)
it provided a political minority with a ‘fig-leaf of legitimacy’ when it
was otherwise incapable of acting within a constitutional framework and
(5) it allowed for the illegitimate seizure of power in the name of a
pseudo ‘majority’, namely the “crowds in the central plaza”.
Some leftist commentators have argued
two contradictory positions: One the one hand, some simply reduce the
oligarchy’s power grab to an ‘inter-elite struggle’ which has nothing to
do with the ‘interests of the working class’, while others maintain the
‘masses’ in the street are protesting against an “elitist regime”. A
few even argue that with popular, democratic demands, these revolts are
progressive, should be supported as “terrain for class struggle”. In
other words, the ‘left’ should join the uprising and contest the
oligarchs for leadership within the stage-managed revolts!
What progressives are unwilling to
recognize is that the oligarchs orchestrating the mass revolt are
authoritarians who completely reject democratic procedures and electoral
processes. Their aim is to establish a ‘junta’, which will eliminate
all democratic political and social institutions and freedoms and impose
harsher, more repressive and regressive policies and institutions than
those they replace. Some leftists support the ‘masses in revolt’ simply
because of their ‘militancy’, their numbers and street courage, without
examining the underlying leaders, their interests and links to the elite
beneficiaries of a ‘regime change’.
All the color-coded “mass
revolts” in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR featured popular leaders who
exhorted the masses in the name of ‘independence and democracy’ but were
pro-NATO, pro-(Western) imperialists and linked to neo-liberal elites.
Upon the fall of communism, the new oligarchs privatized and sold off
the most lucrative sectors of the economy throwing millions out of work,
dismantled the welfare state and handed over their military bases to
NATO for the stationing of foreign troops and the placement of missiles
aimed at Russia.
The entire ‘anti-Stalinist’ left in the
US and Western Europe, with a few notable exceptions, celebrated these
oligarch-controlled revolts in Eastern Europe and some even participated
as minor accomplices in the post-revolt neo-liberal regimes. One clear
reason for the demise of “Western Marxism” arose from its inability to
distinguish a genuine popular democratic revolt from a mass uprising
funded and stage-managed by rival oligarchs!
One of the clearest recent example of a
manipulated ‘people’s power’ revolution in the streets to replace an
elected representative of one sector of the elite with an even more
brutal, authoritarian ‘president’ occurred in early 2001 in the
Philippines. The more popular and independent (but notoriously corrupt)
President Joseph Estrada, who had challenged sectors of the Philippine
elite and current US foreign policy (infuriating Washington by embracing
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez), was replaced through street demonstrations of
middle-class matrons with soldiers in civvies by Gloria
Makapagal-Arroyo. Mrs. Makapagal-Arroyo, who had close links to the US
and the Philippine military, unleashed a horrific wave of brutality
dubbed the ‘death-squad democracy’. The overthrow of Estrada was
actively supported by the left, including sectors of the revolutionary
left, who quickly found themselves the target of an unprecedented
campaign of assassinations, disappearances, torture and imprisonment by
their newly empowered ‘Madame President’.
Past and Present Mass Revolts Against Democracy: Guatemala, Iran, and Chile
The use of mobs and mass uprisings by
oligarchs and empire builders has a long and notorious history. Three of
the bloodiest cases, which scarred their societies for decades, took
place in Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, and Chile in 1973.
Democratically-elected
Jacobo Árbenz was the first Guatemalan President to initiate agrarian
reform and legalize trade unions, especially among landless farm
workers. Árbenz’s reforms included the expropriation of unused, fallow
land owned by the United Fruit Company, a giant US agro-business
conglomerate. The CIA used its ties to local oligarchs and right-wing
generals and colonels to instigate and finance mass-protests against a
phony ‘communist-takeover’ of Guatemala under President Arbenz. The
military used the manipulated mob violence and the ‘threat’ of Guatemala
becoming a “Soviet satellite”, to stage a bloody coup. The coup leaders
received air support from the CIA and slaughtered thousands of Arbenz
supporters and turned the countryside into ‘killing fields’. For the
next 50 years political parties, trade unions and peasant organizations
were banned, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered and millions
were displaced.
In 1952 Mohammed Mossadegh
was elected president of Iran on a moderate nationalist platform, after
the overthrow of the brutal monarch. Mossadegh announced the
nationalization of the petroleum industry. The CIA, with the
collaboration of the local oligarchs, monarchists and demagogues
organized ‘anti-communist’ street mobs to stage violent demonstrations
providing the pretext for a monarchist- military coup. The CIA-control
Iranian generals brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back from Switzerland and for
the next 26 years Iran was a monarchist-military dictatorship, whose
population was terrorized by the Savak, the murderous secret police.
The US oil companies
received the richest oil concessions; the Shah joined Israel and the US
in an unholy alliance against progressive nationalist dissidents and
worked hand-in-hand to undermine independent Arab states. Tens of
thousands of Iranians were killed, tortured and driven into exile. In
1979, a mass popular uprising led by Islamic movements, nationalist and
socialist parties and trade unions drove out the Shah-Savak
dictatorship. The Islamists installed a radical nationalist clerical
regime, which retains power to this day despite decades of a
US-CIA-funded destabilization campaign which has funded both terrorist
groups and dissident liberal movements.
Chile is the best-known case of
CIA-financed mob violence leading to a military coup. In 1970, the
democratic socialist Dr. Salvador Allende was elected president of
Chile. Despite CIA efforts to buy votes to block Congressional approval
of the electoral results and its manipulation of violent demonstrations
and an assassination campaign to precipitate a military coup, Allende
took office.
During Allende’s tenure as
president the CIA financed a variety of “direct actions” –from paying
the corrupt leaders of a copper workers union to stage strikes and the
truck owners associations to refuse to transport goods to the cities, to
manipulating right-wing terrorist groups like the Patria y Libertad
(Fatherland and Liberty) in their assassination campaigns. The CIA’s
destabilization program was specifically designed to provoke economic
instability through artificial shortages and rationing, in order to
incite middle class discontent.
This was made notorious by
the street demonstrations of pot-banging housewives. The CIA sought to
incite a military coup through economic chaos. Thousands of truck owners
were paid not to drive their trucks leading to shortages in the cities,
while right-wing terrorists blew up power stations plunging
neighborhoods into darkness and shop owners who refused to join the
‘strike’ against Allende were vandalized.
On September 11, 1973, to
the chants of ‘Jakarta’ (in celebration of a 1964 CIA coup in
Indonesia), a junta of US-backed Chilean generals grabbed power from an
elected government. Tens of thousands of activists and government
supporters were arrested, killed, tortured and forced into exile. The
dictatorship denationalized and privatized its mining, banking and
manufacturing sectors, following the free market dictates of Milton
Friedman-trained economists (the so-call “Chicago Boys”). The
dictatorship overturned 40 years of welfare, labor and land-reform
legislation which had made Chile the most socially advanced country in
Latin America. With the generals in power, Chile became the ‘neo-liberal
model’ for Latin America. Mob violence and the so-called “middle class
revolt”, led to the consolidation of oligarchic and imperial rule and a
17-year reign of terror under General Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The
whole society was brutalized and with the return of electoral politics,
even former ‘leftist’ parties retained the dictatorship’s neo-liberal
economic policies, its authoritarian constitution and the military high
command. The ‘revolt of the middle class’ in Chile resulted in the
greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the oligarchs in Latin
America to this day!
The Contemporary Use and Abuse of “Mass Revolts”: Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, and Argentina
In recent years “mass
revolt” has become the instrument of choice when oligarchs, generals and
other empire builders seeking ‘regime change’. By enlisting an
assortment of nationalist demagogues and imperial-funded NGO ‘leaders’,
they set the conditions for the overthrow of democratically elected
governments and stage-managed the installment of their own “free market”
regimes with dubious “democratic” credentials.
Not all the elected
regimes under siege are progressive. Many ‘democracies’, like the
Ukraine, are ruled by one set of oligarchs. In Ukraine, the elite
supporting President Viktor Yanukovich, decided that entering into a
deep client-state relationship with the European Union was not in their
interests, and sought to diversify their international trade partners
while maintaining lucrative ties with Russia. Their opponents, who are
currently behind the street demonstrations in Kiev, advocate a client
relationship with the EU, stationing of NATO troops, and cutting ties
with Russia. In Thailand, the democratically-elected Prime Minister,
Yingluck Shinawatra, represents a section of the economic elite with
ties and support in the rural areas, especially the North-East, as well
as deep trade relations with China. The opponents are urban-based,
closer to the military-monarchists and favor a straight neo-liberal
agenda linked to the US against the rural patronage-populist agenda of
Ms. Shinawatra.
Egypt’s
democratically-elected Mohamed Morsi government pursued a moderate
Islamist policy with some constraints on the military and a loosening of
ties with Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In terms of
the IMF, Morsi sought compromise. The Morsi regime was in flux when it
was overthrown: not Islamist nor secular, not pro-worker but also not
pro-military. Despite all of its different pressure groups and
contradictions, the Morsi regime permitted labor strikes,
demonstrations, opposition parties, freedom of the press and assembly.
All of these democratic freedoms have disappeared after waves of ‘mass
street revolts’, choreographed by the military, set the conditions for
the generals to take power and establish their brutal dictatorship –
jailing and torturing tens of thousands and outlawing all opposition
parties.
Mass demonstrations and
demagogue-led direct actions also actively target democratically elected
progressive governments, like Venezuela and Argentina, in addition to
the actions against conservative democracies cited above. Venezuela,
under Presidents Hugo Chavez and Vicente Maduro advance an
anti-imperialist, pro-socialist program. ‘Mob revolts’ are combined with
waves of assassinations, sabotage of public utilities, artificial
shortages of essential commodities, vicious media slander and opposition
election campaigns funded from the outside.
In 2002, Washington teamed up with its
collaborator politicians, Miami and Caracas-based oligarchs and local
armed gangs, to mount a “protest movement” as the pretext for a planned
business-military coup. The generals and members of the elite seized
power and deposed and arrested the democratically-elected President
Chavez. All avenues of democratic expression and representation were
closed and the constitution annulled. In response to the kidnapping of
‘their president’, over a million Venezuelans spontaneously mobilized
and marched upon the Presidential palace to demand the restoration of
democracy and Hugo Chavez to the presidency.
Backed by the large pro-democracy and
pro-constitution sectors of the Venezuelan armed forces, the mass
protests led to the coup’s defeat and the return of Chavez and
democracy. All democratic governments facing manipulated
imperial-oligarchic financed mob revolts should study the example of
Venezuela’s defeat of the US-oligarch-generals’ coup. The best defense
for democracy is found in the organization, mobilization and political
education of the electoral majority. It is not enough to participate in
free elections; an educated and politicized majority must also know how
to defend their democracy in the streets as well as at the ballot box.
The lessons of the 2002 coup-debacle
were very slowly absorbed by the Venezuelan oligarchy and their US
patrons who continued to destabilize the economy in an attempt to
undermine democracy and seize power. Between December 2002 and February
2003, corrupt senior oil executives of the nominally ‘public’ oil
company PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela) organized a ‘bosses’ lockout
stopping production, export and local distribution of oil and refined
petroleum produces. ,Corrupt trade union officials, linked to the US
National Endowment for Democracy, mobilized oil workers and other
employees to support the lock-out, in their attempt to paralyze the
economy. The government responded by mobilizing the other half of the
oil workers who, together with a significant minority of middle
management, engineers and technologists, called on the entire Venezuelan
working class to take the oil fields and installations from the
‘bosses’. To counter the acute shortage of gasoline, President Chavez
secured supplies from neighboring countries and overseas allies. The
lockout was defeated. Several thousand supporters of the executive power
grab were fired and replaced by pro-democracy managers and workers.
Having failed to overthrow
the democratic government via “mass revolts”, the oligarchs turned
toward a plebiscite on Chavez rule and later called for a nation-wide
electoral boycott, both of which were defeated. These defeats served to
strengthen Venezuela’s democratic institutions and decreased the
presence of opposition legislators in the Congress. The repeated
failures of the elite to grab power led to a new multi-pronged strategy
using:
(1) US-funded NGO’s to exploit local grievances and mobilize residents around community issues;
(2)
clandestine thugs to sabotage utilities, especially power, assassinate
peasant recipients of land reform titles, as well as prominent officials
and activists;
(3)
mass electoral campaign marches, and (4) economic destabilization via
financial speculation, illegal foreign exchange trading, price gouging
and hoarding of basic consumer commodities.
The purpose of these
measures is to incite mass discontent, using their control of the mass
media to provoke another ‘mass revolt’ to set the stage for another
US-backed ‘power grab’. Violent street protests by middle class students
from the elite Central University were organized by oligarch-financed
demagogues. ‘Demonstrations’ included sectors of the middle class and
urban poor angered by the artificial shortages and power outages.
The sources of popular discontent were
rapidly and effectively addressed at the top by energetic government
measures: business owners engaged in hoarding and price gouging were
jailed; prices of essential staples were reduced; hoarded goods were
seized from warehouses and distributed to the poor; the import of
essential goods were increased and saboteurs were pursued. The
Government’s effective intervention resonated with the mass of the
working class, the lower-middle class and the rural and urban poor and
restored their support. Government supporters took to the streets and
lined up at the ballot box to defeat the campaign of destabilization.
The government won a resounding electoral mandate allowing it to move
decisively against the oligarchs and their backers in Washington.
The Venezuelan experience shows how
energetic government counter-measures can restore support and deepen
progressive social changes for the majority. This is because forceful
progressive government intervention against anti-democratic oligarchs,
combined with the organization, political education and mobilization of
the majority of voters can decisively defeat these stage-managed mass
revolts.
Argentina is an example of a weakened
democratic regime trying to straddle the fence between the oligarchs and
the workers, between the combined force of the agro-business and mining
elites and working and middle class constituencies dependent on social
policies. The elected-Kirchner-Fernandez government has faced “mass
revolts” in the a series of street demonstrations whipped up by
conservative agricultural exporters over taxes; the Buenos Aires
upper-middle class angered at ‘crime, disorder and insecurity’, a
nationwide strike by police officials over ‘salaries’ who ‘looked the
other way’ while gangs of ‘lumpen’ street thugs pillaged and destroyed
stores. Taken altogether, these waves of mob action in Argentina appear
to be part of a politically-directed destabilization campaign by the
authoritarian Right who have instigated or, at least, exploited these
events. Apart from calling on the military to restore order and
conceding to the ‘salary’ demands of the striking police, the Fernandez
government has been unable or unwilling to mobilize the democratic
electorate in defense of democracy. The democratic regime remains in
power but it is under siege and vulnerable to attack by domestic and
imperial opponents.
Conclusion
Mass revolts are two-edged
swords: they can be a positive force when they occur against military
dictatorships like Pinochet or Mubarak, against authoritarian absolutist
monarchies like Saudi Arabia, a colonial-racist state like Israel, and
imperial occupations like against the US in Afghanistan. But they have
to be directed and controlled by popular local leaders seeking to
restore democratic majority rule.
History, from ancient
times to the present, teaches us that not all ‘mass revolts’ achieve, or
are even motivated by, democratic objectives. Many have served
oligarchs seeking to overthrow democratic governments, totalitarian
leaders seeking to install fascist and pro-imperial regimes, demagogues
and authoritarians seeking to weaken shaky democratic regimes and
militarists seeking to start wars for imperial ambitions.
Today, “mass revolts” against democracy
have become standard operational procedure for Western European and US
rulers who seek to circumvent democratic procedures and install
pro-imperial clients. The practice of democracy is denigrated while the
mob is extolled in the imperial Western media. This is why armed
Islamist terrorists and mercenaries are called “rebels” in Syria and the
mobs in the streets of Kiev (Ukraine) attempting to forcibly depose a
democratically-elected government are labeled “pro-Western democrats”.
The ideology informing the
“mass revolts” varies from “anti-communist” and “anti-authoritarian” in
democratic Venezuela, to “pro-democracy” in Libya (even as tribal bands
and mercenaries slaughter whole communities), Egypt and the Ukraine.
Imperial strategists have
systematized, codified and made operational “mass revolts” in favor of
oligarchic rule. International experts, consultants, demagogues and NGO
officials have carved out lucrative careers as they travel to ‘hot
spots’ and organize ‘mass revolts’ dragging the target countries into
deeper ‘colonization’ via European or US-centered ‘integration’. Most
local leaders and demagogues accept the double agenda: ‘protest today
and submit to new masters tomorrow’. The masses in the street are fooled
and then sacrificed. They believe in a ‘New Dawn’ of Western
consumerism, higher paid jobs and greater personal freedom … only to be
disillusioned when their new rulers fill the jails with opponents and
many former protestors, raise prices, cut salaries, privatize state
companies, sell off the most lucrative firms to foreigners and double
the unemployment rate.
When the oligarchs ‘stage-manage’ mass
revolts and takeover the regime, the big losers include the democratic
electorate and most of the protestors. Leftists and progressives, in the
West or in exile, who had mindlessly supported the ‘mass revolts’ will
publish their scholarly essays on ‘the revolution (sic) betrayed”
without admitting to their own betrayal of democratic principles.
If and when the Ukraine enters into the
European Union, the exuberant street demonstrators will join the
millions of jobless workers in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, as well as
millions of pensioners brutalized by “austerity programs” imposed by
their new rulers, the ‘Troika’ in Brussels. If these former
demonstrators take to the streets once more, in disillusionment at their
leaders’ “betrayal”, they can enjoy their ‘victory’ under the batons of
“NATO and European Union-trained police” while the Western mass media
will have moved elsewhere in support of ‘democracy’.
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