As Bashar al-Assad flees the capital, the armed segments of the revolution appear to be inflicting blows on sections of the security apparatus and taking over major cities: the revolution is turning a corner.  Robert Fisk reports that a crucial dynamic now is the fracturing of an alliance between the Sunni middle class and the Alawite regime, signalled by the spread of the revolt to Aleppo.  And defections from the state-capitalist power bloc continue.  Indeed, Juan Cole has suggested that such divisions must run deep in the Syrian state for the opposition to be capable of planting a bomb that can kill a senior minister.

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The course of this uprising, from the immolation of Hasan Ali Akleh in January 2011, redolent of Mohamed Bouazizi's death in Tunisia, to the suicide attack on the defence minister, has been brutal.  In the early stages, the Syrian government had a monopoly on violence.  It was police violence and the decades-long rule by the Ba'athist dictatorship, undergirded by repressive 'emergency law', which provoked the 'days of rage'; it was the police beating of a shopkeeper that provoked a spontaneous protest on 17th February 2011 in the capital, which was duly suppressed; it was the imprisonment of Kurdish and other political prisoners that led to the spread of hunger strikes against the regime by March 2011.  And it was the security forces who started to murder protesters in large numbers that same month.  It was they also who repeatedly opened fire on large and growing demonstrations in April 2011.  In the ensuing months until today, they have used used everything from tear gas to live bullets to tank shells. 

And the main organisations of the Syrian opposition pointedly refused the strategy of armed uprising, noting what had happened in Libya, and arguing that the terrain of armed conflict was the ground on which Assad was strongest.  Nonetheless, the scale of the repression eventually produced an armed wing of the revolt.  The Free Syrian Army became the main vector for armed insurgency, expanded by defections from the army and the security apparatus.  Now it is making serious advances.

In response to the insurgency, the argument among a significant section of the antiwar left has been that this revolution has already been hijacked, that those who initially rose up have been sidelined and marginalised by forces allied with external powers, intelligence forces and so on.  Thus, the arms, money and international support for the armed rebellion is said to be coming from Washington, and Riyadh, and Tel Aviv.  The likely outcome is the decapitation of a regime that is problematic for the US, and its replacement with a regime that is more amenable to the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.  Moreover, they argue, the political forces likely to hegemonise the emerging situation are essentially reactionary and sectarian.  The left, democratic and anti-imperialist forces are, they say, too weak to lead the fight against Assad's regime.  And so, as Sami Ramadani puts it in the latest Labour Left Briefing, "the sacrifices of the Syrian people have been hijacked by NATO and the Saudi-Qatari dictators". 

Tariq Ali was the latest to make this case on Russia Today (prompting an impassioned rebuttal from this left-wing Syrian blog).  MediaLens, an organisation whose output I have promoted in the past, also takes this view, and reproaches myself and Owen Jones for being insufficiently attentive to the accumulating mass of evidence that the armed revolt is basically a creature of imperialism, its actions no more than, effectively, state terrorism.  Obviously, I think this is mistaken.

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I'll start with imperialism.  One has to expect that in a revolutionary situation, rival imperialist powers will try to influence the course of events.  We have seen the US, UK, France and Russia all involved in Syria's battle in different ways.  Washington has long provided funding and other types of support to opposition groups, and the CIA is alleged to be training groups outside the Syrian border.  It has two specific reasons to be involved: taking out a strategic ally of Iran, and being seen to be on the side of democratic change in the Middle East.  The nature of its involvement is dictated by its preference for some sort of coup d'etat rather than a popular revolution; they want to encourage more senior regime defections so that a faction of the old ruling elite can coordinate its forces, lead an armed assault on the bastions of the Assad regime, and then declare itself the new boss.  That is most likely why they are selectively feeding arms to groups they deem reliable, and training various select groups outside the country.

Russia, of course, is nowhere near as powerful an imperialist state as the US.  Its role is arguably slightly enhanced by the fact that it is backing up a centralised, well-armed regime (vis-a-vis the insurgent population), whereas the 'Western' imperialist powers have been trying to infiltrate and co-opt elements of a very loosely coordinated resistance.  The rebels by all accounts are extremely poorly armed; the trickle of weapons from the Gulf states is nothing compared to the helicopters, tanks and other munitions which the Assad regime possesses and deploys with such indiscriminate force.  However you assess the relative balance between the various intervening forces, though, the point is that if you want to talk about imperialism in Syria you cannot just ignore the intervention taking place on behalf of the regime.

In fairness, many of those commentators highlighting imperialist intervention have also noted the flow of arms from Russia to the regime - Charles Glass, for example.  Moreover, none of them appear to be denying serious repression by the regime.  Rather, Patrick Seale is typical in arguing that the transition to an armed strategy, provoked by the regime, has been immensely destructive, as this is the terrain on which the regime is the strongest.

Nonetheless, there is in some of this a type of 'blanket thinking' that one commonly encounters, in which a signposted quality of one organisation, or faction within an organisation, or individual within a faction, is taken to be expressive of the situation as a whole. Thus, for example, Ramadani characterises the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are characterised as "Saudi-Qatari-backed ... logistically backed by Turkey": which is some of the truth, but simply not the whole truth.  I will return to this.  Likewise, when Seale describes the opposition strategy as being one of provoking "Western military intervention to stop the killing on humanitarian grounds", he ignores the declarations of the Local Coordinating Committees (LCCs) which are the organisational, cellular basis of the revolt, and which have consistently opposed imperialist intervention.  He also ignores the left-nationalist and Kurdish forces - there are traditions of anti-imperialism in Syria well beyond the Ba'ath Party.

Or, let's take as an example this article by the comedy writer Charlie Skelton which is being recited widely.  It basically makes two arguments.  One is that leading figures within the Syrian National Council have connections to various US-funded bodies.  The other is that vocal neoconservatives are pressing for military intervention and 'regime change', and declare themselves pleased by the successes of the armed opposition such as the Free Syrian Army.  In and of itself, this could be part of a valid argument: why should these people be the spokespersons for the Syrian revolution in the Anglophone media?  Why should the interests of Syrians be hijacked for some imperialist grand strategy?  However, inasmuch as this ignores the majority of what is taking place, instead looking solely at narrow networks of influence, this is indeed a form of 'blanket thinking', allowing small minorities to stand in for the whole.

Imperialism is certainly involved.  However, a few vulgar regime apologists to one side, no one is denying that there is more to it than that; that there are internal social and class antagonisms that have produced this revolt.  If you want an analysis of the breakdown of the Syrian social compact in the last decade, amid a new wave of US imperialist violence which sent waves of refugees fleeing from Iraq, and Bashar al-Assad's neoliberal reforms, you should see Jonathan Maunder's article in the last International Socialism.  The important point is that the regime can't survive.  It is incapable of advancing the society any further, even on bourgeois terms.  There is, therefore, only the question of how the regime will be brought down, and by whom.

The question is, is the geopolitical axis dominant?  Is it this, rather than domestic antagonisms, which will determine the outcome of this revolt and its meaning?

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When you hear from ordinary Syrian activists, and not the exiles in the SNC, you don't hear a lot of support for an invasion or bombing: quite the contrary.  The trouble is that there have been groups advocating intervention, and there has been a degree of intervention already.  And while the rank and file have never been won over to the strategy of armed imperialist intervention, there isn't much unity over what strategy should be pursued and to what precise end.  The question then is which forces can dominate and impose their line.

Before addressing this, one should say something about the organisational basis of this revolution.  It isn't the leadership of the Syrian National Council (SNC), whose role as an 'umbrella' group belies their lack of influence on the ground.  At the most basic, cellular level, it is the local coordinating committees (LCCs).  A section of these, about 120 of them, have recognised the SNC since it was founded, and have some formal representation.  In fact, they are grossly under-represented in the SNC structure compared to the liberal and Islamist opposition groups.  And they don't make a very effective representation within the SNC structures, which means that when the SNC speaks it isn't necessarily speaking for the grassroots.  However, a larger chunk, some 300 LCCs, have declined to recognise or affiliate to the SNC.  The LCCs have opposed imperialist intervention, despite the bloodiness of Assad's repression; they have even tended to resist the trend toward militarisation of the uprising.  Now, the LCCs, being localised resistance units based in the population, are not politically or ideologically unified.  There are undoubtedly reactionary elements among them, as well as progressive and just politically indeterminate forces.  So, the question of political representation is significant.

And at the level of political representation, there are various ideologically heterogeneous coalitions and groups. The SNC is understood to be the main 'umbrella' organisation unifying several strands from Kurdish to liberal groups.  The leadership is disproportionately weighted toward exiles, while the actual systems of representation within the SNC are seriously skewed toward the bourgeois liberals and the Muslim Brothers.  That's not the end of the world, given that some people have been invoking 'Al Qaeda' (really?  people on the Left buying into this? Apparently so...) or just sectarian jihadis of one stripe or another.  The fact is that Islamists and liberals are a part of the opposition in most of the old dictatorships of the Middle East, from Tunisia to Algeria to Yemen to Egypt to Bahrain etc etc etc.  But these forces do represent the more conservative and bourgeois wing of the resistance to Assad.  Generally speaking, like the LCCs, they have opposed the strategy of armed struggle - this is one of the reasons for their generally antagonistic relationship with the Free Syrian Army.  But they did favour a strategy of armed intervention until forming an agreement in January with the left-nationalist National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which rejected all imperialist intervention from outside the region: in other words, they would accept help from Arab states, but not from the 'West'. (Caveat: as will become clear, the SNC negotiators did not get this agreement ratified, and it may well be that the issue of imperialist intervention was one of the sticking points.)  

Why, then, did the dominant forces in the SNC look for a time to imperialist intervention?  I think it is obviously because these are not forces that are comfortable with mass mobilisation, least of all with armed mass mobilisation.  A UN-mandated intervention - bombing, coordination with ground forces, etc. - would have solved this problem for them, achieving the objective of bringing down a repressive and moribund regime without mobilising the types of social forces that could challenge their hegemony in a post-Assad regime.  Then they could have been piloted into office as the nucleus of a new regime, a modernising, neoliberal capitalist democracy.  But as the prospects of such an intervention declined, as the grassroots failed to mobilise for some sort of NATO protectorate, and as the emphasis shifted to armed struggle via the Free Syrian Army (FSA) throughout the first half of this year, the SNC has been compelled to respond.  It has developed a military bureau to relate to the FSA, albeit this has produced more claims of attempted manipulation.

Despite its international prominence, however, the SNC is not the only significant political formation organising opposition forces.  The main organisation in which the Syrian left is organised is in the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, mentioned above - also known as the National Coordination Committee (NCC), tout court.  This is the second most widely recognised organisation aside from the SNC, and has a much stronger basis within Syrian society.  It is headquartered in Damascus rather than in Turkey, it has a strong basis in the LCCs and includes Kurdish, nationalist and socialist organisations.  There have been attempts by both the SNC and NCC to overcome their differences and construct a sort of united front against Assad, but their political and strategic differences have made this impossible.  Another factor obstructing unity is the NCC's position within Syria; it is far more exposed to military reprisals by the regime, and thus must pitch its demands very carefully.  This is an important reason why it has emphasised a negotiated settlement as the answer to the crisis.

Also of significance is the Kurdish National Council, created by Kurdish forces in anticipation of having to fight their corner in a post-Assad regime: indeed, the reluctance of the majority of Kurds to actually support the SNC has been a significant factor in the composition and division of labour in the opposition.  For Kurds oppressed in Assad's Syria, who do not automatically trust a future regime dominated by Sunni Arabs to protect minorities, it is seen as far more sensible to turn to a dense network of regional supporters and interests, described very well here.

The lack of unity between any political leadership and the revolutionary base - which extends to a lack of coordination between the coalitions and the armed groups, as we'll discuss in a moment - is a real weakness in the revolution.  Aside from anything else, it makes it harder for the opposition to win over wider layers of the population - because people aren't sure exactly what they'll be supporting, what type of new regime will emerge from the struggle.  There is a real fear of sectarian bloodshed, notwithstanding the cynical way in which the regime manipulates this fear.  The military and civilian opposition leaders have tried to allay this fear, and FSA units say they are working with Allawi forces.  But without a degree of unity and discipline, with the continued disjuncture between the turbulent base and the political leadership, and with Assad's forces heavily outgunning the opposition, this is a powerful disincentive for people to break ranks with the regime.  Moreover, if some greater degree of cohesion and coordination is not reached, then the risk of some force outside the popular basis of the revolt (say, a few generals leading a proxy army) interpolating itself in the struggle and siezing the initiative, is increased.

This is not to argue that the SNC and NCC must converge around a common programme and then somehow impose themselves on the LCCs.  I don't know how the political division of labour in the opposition could be optimised, and unity between the base and the leadership of such a movement would have to be negotiated and constructed on the basis of a recognition of the mutual interests of the social classes and ethnic groups embodied in the movement.  Further, whether a merger would help or hinder the revolution probably depends very much what the agenda is and who is materially dominant in the emerging representative institutions.  It does, however, explain why there have been and will continue to be attempts at forging some sort of unity, despite the ongoing antagonisms and differences between the various forces, and despite the very real problems with the SNC leadership.

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As for the armed contingent, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) has been summarily vilified and demonised by many polemicists.  Consistent with the 'blanket thinking' referred to previously,  the FSA has been deemed a sectarian gang, terrorists, a Saudi-Qatari front, and so on.  The first and most important thing about the FSA is that it is made up of anything between 25,000 and 40,000 assorted rebels - defectors from the armed forces, both soldiers and officers, and various civilians who volunteered to fight.  As such, it is as politically and ideologically variegated a formation as the LCCs.  Nominally, the FSA is led by Colonel Riad al-Asaad, a defector from the air force whose family members have been executed by the regime.  But the reality, as Nir Rosen describes, is more complex: "The FSA is a name endorsed and signed on to by diverse armed opposition actors throughout the country, who each operate in a similar manner and towards a similar goal, but each with local leadership. Local armed groups have only limited communication with those in neighbouring towns or provinces - and, moreover, they were operating long before the summer."  In other words, this is a highly localised, cellular structure with limited cohesion.

Contrary to what has been asserted in some polemics, then, the FSA is not simply a contingent of the SNC.  It formed independently, several months into the uprising, following a series of lethal assaults on protests by the regime, specifically in response to the suppression in Daraa.  It incorporated armed groups that had been operating locally with autonomous leadership for a while.  Its relationship with the SNC, despite attempts by the leaderships to patch over differences, has been strongly antagonistic - largely because of the SNC leadership's opposition to the strategy of armed insurgency and its fears of being unable to control the outcome.  Earlier in the year, a split from the SNC formed briefly over this point, with a group formed within the council to support armed struggle.  Therefore, those who describe the FSA as "the armed wing" of the SNC, as The American Conservative did, are only exposing their ignorance, as well as that blanket-thinking.  The same applies to those who say that the FSA is a Turkish-Saudi-Qatari client.  Undoubtedly, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies have an interest in this struggle.  Certainly, the leadership of the FSA is currently situated in Turkey, and enjoys Turkish support.  And Turkey is a NATO member.  But the extent of any support must be judged to be poor, because by all reports the army remains an extremely loose, and lightly armed force.  Purely on military grounds, the regime has always enjoyed the advantage, and continues to do so.  Moreover, the FSA is just far too disarticulated and heteroclite to be converted into someone's proxy army - unless you assume that any degree of external support automatically makes one a proxy, which strikes me as specious reasoning. 

Finally, there is the question of the FSA's human rights record.  Those who want to oppose the revolt say that the armed insurgents are a bunch of thugs or even - some will actually use this propaganda term - 'terrorists'.  Well, the fact is that the armies have captured and tortured and killed people they believed to be regime supporters or informants. I believe they have blown up regime apparatuses and probably have killed civilians in the process.  My answer?  You can criticise this or that attack, you can say that the Islamists who bombed Damascus and issued a sectarian statement are not allies of revolution.  But you can't keep saying this is a 'civil war' and then express shock when one side, the weaker side, the side that has been attacked and provoked, the side that is ranged against a repressive dictatorship, actually fights a war. 

For the regime is fighting a bitter war for its own survival, and it is destroying urban living areas in the process.  Do you want to go and look at Jadaliyya, and see the kinds of reports they post every day?  Do you want to see the footage of what the Syrian armed forces are doing to residential areas, not to mention to the residents?  Unless you're a pacifist, in which case I respect your opinion but disagree with you (in that patronising way that you will have become used to), the only bases for criticising such tactics are either on pro-regime grounds, or on purely tactical grounds.   Among the tactical grounds are the objection that 1) this is the territory on which the regime is strongest (true, but I think the signs are that this can be overcome), and 2) there is a tendency in militarised conflict for democratic, rank-and-file forces to be squeezed out (not necessarily the case, but a real potentiality in such situations which one doesn't overlook).  Of course, those tactical observations are valid, and people are entitled to their view.  My own sense is that the regime has made it impossible to do anything but launch an armed insurgency and so these problems will just have to be confronted.

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All this raises the question, then: what accounts for the advances being made by the insurgency given its relative military weakness and strategic divisions?  Part of the answer is that there is no surety of continued advance.  It's an extremely unstable situation, wherein the initiative could fall back into the regime forces' hands surprisingly quickly.  The current gains have been chalked up rather quickly, and not without serious cost.  Nonetheless, the dominant factor clearly is the narrowing of the social basis of the regime, and the growing conviction among ruling class elements, as well as the aspiring middle classes, that Assad and the state-capitalist bloc that rules Syria can neither keep control, nor update the country's productive capacity, nor reform its rampantly corrupt and despotic political system. 

Much has been made of Assad's supposed popularity, and the fact that he does have a significant social base.  Even if the signs are now that the core bases of his regime are starting to split, the durability of the pro-Assad bulwark has to be encountered and understood.  Recently, there was a Yougov poll of Syrians, which Jonathan Steele drew attention to in the Guardian.  55% of those Syrians polled said they wanted Assad to stay, and the number one reason they gave for saying this was fear for the future of their country.  Now, you can take or leave a poll conducted under such circumstances.  After all, the poll was conducted across the whole Arab world, with only 97 of its respondents based in Syria.  How reliable can it be?  And it would seem pedantic and beside the point to expect anyone targeted by Assad's forces to pay any heed to it.  Nonetheless, there's a real issue here in that at least a sizeable plurality of people are more worried by what will happen after Assad falls than by what Assad is doing now. 

A significant factor in this, as mentioned, is the problem of sectarianism.  There is no inherent reason why a country as ethnically and religiously diverse as Syria should suffer from sectarianism: this is something that has to be worked on, and actively produced.  The Ba'ath regime certainly didn't invent sectarianism, but in pivoting its regime on an alliance between the Alawi officer corps and the Sunni bourgeoisie, it did represent itself as the safeguard against a sectarian bloodbath and has constantly played on this fear ever since, even while it has brutally repressed minorities.  Given the breakdown of the class and ethnic alliance making up the regime's base, sectarianism as a disciplinary technology is one of the last hegemonic assets the regime possesses.  The importance of opposition forces being explicitly anti-sectarian (as has been seen repeatedly) can thus hardly be over-stated.  At the same time, fear of imperialist intervention and some sort of Iraq-like devastation being visited on the country, is also real.  Syria, as the host of many of Iraq's refugees, experienced up close the effects of that trauma.  Nor is there much in Libya's situation today that I can say I would recommend to the people of Syria.  So, it has been of some importance that despite serious bloodshed the LCCs and NCC maintained resistance to the SNC approach of trying to forge an alliance with imperialism.

If you observe the tendencies in each case of revolution, you see amid concrete differences important similarities.  For example, there were considerable differences between the Mubarak and Assad regimes and in the tempo and pattern of resistance and opposition.  This was not just in terms of foreign policy and the relationship to US imperialism, but also in terms of the prominence of the state as a factor in neoliberal restructuring which was far more important in Syria, the impact of the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing flows of refugees and fighters, the role of an organised labour movement in sparking rebellion which has so far played very little role in Syria (strikes have tended to be organised mainly be professional or petty bourgeois groups  - another serious limitation faced by the revolution), and the role of military repression and insurgency in each state.

Even so, there are broad convergences which point to a general pattern.  Most important of these are:

1) within these societies, a secular tendency toward a widening of social inequality, coupled with a narrowing at the top of society, resulting from the imposition of neoliberal accumulation patterns.

2) the fraying of the class alliances sustaining the regime as a consequence. 

3) the exhaustion of the regime's resources for adaptation, and intelligent reform, such that all concessions come far too late and after such immense repression that it is hard to take them seriously.

4) the declining capacity of the state to maintain consent (or rather, encircle and marginalise dissent) either through material consessions or terror.

5) the re-emergence of long-standing opposition forces in new configurations during the period immediately before and since January 2011, with middle class liberal, Islamist and Arab nationalist forces playing a key role. 

6) the emergence of forms of popular organisation - militias in some cases, revolutionary councils in others - performing aspects of organisation that would ordinarily be carried out by the state, and assuming a degree of popular legitimacy in contention with the regime.

7) the defection of significant sections of the ruling class and state personnel, who attempt to play a dominant, leading role in the anti-regime struggle and assume control of reformed apparatuses afterward.

My estimation is that in the context of the global crisis, and amid a general weakening of US imperialism - notwithstanding the relatively swift coup in Libya - these regimes are going to continue to breakdown, and opposition is going to continue to develop in revolutionary forms, ie in forms that challenge the very legitimacy of the state itself.  The old state system, based around a cleavage between a chain of pro-US dictatorships and an opposing rump of nominally resistant dictatorships, is what is collapsing here.  That is something that the advocates of negotiations as a panacea here might wish to reflect on.  Certainly, I have no problem with negotiations as a tactic, particularly in situations of relative weakness.  But these are revolutionary crises inasmuch as they severely test the right of the old rulers to continue to rule in the old ways. 

These processes, not just in Syria but across the Middle East, are richly overdetermined by the various crises of global capitalism, which are so deep, so protracted, and giving rise to much social upheaval, that it is beyond the capacity of even the most powerful states to bring them under control.  Into these complex processes, as we have seen, imperialist powers can impose themselves in various, often destructive, ways; but those commentators who spend all their time charting the agenda of US imperialism and its webs of influence in the region would do well to scale back and get a wider perspective.  There is no reason at this moment to think that imperialist intervention is, or is going to be, the dominant axis determining the outcome and meaning of this process.

Soumayya Ghannouchi, the Guardian columnist and daughter of the Tunisian An-Nahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, argues for a coalition of socialists, liberals and Islamists to overthrow the Tunisian state. Rachid himself argues for exactly this approach in his interview with the FT:

We cannot bring out a democratic system out of this corrupt, dictatorial system. We have to put an end to the authoritarian system and start a new one. Basing this transition on Article 56 or 57 is a continuation of the old system. The constitution was a tyranny, the state was reduced to one man, who had in his hands the executive, judicial and legislative powers and was not accountable to anyone. How can such a constitution point towards building a democratic system, even as a starting point.

The first step of building a democratic system is to build a democratic constitution. For this we need a founding council for rebuilding the state, one in which political parties, the trade unions and the civil society join. This council will rebuild the democratic constitution and will be the basis for building the democratic system.

Several ministers have withdrawn from the 'unity government' led by the Prime Minister and now acting president Mohammed Ghannouchi, due to the inclusion of several hacks from the former ruling party, the Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD), in the government. The ministers who have left are three UGTT leaders, apparently under pressure from protesters demanding an end to the RCD's role in government.

The significance of this is clear. The political elite, the ruling class it is integrated into, and in all probability a phalanx of EU and US diplomats, wanted a constitutional lash-up that would preserve the same basic pyramid of control with some more inclusive, and slightly more representative, structures. The trade union federation, once it showed its ability to act independently, defy the paramilitaries and win over at least the rank and file of the army, was always going to be essential to that. The ruling class is clearly weak and divided, its institutions of repression unable to keep control. In some cities, the population has been able to effectively take full over. No government that does not include organised labour in some capacity will have any legitimacy. It seems unlikely that the mere inclusion of a couple of mainstream social democrats, such as Najib Chebbi (Progressive Democratic Party) and Mustafa Ben Jabar (Union of Justice and Labour), will be sufficient to do the trick.

So the class character of the revolt is coming more clearly to the fore. The New York Times reports that the character of the protests has been changing, as middle class layers have accepted the new situation and celebrated a 'new freedom', while those still protesting are "more working class". But this is also a blow to imperialism, in the sense that it will prove difficult to impose a regime that simply cleaves to the solutions of the IMF and EU.

This is precisely one of the reasons why the working class protesters want the RCD out. Which is not to say that the IMF and EU will lose their leverage over Tunisia. Nor is it likely in the immediate term that Tunisia would withdraw from its treaty commitments to Africom, and thus from its role in the wider structure of US imperial control in the African continent. But if, as seems increasingly possible, the revolt spreads and takes down some other pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan or Algeria, then Obama has problems. One can well imagine him, despite his ongoing commitment to aggression in Afghanistan and Pakistan, going down as a Carter-style weakling if a few US embassies in the region start to look vulnerable. Which is why I would expect some sort of panicked intervention by the US and its local proxies to be going on even as you read.

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 revolution in Tunisia that began on 18th December went from being almost completely ignored in the British newspapers to being a sensational story of bloodbaths, gang violence, Israeli worries about "stability", and pleas for "restraint" from the foreign secretary in the space of a few days. At the top of the agenda for many newspapers has been the implications for tourism, Tunisia's number one growth industry, and thus for holidaymaking Britons. No surprises here. Whitey's travelogues in Arabia form a mainstay of the Orientalist canon, and the reduction of Tunisia to scenery and troublesome natives is in keeping with tradition.

Tunisia's development since the Bourguiba days has been of interest to Euro-American journalists and academics principally in terms of how well its elite has been trained by enlightened tutelage, how reasonably it has imitated the white intellect and internalises and articulates 'Western political concepts' such as constitutional sovereignty, democracy, and free markets, with the emphasis strongly on the latter. Bourguiba was approved for aligning with the US during the Cold War, opposing Nasser's leadership in the region, and for attempting to maintain a space for economic liberalism (ie private capital accumulation) even when the state had to constantly intervene to make up for a weak bourgeoisie. If he ultimately failed in his attempts to reform Tunisia's economy along neoliberal lines, and defeat the growing Islamist opposition, he is nevertheless fondly remembered, where he is remembered at all, in the newspapers and scholarly journals of the West. Ben Ali has been the recipient of benediction in the US and Europe first for his role in using state terror to break up the old corporatist order, and brutally forcing neoliberalism on a recalcitrant working class, and secondly for his pro-American stance in the context of the 'war on terror'. With Ben Ali overthrown in a revolt led by the organised working class, those ruling class forces that have hitherto feigned an interest in Middle East democracy are worried by the potential consequences for Algeria, Egypt and the other pro-American dictatorships in the region, a concern they choose to express in the idiom of 'stability'. And their fear is justified. For it concentrates within it the elements of the twin crises of global capitalism, and of US imperialism.

***

Ben Ali's dictatorship, as the above suggests, took power as part of a global reconfiguration in capitalist property relations, as well as in response to specific domestic problems for the Tunisian ruling class. The latter have roots in the weaknesses of the state and the corporatist system built up under the Sahelian lawyer Habib Bourguiba, with the Neo-Destour party at its apex. The Neo-Destour emerged in 1934, as a competitor to the liberal-constitutionalist Old Destour in resisting French colonialism. The Old Destour was too moderate, and too effectively contained by the colonial powers, to be effective. Bourguiba did not himself initially seek full independence. Autonomous government and equality between Arabs and Frenchmen would have been his preference, but this was not a policy that was commensurate with the colonists' ends. Every effort at moderation on the part of anticolonial elites, every attempt to form a rapprochement with the colonists, seems to have failed. Thus, more often than not, the nationalist leadership was forced into militancy that it did not really want.

As with most nationalist parties resisting colonial rule in the Middle East, the leadership of the Neo-Destour was initially comprised of a small section of the intelligentsia, university graduates who resented the colonial jackboot and the Tunis-based grand familles who connived with the colonists. These educated elites were offspring of the emerging Sahel bourgeoisie, who needed to mobilise the peasantry and the emerging proletariat, without fundamentally altering the relations of subjection and exploitation in which the latter were held. As usual, there was an emphasis on regenerating national culture, and modernising the better to resist colonial domination. But, there was also the particular element of hatred for the crusading policy of the French Catholic church under Cardinal Lavigerie, the French empire's supernal advocate. Thus, the Neo-Destours emphasised the protection of Islamic traditions, attempting to mobilise them as elements of the national identity they sought to 'restore'.

From this nucleus grew a mass party, incorporating the Tunis proletariat, the emerging bourgeoisie and peasants from the interior. By 1937, the party had 100,000 members. The full-time cadres tended, like the leadership, to be university graduates. But while the leadership were products of the Franco-Arab education system, the intermediate cadres were graduates of the Zaytuna mosque-university. The new mass party out-manouevred its old Destour rivals, and participated in mass anti-colonial riots in 1938 alongside the CGTT, the pro-Destour trade union federation set up in opposition to the CGT which was dominated by the French Socialists. The alliance between the Neo-Destour and the trade union movement resulted from the routine discrimination against Tunisian workers by colonial powers, thus giving their demands a nationalist aspect. This alliance would last well into independence. The riots were met with extreme violence, as colonial police shot dead 112 people and wounded 62 more. Aside from repression, one feature of colonial life that made resistance difficult was the designs of the Fascist power Italy on Tunisia. Mussolini had been encouraging Italian agents to scope out the prospects for hijacking nationalist resistance to French rule, and the Destourians were wary of such predation. One of the sordid betrayals of the Popular Front government of France was to refuse to free the colonies, arguing that it could not do so in the case of Tunisia because it would immediately be taken over by Mussolini. Bourguiba arued that a free Tunisia would readily make an alliance with the French against fascism. And while the betrayal of the French socialists and communists led many rank and file Destourians to sympathise with the Axis, the Neo-Destour leadership's hostility to the Fascist powers prevailed throughout WWII. This ensured that even after the Italian Fascists had freed Bourguiba from a French jail, he spoke out against any illusions in an alliance with the Axis powers to defeat colonialism. Instead, he declared his support for France, and called for an alliance with the Allied powers.

It should be said that this stance did not hasten the end of colonialism when the war ended. The colonial powers continued to repress the anticolonial front. Bourguiba sought and gained the support of the newly found Arab League, but otherwise diplomatic initiatives yielded little. The French authorities made minor concessions, such as forming a new government with an equal number of French and Tunisian ministers under the formal sovereignty of the bey (monarch). But this was in keeping with the treaty of protectorate, not a deviation from it. The Destourists were compelled to launch a guerilla war against the French, beginning in 1952. Coupled with joint action by the trade union movement, the struggle finally won independence in 1956.

***

The new regime under Bourguiba and the Neo-Destour would be a self-consciously modernising, secular, republican one. Though it introduced some redistributive measures, the new regime was bourgeois reformist rather than socialist. The trade union leadership supported the regime, but on the basis of principles of tadamuniyya, essentially cross-class solidarity in the interests of the nation. This was in no way inconsistent with widespread capitalist support for Bourguiba, or with the general trend toward corporatist rule in much of the world, or with the version of nationalism which the Neo-Destour propagated. Bourguiba's education had inculcated in him a romantic view of French nationalism, which he venerated and sought to reproduce in Tunisia. His conception of the rational state was Napoleonic in most respects, with the single exception that it was to be non-militarist, as Bourguiba and his confederates could see no way in which Tunisia could be an effective military power, even regionally. Its foreign policy alliances would be pragmatic but tend toward support for the US and Europe, as Tunisia's ruling class generally stood aloof from the Arab nationalism sweeping the Middle East and North Africa at the time. Bourguiba worked hard to rebuild relations with the old colonial power, even after the emergence of the European Common Market started to raise barriers to Tunisian exports.

The Neo-Destour party's platform initially consisted of a series of reforms designed to overcome the weaknesses inherited from France's predatory rule. The aim was to establish an independent centre of capital accumulation in Tunisia and, as had been the case with late coming capitalist powers in Europe, this required strong state intervention to cultivate and nurture the very bourgoisie that would become the new ruling class. French colonists singularly uninterested in such goals, had declined to develop an industrial base in Tunisia, instead focusing their surplus-extraction activities on agrarian and mining economies. So, the immediate course was to try to combine the necessary state control over utilities and direction of key assets, as well as the incorporation of organised labour into the state, with a certain amount of economic liberalism.

This was interrupted by a brief period of 'socialism', modelled on the experiments in Egypt and Algeria, during the Sixties. The party was renamed the Parti Socialist Destourien (PSD). A new minister of planning was appointed in 1964, with responsibility for creating a new economic policy based on agricultural cooperatives and industrialization led by the public sector. The minister in question was Ahmed Ben Salah, former UGTT leader. The trade union leadership, which had longed pledged its support as a crucial element in the power base of Bourguiba's government, had always been happy to participate in corporatist rule, and these reforms promised to raise the bargaining power of labour as well as improving social welfare. In truth, as in much of the Middle East and North Africa, such avowedly socialist measures would have accelerated the development of a bourgeoisie, albeit one integrated into the state. But those elements of the capitalist class and mercantile elite that had formed another crucial component of Bourguiba's coalition were aghast, and the reforms came to little. In 1967, Israel delivered a knock-out blow to Egypt and its allies, and a lynchpin of radical Arab nationalism was devastated. Globally, neoliberalism was starting to emerge as a plausible solution to the existing impediments to capital accumulation. Ben Salah was dismissed in 1970, and eventually jailed. Thus, the 'socialist' experience came to an end - but the corporatist order remained in place.

In the 1970s, the regime embarked on a bid to liberalise the economy and pursue export-led growth. Import-substitution programmes didn't stimulate growth due to weak domestic demand, and capital fared poorly in international markets. Foreign direct investment was in capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive sectors, so did not tend to improve employment. The country was suffering from a serious balance-of-payments deficit, only overcome by the temporary expedient of borrowing and rising hydrocarbon revenues. Demand for well educated, skilled Tunisian labour in Libya and the Gulf also meant that labour remittances boosted national incomes. This was the reason for the attempted liberalisation programme. But as in other corporatist societies, a radical left-wing was emerging in the trade union movement, challenging the wage freezes agreed by the union bureaucracy through the 'social progress Charter', and potentially posing a serious threat to the regime's hegemony. Left-wingers in the party and elements of the state bureaucracy were also hostile to the reforms for different reasons. Thus, the neoliberal reforms foundered on resistance led by organised labour. A general strike in 1978 had to be put down by the armed forces. Further confrontations included the food riots in 1983 and 1984. As oil revenues dried up, demand for Tunisian labour fell, and Tunisia's debt credibility collapsed, the class basis of Bourguiba's corporatist state was fracturing.

The International Monetary Fund intervened in 1986 with a 'stabilization' programme predicated on structural reforms such as privatization. To achieve this liberalisation, the trade unions would be politically neutralised, and the state's relationship to labour would take a bureaucratic-authoritarian turn, in order to break the possible sources of resistance to the new order. But it would require the dictatorial rule of the former military officer, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, to impose this agenda. Ben Ali thus took power when a couple of medics attending Bourguiba conveniently declared him medically incompetent, and thus constitutionally incapable of continuing to rule. The former head of the Italian military secret police claims the credit for having organised this smooth succession, on behalf of Bettino Craxi's Socialist administration. But it could not have worked if Ben Ali didn't have the backing of a powerful faction within the state and, on the face of it, a saleable agenda. That agenda was democracy.

***

From the second his 'bloodless coup' was consummated on 7 November 1987, Ben Ali pledged that under his rule, the country would be democratised - just as he has been promising for the last few weeks until his final flight to the welcoming arms of the Saudi monarchy, a long-standing refuge for beaten despots. He would respect human rights, he said, and insist on the rule of law where Bourguiba had flouted it. This was his serenade to a country, and a region, on the brink of change. It seemed at the time that Algeria was about to go through a similar process of democratisation. Ben Ali revamped the ruling party, which he now called the Rassemblement Constitutionel Democratique, and amnestied thousands of political prisoners in his first year. He ratified the UN convention on torture, abolished the presidency for life, relaxed laws on the formation of parties and associations, and formed a new National Pact with the leading political and social organisations in the country. This period of relative laxity lasted for less than the two years it took for Ben Ali to coordinate rigged elections in 1989, from which his party emerged with 100% of the seats.

The UGTT, meanwhile, was effectively coopted again. Worse than that, it was subjugated. Union salaries had long been paid for by the state, but one source of independent action was the autonomous budget, paid for by a 1% tax on workers' wages, given to the unions each year. This budget was withheld after the 1984-5 food riots. The leadership around Habib Achour was removed, the old guard purged. Under Bourguiba first, then Ben Ali, the union effectively became a technocratic partner of the government in a bureaucratic process of implementing policy, rather than a labour union bargaining over wages and conditions. Politically, the left-wing was defeated in favour of a centre-left slate, reflecting an accomodationist attitude after 1989. The old union leadership was coopted, but could still put up a fight if pushed. The new union bureaucracy under Ismail Sahbani was not even capable of that. They were the Blairites of Tunisian trade unionism. The 'National Pact' itself, though MERIP reports it as an example of inclusion in the early days, was part of this subordination. It required that the unions accept new conditions that would dramatically weaken their power, exposing their members to wage loss, insecurity and price rises. Only a union that had been suitably beaten could be incorporated into such an agenda.

Aside from the trade unions, the two main potential sources of opposition to the new regime were the Communists and the Islamists, and the government did not waste any time in tackling them. MERIP reports that the state "stepped up its repression against an-Nahdha and the Tunisian Communist Workers' Party (POCT). Late-night raids and house-to-house searches became commonplace in some neighborhoods. Stories of torture under interrogation and military court convictions multiplied. The campaign to crush an-Nahdha intensified in 1991 following an attack on an RCD office in the Bab Souika area of Tunis and after the government claimed that security forces had uncovered a plot to topple the regime. Susan Waltz reports that the government's extensive dragnet hauled in more than 8,000 individuals between 1990 and 1992".

Vilifying their political opponents as 'terrorist' was a singularly effective way for the state to disarm criticism of its repressive measures. Dyab Jahjah has written that protesters in Tunisia fear the state will unleash its repertoire of false flag techniques today - indeed, even today there are rumours (more than rumours now) of agents being captured in the capital. The internal security apparatus was also continually expanded, long after any plausible threat had been neutralised. Opponents were hounded with the use of phone-tapping, threats, beatings and assassinations. Torture was practised systematically, with hundreds of cases documented by domestic and international human rights agencies. Despite this, Ben Ali still claimed to be interested in democratising Tunisia, over time. After the 1994 elections, again held in rigged circumstances that guaranteed the continued control of the ruling party, Ben Ali argued that democratic transition had to be done gradually, in order to make it compatible with the country's long-term development and to avoid letting the Islamists in. But, he insisted, democracy was still on his agenda.

Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions, acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the war against 'terrorism' throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah.

The results of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism for capital were impressive in their way: GDP on a par with the European periphery, low public-sector deficit, controlled inflation and renewed credit-worthiness. The financial sector was reformed and initially experienced a mini-boom. Significant sections of the public sector were turned over for profitable investment. A total of 160 state owned enterprises have been privatised. The stock market capitalisation of the 50 largest companies listed on the Bourse de Tunis was worth $5.7bn by 2007. Ben Ali's famously, corruptly wealthy family also made a mint from the boom. He himself became a darling of the EU and the US, conferring global prestige on his regime. The cost of all this to the working class, though concealed in some of the official figures, was just as significant. High unemployment, growing inequality, the removal of subsidies for the poor, rising housing costs and weaker welfare protections are among the added burdens of the Tunisian working class in the neoliberal era.

This does not mean that the average working class person has experienced an absolute decline in income throughout this period. In fact, the development of the cities has meant more people moving from the poorer rural areas to cities and towns where absolute poverty is less common. What it means is that wage growth has been suppressed by the government, and made conditional upon productivity rises. In the private sector, liberalisation means that the discipline of the market has been used to extract higher productivity from the workforce. The total effect is that more of the wealth that has been generated has gone into the pockets of the very rich. In simple terms, it means that the rate of exploitation has been increased. For as long as the political opposition was effectively suppressed, and for as long as the trade union movement was effectively subjugated, the old order could continue. But that in turn depended on the regime's ability to boast that it was creating a wealthier economy that would eventually benefit everyone. That is, the viability of the regime rested on the viability of neoliberal institutions, both domestically and globally - and that is exactly what has taken a knock.

***

The first real signs of an independent civil society movement with trade unions operating separately from the state came on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Then, the trade union movement organised antiwar demonstrations - relatively small in scale, due to repression and widespread arrests. There has also been activism in solidarity with Gaza, where some space to organise has been made possible by the regime's traditional two-state position. US power in the region has experienced a crisis with the occupation of Iraq and, to an extent, with the failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Had these ventures been successful on their own terms and at low cost, then the US might already have new client dictatorships in place in Iran, Lebanon and Syria. But this crisis helped rebuild oppositional movements across the region, and contributed, alongside domestic factors, to the emergence of a mass, militant working class movement against Mubarak in 2007. It started to weaken the chain of pro-American rulers across the Middle East.

However, it was to be the global capitalist crisis, and its concentrated regional effects, that was to do for Ben Ali. The riots began in Sidi Bouzid when Mohammed Bouzazi poured petrol over his person and set himself on fire in protest at the police's confiscation of his fruit and vegetable cart. He was unemployed, and trying to make a living the only way he could. Unemployment was already high during the boom - it has exploded since the crisis began. In 2009, unemployment was officially estimated to be around 14%, far below the real rate. The suffering has spread beyond the working class and affected the growing layer of university graduates. The khobzistes (unemployed) responded to the suicidal protest of this poor man, saw their own fate in his, and exploded. Food prices have also been driven up by a number of factors - wheat droughts, soaring oil costs, speculative bubbles. Millions of workers have been affected by this, another source of the growing protests.

But it is the intervention of the trade union movement, its bureaucracy hitherto prepared to act in conjunction with and as a tool of the regime, that decisively changed matters. The repressive response of the police to the protests, which had resulted in dozens of killings, was the immediate cause of the trade unions' involvement. The clampdown provoked the unions to embark on a general strike, contributing to the protest which resulted in Ben Ali's flight. But the repression itself highlighted all of the complex social conflicts that, with the application of bureaucratic violence, the police had been trying to solve. And it also exposed the weakness of the regime, especially when Ben Ali began to pose, once more, as a tireless friend of democracy, who was just about to bring about this new era of freedom if only people would have patience. The trade unions thus demanded not only the freedom to organise, which is a huge step in itself, but also a 'national dialogue' on the necessary economic and social reforms - in other words, organised labour was asserting its right to have a say in the future development of the country in light of this crisis. You can say this is harking back to its Bourguibist days, but it's becoming far more significant than that. Finally, sections of the military rank and file began to defect, and the rapprochement between the soldiers and the protesters indicated that the ruling elite was losing the battle. The social base beneath the Ben Ali regime had shattered, leaving him with only his security personnel and the super rich to support him. Probably, at that point, the ruling class pulled the plug, and Ben Ali escaped.

Now Jordanians and Algerians have joined the fight, motivated by many of the same issues. Palestinians are expressing hope and praise over this rebellion, as well they might. The forces of their oppression have been shaken, their regional allies emboldened. It can't be long before Mubarak has to face down another surging rebellion. The Tunisian ruling class, however, is still in power. It is weakened, afraid, hesitant. But it is in power. US imperialism and its Zionist client retain the capacity to act, as does Saudi Arabia, one of the vanguards of reaction in the region. Ben Ali's internal security apparatus is unlikely to have disintegrated (looks like they're fighting with the army on his behalf even now), and it seems likely that he was forced out not only by elements of the state bureaucracy, but also by international players with an interest in Tunisia's development. Still, the protests continue, and the 'acting president' probably won't be acting for long. The revolution has an organised core of trade unionists and left-wing activists, not to mention some of the Islamists who have arrived late on the scene, but it has not yet convoked a new political leadership. What it has done, potentially, is begin the process that will clear out the repressive apparati, opening the way for the emergence of the kinds of mass movements that can overthrow not just America's row of dictators, but also the system which they uphold.

Guest post by Kevin Ovenden:

Over the last quarter of a century the regime in Tunis has narrowed its social base. It swung behind US hegemony in the region. Its main policy internally became police repression rather than any kind of accommodation or integration of the constitutional Islamists, the union and the left. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer families at top, including the extended family of Leila Trabelsi, the ex-president’s wife. The story of Ben Ali and Trabelsi’s rise is fascinating and tells you everything about the amoral, corrupt cliques that have so much power across the region.

He was a motorcycle cop who climbed through the bloody ranks to become head of security. He was a filthy piece of work - the Lavrenti Beria of Tunisia. He had a penchant for using his position to take whatever woman he wanted, though inducements or directly through rape - think of Claude Raines’s character in Casablanca without the charm, bons mots or pangs of conscience in the final reel.

A friend of mine, the wife of a senior Palestinian official of the time, recalls her stay in Tunis.

Ben Ali followed her car all through the backstreets until she came to a hotel. There, she got out, told him who she was and that her husband had no compunctions about suitable reprisals should he not back off. Forlorn, he did.

Leila washed hair in a coiffeurs. She was attractive and presented well in European society. So the owner used her as a currier to smuggle high value items in from Paris. She was caught and put in the police cells. A grubby officer saw her and told his boss, Ben Ali that there was an attractive young woman in custody. She was brought to him. He told her she would be released if she agreed to be his mistress (he was already married). Under what was clearly some duress, she agreed.

She bore two daughters. He rose through various positions - ambassador, interior minister and the like - and at her insistence secretly married her in a civil ceremony in, iirc, Poland: the then Tunisian president had outlawed polygamy. Then he made a pitch for the top job. She was expecting their son.

He moved in to the Presidential Palace with his official wife, but Leila kicked up such a stink that he divorced and she moved in. Her brother, a small time mafiosi, overnight was transformed into one of Tunisia’s leading businessmen. Stellar advancement beckoned for the rest of the Trabelsi clan as Tunisia itself sank into the nightmare of police repression, corruption on a Croesian scale and slavish adherence to US/French policy interests, all glossed over in Washington, London and Paris, of course, as they encouraged tourism and then latterly the enforced one way flights of rendition to the black jails of the Tunisian desert.

So - an endearing first family for life. Somehow I don’t hear a Llyod-Webber musical in the wings, a la Evita: Eva Peron had in contrast infinite redeeming features.

Ben Ali was not alone at the top of a pyramid of sadistic repression, grand corruption internally and pimping the country externally. The core of the movement of demonstrations and strikes is surely right in focusing the next steps on the complete clearing out of all those tainted by association with the regime. The caretaker President is already being targeted and the protests continuing.

It is enormously significant that one of the most pro-western and seemingly stable dictators in the Arab world has fallen in a revolution. Only belatedly do events seem to be entering the calculus of Western policy makers and of potentates and princes in the Middle East. Sarkozy was looking forward to playing kingmaker in the unfolding crisis in another former French possession, Lebanon, as Western forces vainly try to get their ducks in a row to isolate Hizbollah and turn back the strengthening alliance between Turkey, Syria and Iran, thus shoring up their own interests and those of Israel.

Just when they were starting to cohere a policy in the Levant, however shot through with wishful-thinking, the first revolution in the wider region for three decades enters the equation. It’s a funny old world as someone once put it.

*****

According to friends who I've just spoken to by phone, there is now a sharpening focus on dismantling the Mukhabarat and most repressive security apparatus and on the driving out the most reviled and corrupt members of the elite. The army and securitat are very largely intact and the barely formed emergency government is seeking to up the presence on the streets to bring the movement to heal. The second wave of the uprising is now taking place. The regime still lacks an interlocutor with the authority to calm the movement in the foolish hope of coming to an accommodation with what is essentially Ben Ali's apparatus sans Ben Ali. Discussion - largely semi-formal - is taking place everywhere in gatherings in neighbourhoods, syndicates, mosques and some larger workplaces.