Press Association/AP/Nasser Nasser. All rights reserved.The question of the Egyptian revolution’s future has become as much a
cliché as the discourse on its utopian history. The former is as excessive in
its pessimism as the latter is in its optimism. Although neither abide by
empirical rationale, both are politically understandable.
But before asking the classical question: “does the
Egyptian revolution still have a future?”; let us first agree that such a
pessimistically oriented question, or rather proposition, is engrained in and
stems from a wider and more comprehensive history of Egypt and the revolution
as independent concepts. We do not give rise to such propositions, for history
thrusts them upon us as questions nagging for answers, while hiding its own
answers within the questions it imposes. So let us not repeat after the
‘written-by-the-victorious’ history what it wants us to keep repeating; and
rather seek hidden impulses beneath the surface of contemporary understandings
of the Egyptian revolution.
That a huge number of Egyptians took to the streets in
2011 was a necessary moment, a proposition that forced itself. Other
propositions were later born out of that momentous rupture. But it was not
exactly a rupture; not a total break with the past. It is only an attempt at rupture, better yet a crack.
A revolution is an incomplete rupture; a rupture in
the making; a groping for answers yet impervious to immediate answers. If the
act of revolting took place, it was only a call for the rupture that had been
there. The call did not beget it, only called for it. To employ a Derridean –
above all a Marxian – term, the revolution is a ‘spectre’, always there if
unseen, waiting to be conjured up or to conjure itself up. But the call was
equally a necessary call; a call that united otherwise mutually hostile groups,
politicised the apolitical and neutralised the anti-political.
Will the attempt at rupture answer the call of
democracy? An answer to this question is conditional. We cannot respond to it
unless we dig a little deeper and ask: will democracy answer the people’s call?
Or dig a bit further and ask: was the people’s call a “genuine” call for
democracy?
If the above is ambiguous, it is only because I did
not make myself clearer by drawing on a few lessons of history. But before I go
about doing this, allow me to resolve few theoretical ambiguities that have a
direct bearing on our topic.
To begin with, let us agree that the word ‘state’ is
an abstraction, i.e. it is only understood through its attributes. Thus, the
state is state power, a wielding of the state apparatus (both repressive and
ideological), namely its machinery of persuasion, surveillance and repression
that ensures the reproduction of a status
quo, a mode of economic, social and political production. A
revolution is anattempt to summon a rupture to
the state apparatus; a redefinition of the raisons
d'état that
preserves the status
quo. But such an attempt seldom initially succeeds. Here, it
is worth quoting Louis Althusser at some length:
"We know that the State apparatus may survive, as
is proved by bourgeois ‘revolutions’ in nineteenth-century France (1830, 1848),
by coups
d’état (2 December, May 1958), by collapses of the State
(the fall of the Empire in 1870, of the Third Republic in 1940), or by the
political rise of the petty bourgeoisie (1890-95 in France), etc., without the
State apparatus being affected or modified: it may survive political events
which affect the possession of State power…Even after a social revolution like
that of 1917, a large part of the State apparatus survived after the seizure of
State power by the alliance of the proletariat and the small peasantry: Lenin
repeated the fact again and again."
Indeed, there were moments in history, though brief
and with mixed results, when the rupture was realised. After all, a revolution
is a protest against rulers’ estrangement from their subjects. The more
profound the estrangement, the more intense and unyielding the protest, and the
closer appears the rupture. But what the revolutionaries in Egypt bitterly
learned was that protesting is more of a sign of discontent than an actual
contestation; thus the now glamourous cliché used by almost all diverse political
actors on the Egyptian scene: “protesting is not enough”.
The calls in June 2013 were not a breaking of silence. They were calls for the reinstitution of silence.
The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia offers great
insights in this regard. Like that of France prior to the French Revolution of
1789, the Russian aristocracy suffered from paralysis, a function of years of
discussions separated from any obligation to take productive decisions, let
alone crystallise them into plans of action. The resultant lacuna was naturally
filled by men the likes of Lenin and Stalin, with the vision not only to wrest
control from the jaws of anarchy, but also to consolidate their rule through
iron discipline.
Their opponents had no recourse other than an archaic
habit of obedience that had collapsed, and a long-held patriotism that had been
dissolved thanks to the despotic Czars. Revolutionary millennial fancies
supplemented by a clear-headed philosophy enabled the Bolsheviks to draw
citizens to their side, through political maneuvering on the one hand and
infusing them with vigour about a utopian future on the other. Clearly, in
times of uncertainty the people are in dire need of those who promise order and
solidarity, even if their ultimate objectives are questionable. The Bolsheviks
promised both and the rupture was partially realised.
To say that the Bolshevik hold on power marked the end
of ideology for the Russians is to ignore the glasnost and perestroika
initiated by Gorbachev in the 1980s. I do not intend to share Fukuyama’s rather
hasty conclusion that the demise of Marxism-Leninism marked the end of history
either. It is always futile to attempt to put a full stop to history. No sooner
do scholars – and masses – rest satisfied with their assertions than history
disappoints them.
This is exactly what happened in the Arab world in
2011. Although there were predictions of a building resentment in some camps,
the tide of Arab uprisings came as a shock to most Arabs (including the
revolutionaries and political activists themselves), more so to the westerners.
The fact that the revolutionaries’ call for democracy came to the liking of
end-of-history scholars is not a sufficient proof of their ‘triumph of the
west’ theory, for it accounted neither for the rise of political Islam nor for
the fierce resistance battle waged by military generals (i.e. the survival of
the state apparatus).
During the year Morsi was in office, we heard
desperate calls for a return to the pre-2011 period, a return to so-called
stability. Those calls were even intensified after the overthrow of Morsi. They
were not calls for the mere overthrow of Morsi and the restoration of the
democratic transition. They were rather calls for cleaning up the whole
revolutionary mess. What is more interesting is that these calls brought
together the silent 'couch potatoes' who had no stakes in the 2011 uprising to
begin with and the very revolutionaries who were panicked by the vivid demise
of their end-of-history revolutionary project.
Some people like to attach those calls to
counter-revolutionary forces. It makes sense, for who else would have wanted to
revoke the democratic gains of the revolution? However, it is hard to determine
these “counter-revolutionary” forces. In fact, being counter-intuitive in
itself, it cannot be understood except in juxtaposition with the
“revolutionary”. But who knows who represents this revolution? There are only
assumptions. As I have discussed
earlier, there was not one homogenous group that revolted for the
same demands.
As such, the calls in June 2013 were not a breaking of
silence. They were calls for the reinstitution of silence, for the restoration
of their feel-good couches. What explains this euphoria for self-oppression?
What accounts for this habit of consent?
Press Association/AP. All rights reserved.Gramscians might have an answer. The ideological
underpinning is a function of hegemony, Gramsci contends, which operates on
various levels and takes many forms, but primarily a function of hegemony as an
appendix to domination (i.e. the exclusive exercise of coercion or ‘armed
force’). The dominant group is at once the hegemonic group, but this shall not
be taken for granted. Sisi understood that better than Mubarak, Tantawi or even
the democratically elected Morsi. When the new and young general rose to power,
he did not merely exercise authority through military tanks. He relied on what
Guillermo O’Donnell, referring to Latin America, coined "delegative
democracy". Refusing to identify with any political faction, partly to
avoid the missteps of his predecessor and partly to strike a nationalist chord,
Sisi has projected himself as a ‘paternal figure’ whose destiny is bound up
with that of the entire nation.
In transcending party politics, the Sisi regime based
itself on obscurantism (including the identities of Sisi’s close advisors) and
is represented as anonymous and apolitical. This surely runs in naked contrast
to representative democracy, but yet in parallel with a castrated form of it,
with parliamentary elections being a critical sideshow to beguile and divert
the people’s attention away from a serious bid to install military authority.
To maintain appearances, he retains electoral politics, but then curtails it
with all sorts of dilatory electoral rules that filter out true independents
and dissidents and ensure the success of those with either material resources
or connections with the seats of power. Besides ensuring politically correct
election results, the ‘crowning’ achievement of all this is political
incoherence, with alienated oppositionists at a loss whether to totally boycott
or participate in political life
and under which banner(s). This makes such a form of delegative democracy a
political deism, in which the voters delegate authority to the president who
then acts as he sees fit.
While the above has only proffered a diagnosis of what
went wrong, what follows is an attempt to show how to put it right, and to put
the question “does the Egyptian revolution still have a future?” to rest. But
first it is important to again acknowledge that the rupture is unavoidable, for
the rupture is already there. Where? Some would ask. Not in actual mass
mobilisations, but in various other means of contestation to the state’s very
unstable hegemony. There is one event and quote which combined give a vivid
example. The quote is Hannah Arendt's:
"The surest enemy of authority is contempt and
the surest way to undermine it is laughter."
The event is that of Shady AbouZeid and Ahmed Malek
distributing balloons made of blown up condoms to proud, narcissistic policemen
in Tahrir on 25 January 2016. The
state had set this day as a moment of reinstating its authority, not only by
using force and warnings to prevent any protestor from entering Tahrir, but
also by bringing in pro-state mobs to celebrate the day as Police (not
revolution) Day.
By being utterly absent from all serious political debates, Sisi made of himself the hero of the masses’ fantasies.
Shady and Ahmed made a very short video that made the
celebrators, the large swathes of police officers, and the pro-state media
appear utter idiots. The videos went viral on social media and the police took
it a bit too seriously and threatened them. Shady refused to pull back,
although Malek understandably but sadly did apologise. Now social media is full
of statements supporting Shady by making further fun of the police, putting
forward a plethora of ridiculous hashtags and groups.
That is not to say that “laughter” is a solution by
and in itself. In fact, making a joke of the oppressor is only making the event
of oppression – which was vivid with tanks fully occupying Tahrir on the
anniversary of a revolution against the rule of those very tanks – less
serious. Even Arendt herself asserts that “detachment and equanimity in view of
ordinarily unbearable tragedy is the worst sign of dehumanisation.”
But what I argue here, following Arendt, is that
laughter is a means of communication between potential revolutionaries when
other means are absent. It is a sign that the revolution is still alive.
Herein lies the challenge: how to convert such a
“silent revolt” (borrowing Søren Kierkegaard term) into a grounded challenge to
oppressive authority? My answer is, I do not know. No, that is not the right
answer. The answer is: I shall not know. The answer shall not come from the
same few educated elites who imposed themselves on January 2011’s agenda,
ultimately leading to its current lamentable fate. The answer shall happen on
its own, stem from a rupture of the already existing crack, impose itself, not
be imposed. As Gramsci contended, and as we later saw in the Egyptian
revolution, “the dangers inherent in introducing knowledge from above lead to
the bastard trio of skepticism, sectarianism and tragedy. The knowledge to be
imparted must derive inspiration from the beliefs and mode of thinking of the
masses.”
This is what Abdel Fattah El Sisi understood. Instead
of proposing a particular agenda to the masses, he was one of the few
presidents in the 21st century
to run for president without even a nominal mandate. By being utterly absent
from all serious political debates, he made of himself the hero of the masses’
fantasies. That is also precisely what a counter-Sisi movement ought to do.
Stay silent for a while and wait to see what the rupture will beget. Meanwhile,
follow Albert Camus’ revolutionary catalogue: “laugh, laugh, laugh and laugh
again.”
For apolitical militarism cannot and in any case
should not be challenged with a political agenda; for it is out of the
political realm. Shady and Malek have thankfully shown an alternative way to
counter apolitical authority, perhaps without noticing their impact and most
certainly without thinking of Arendt's or Camus' philosophy.
Thus, as to the question “does the Egyptian revolution
still have a future?’ I do not think it does, for it never actually did have a
present; but I see it coming.