As Egyptians trickle into Tahrir to commemorate the 2011
revolution, hijacked by the army, it becomes ever more important to listen to
the unheard voices.
Philip Rizik, Roar Magazine
On the morning of January 25, 2014 as people trickle into
Tahrir Square, it is once again important to realize where we point our gaze to
understand a bit of what is taking place in Egypt. A discourse of terror has
scared many into supporting with blind faith a military leader who claims to be
able to re-instate the good old days of stability. This discourse of fear also
has the opposite effect and across the population there are those who are not
falling for the terror trap.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters certainly won’t and continue
to fight for what they believe to be their mantle of legitimacy. But beyond
that there are those without ideology, rarely heard, boiling with rage against
leaders who vie for power only to usurp and exploit and this by any means,
clampdown, torture, incarceration, murder, all in an arena of lawlessness, for
those power mongers — whether NDP, Brotherhood or military generals — place
themselves above the law. The population’s discontent, due to economic woes,
the expectations to be able to afford food, to find jobs, to be able to roam
the streets without fearing the terror of the authorities, is widespread and
won’t go away unless these conditions are turned around.
In moments like these it is important to listen to the
quieter voices. I wrote the following essay, “2011 is not 1968″, over
the course of the first half of 2012 after having tried to listen to those
quieter voices. As chants are heard this morning sounding from the square, “the
people demand the affirmation of the regime,” we must remember that the big
cameras are not capturing the only voices, nor the predominant ones; they are
just the ones that make it onto TV.
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An Open Letter to an Onlooker
On January 28, 2011, Egyptians started marching through the
streets of their country’s cities in a powerful force of protest. You gazed at
the spectacle developing before your eyes, on your TV screens, across various
international news channels. A fixation, an intrigue emerged toward the images
projected particularly from one site: Midan al-Tahrir – the Square of
Liberation. The fascination with the constant stream of images opened your
imagination. The imagination ran wild. Egyptians had been inspired, as well as
shamed, into movement by their North African neighbors in Tunisia. Our uprising
in turn helped trigger movements in your cities around the world, from the Take
The Square movement in Europe, to a city center occupation in Madison,
Wisconsin, to the Occupy movement, not to mention an array of uprisings around
the region and still ongoing today in Bahrain, Syria and Sudan only to name a
few.
To make sense of the unfurling scenes, media outlets turned
to a group of individuals who have come to represent the revolution for many.
These news agencies interviewed political commentators or activists —
increasingly becoming celebrities in their own right — to decipher the actions
behind the images seen. As interpretation and then meaning were layered onto
the images, a significant distortion took place to the acts behind the scenes.
Non-Arabic language media outlets relied primarily on English-speaking
activists, many of us middle class, many of us already politicized before
January 25. Arabic-language news stations similarly turned often to middle
class activists to speak on behalf of the revolution, each of whom interpreted
every moment according to their respective ideological perspectives.
Thus, we became the translators of a collective uprising we
were far from representative of. Our faces reflected your own. Our voices were
comprehensible. We served to make this revolution seem accessible. The
intonation in our words gave meaning to what was, for you, an unfamiliar
territory. Our explanations also satisfied the practical requirements and
standards of a media industry with a target audience accustomed to an
interlocutor with a particular profile using a specific political discourse.
This process drowned out the voices of the majority. No matter how hard we
tried to argue otherwise, we fit the part — middle class, internet-savvy,
youth, and thus revolutionary.
The Voices of the Underclass
Did you hear the voices of the underclass? Did you see the
family members of the martyrs clad in black mourning in their homes? Did you
see images of unnamed civilians gunned down by snipers on the roofs of police
stations? Did you see police officers opening prison doors in order to
undermine this revolutionary moment and wreak havoc on nearby communities? Did
you see protesters storming police stations on January 28, seeking vengeance
for years of unaccounted for torture, violence and psychological domination?
Did you see the Molotov cocktails prepared by women and lowered from their
balconies to avenge the maiming of their sons and neighbors? This was not
non-violent. Only the fixation through the lens of a camera on Tahrir Square in
daylight could appease you with that impression.
Other industries soon followed suit: right after journalism,
academia, film, art, the world of NGOs relied on us as the ideal interpreter of
the extraordinary. They all eventually bought into and further fueled the
hyper-glorification of the individual, the actor, the youth subject, the
revolutionary artist, the woman, the non-violent protester, the Internet user.
All this took place in the undercurrent of an unrelenting need to identify,
validate and valorize the role of the familiar. Revolution became unimaginable
without the imagery of a model demonstrator who protected you from the
potential of being faced with the unknown: a collectivist uprising against a
global system of domination within which there is no place for an onlooker.
The Internet helped create the aura that all this was
familiar. By channeling the outrage on the streets through a medium that you
recognized, the narrative presented on news channels diluted the mystery within
the events and chained your imagination to what is familiar. The layers of
interpretation painted over the images diminished your fear of the unknown.
“This is only an act against dictatorship.” “This is the individual cry for
freedom.” “This is a demonstration for democracy.” “This revolution is
non-violent.” The Internet replaced the Kalashnikov. These discourses silenced
the structural dimensions of injustice and concealed the role of neoliberal
policies promoted by the likes of the IMF, the EU and the USA in deepening the
stratification between poor and rich. They made you forget that it is out of
these structures of injustice that the desire for social justice is born in the
first place. These dominating narratives — the narratives of domination —
localized the problematic, for instance, to that of a homegrown dictatorship.
By isolating the crime, and highlighting the corruption of individuals, these
accounts helped set the neo-colonial stage for the now empty shells of the old
regime to be replaced by another that maintains the same logic of governance.
It is no surprise that the owners of these images are
commercial news agencies run by corporations that support or are supported by
the very systems of domination against which we revolted. The images taken by
the cameras of the BBC, the CNN or Al Jazeera become the private property of
these institutions that then use them to tell their narratives, to celebrate
what they desire to promote and silence what they want to suppress. The framing
and broadcasting of an image is a practice of power. These images circulate in
the name of freedom, but by utilizing the captured images for the ends of a
profit-driven enterprise, the dominance of the narrative provided has the
potential to misinterpret and ultimately undermine the very acts of resistance.
Youth activists were by no means representative of the
protests, but they were the dominant voice presented. We were but a handful of
individuals amongst a cacophony of shouts calling for change, each person with
their own concerns, complaints, desires, cause for action, and reason for
revenge. Throughout the upsurge in protest there was a strong horizontal
inclination, a non-centralized decision-making process, a leaderless movement
that could not be represented to a centralized, individual-focused media
apparatus, through a penned article, given speech, authored art work, or
character driven documentary film. Such a process of representation falsifies
reality.
In this letter I too fall into this same logic.
2011 is not 1968
The 1960s were pregnant with the political: battles for
racial equality, Vietnam, the Cold War, the final throws of overt imperialism.
1968 rose out of this moment, a young generation confronted with distant scenes
of occupation and colonization, a student generation, zealous with ideology,
and radicalized by the social and political reality of the times. Over 40 years
later the effects of imperialism through the cloak of post-colonialism provoked
people yet again into mass protest. Under these new conditions, as Frantz Fanon
recounted so clearly, the former colonizers succeeded at hiding their economic
interests behind partnerships with the ruling elites of post-colonial states.
Thus, 2011 is not 1968. 2011 was an uprising of discontent
against the political reality within the neo-colonial condition. 2011 was no
intellectual revolution; there was no burgeoning of ideas. In Egypt, no
radicalization of the population had taken place, nor was the nation tangled up
in a cross-border conflict. There was no ideology but the ideology of
desperation, the unbearable weight of hypocrisy and the limits of a people
living in denial of it. The rising militancy amongst organized workers, and the
growing opposition through small middle class movements like Kefaya — “Enough”–
and the 6th of April movement, as well as through internet-based groups like
Kolina Khaled Said (“We are all Khaled Said”) came about in direct reaction to
the political ruling class’ ongoing repression of an entire population.
By 1968, conflict had spread everywhere, whereas in the
lead-up to 2011 the seeds of revolt had only just become ready to sprout. In
Egypt there wasn’t a movement, but there was movement, and there was momentum,
an undefined force that was much more powerful than any organization could be.
Under Mubarak’s regime, the repression of even the seedling of opposition
groupings had meant that there was hardly a “left” to speak of. The
universities were, and still are, a place of theft of public funds, not a place
of critical thought. The year 2011 witnessed fast-track political
radicalization in the face of years of fast-track neo-liberalization. The
street was the academy, where we exchanged rocks for fire with the regime’s
security forces and military personnel, while exchanging ideas amongst
ourselves.
This is how radical politicization occurred amongst
Egyptians that carried the revolution. The uprising that began in Egypt in the
early days of 2011 was pushed by an unprecedented amount of protesters. Similar
to the uprising in Argentina in 2001, street protests in Egypt were marked by
widespread participation across class, generational and gender lines. Like in
1968, students and workers both participated but in Egypt never as workers and
students, but rather, and simply, as part of a collective and popular movement.
The protests remained significantly leaderless; we confronted a repressive
hierarchical and hegemonic state apparatus using horizontal tactics. It was the
vastness of numbers of protesters that, even if only temporarily, brought the
centralized state structure to its knees.
Demonstrators held a wide variety of demands, there is no
one reason why people started flooding streets and public squares across Egypt
on January 28th, different people rejected different faces of the same system
of power that dominated our everyday lives. As observers, it was your obsession
to comprehend the uprising that fed the media industry’s raison d’être, which
sought to quench those desires. In the dominant Western standpoint, it was your
gaze that incited references to the common, to the familiar, to what you
already knew, making 2011 seem as if it was akin to 1968.
2011 is not 1968. 2011 was not the “classic” revolution of
the socialists: students and workers taking to the street to replace a regime
with their own. No matter how hard people tried, there were no political
parties with a revolutionary blueprint either prior to January 25 nor have any
emerged since. A call that rang loud and clear from the start, “the people want
the fall of the system,” entailed a cacophony of dissent that translated into a
desire to put an end to the status quo: change was necessary, some kind of
change, but how that change looked was uncertain. This was no weakness of an
uprising but testifies to a global crisis to imagine alternative forms of
social organization to the neoliberal state with its self-perpetuating,
self-destructive stratification. Furthermore, this leaderless form of protest
free of pre-packaged ideology allowed for the emergence of ideas in process, a
process of resistance that is only beginning.
Workers and Revolution
A significant moment that made the January 25 revolution
thinkable was the rising wave of worker protests that started in 2004. The
27,000 textile workers that went on strike in the industrial city of Mahalla
al-Kobra in Egypt’s Nile Delta in December 2006 enabled countless Egyptians
that caught a glimpse of that mighty act, or of the multitude of protests that
followed, to begin to imagine revolution. Inevitably, strikes and
demonstrations started spreading across the country. On April 6, 2008 the
independent worker leaders of the same public sector textile mill called for
another strike, but this time the government succeeded in deterring the action
by settling with a select group of workers ahead of time. The demand for
increased wages was tied to rising food prices and as almost every home in
Mahalla has a family member employed at the massive textile factory the strike
was anticipated by more than just the workers. On that day, Mahalla’s citizens
anticipated a confrontation. The insults of a police officer towards an elderly
woman on the street sparked an uprising. April 6 was significant in that the
protest moved beyond the geographical lines of one industrial site and was
carried out by an entire community. In 2006 workers had broken the social rules
of conduct through their public protest.
In 2008, the boundaries of possible resistance were pushed
further still beyond the limits set by the ruling class. The government used
all their wit and force and managed to prevent April 6, 2008 from turning into
what became January 25, 2011. In 2008 the government succeeded in preventing
the spreading of dissent from one industrial town to the rest of the region —
let alone the country — by ordering security forces from across six
governorates to descend on the city. In April 2008 the conditions were not yet
ripe for what would emerge less than three years later. On January 28, 2011
demonstrators spread all over the country prevailed over those same security
forces in a matter of hours. Again, at this juncture there is a need to
emphasize that 2011 is not 1968. 1968 would have been impossible without the
waves of worker strikes and factory occupations in parallel with student
protests. In the case of the January 25 revolution, while participants spanned
all social classes, bringing together the middle class, the unemployed, workers
and farmers, it was precarious workers and not Egypt’s traditional working
class that acted as the radicalizing factor of the revolution. This may sound
like a trivial differentiation but it is at the crux of the distinction between
2011 and 1968.
From 2006 through to January 25, 2011 and ever since,
workers of organized workspaces never stopped demonstrating for better wages,
against privatization, corruption and injustice. The wave of protests that
began on January 25 included a vast number of precarious workers primarily from
Egypt’s many eshwa’eyat or informal neighborhoods. This needs some
clarification. Starting in 2006 workers protested the effects of the intense
neo-liberalization process that Mubarak’s final government was exercising.
Workers reacted directly — even if rarely specifically articulated in these
terms — to the implementation of the Western economic paradigm of
neoliberalism. This meant the government eased the entry of foreign capitalists
into Egyptian industry, they privatized factories and public sector
enterprises, reduced subsidies while strongly encouraging production for export
markets.
Backed by international financial institutions, this system
enabled foreign investors to access Egypt’s natural resources with fewer
restrictions and to exploit its working class with more freedom. This process
included the intense downsizing of the traditional workforce. It forced workers
into what is sometimes termed casualized work, or the “informal sector”, which
meant working without contracts, without guarantees and without social protection,
thus making precarious the working conditions of the traditional working class.
Those most suppressed, most exploited and most desperate under the former
regime’s political system were the underclass without the luxury to attain an
education, with no fixed jobs and thus vulnerable to the reality that police
officers and employers existed above the law.
Precarious workers often maintain two or three jobs in order
to make ends meet. Compared to them, Egypt’s traditional working class lives in
more secure conditions. Though for usually pitiful pay, outrageous hours in the
private sector, poor working conditions and minimal benefits, the traditional
working class has fixed contracts and steady incomes which gives them a luxury
standing within a working class milieu with few guarantees. Consequently, the
working class begin to mimic the middle class’ cautious life style unwilling to
risk losing their jobs. While the working class will fight for better working
conditions, speak out against corruption and abuse at the worksite, their
struggles are limited to these because they are not willing — and
understandably so — to take their battles beyond the boundaries of their
workplaces. Participating in the street battles of the revolution meant taking
to the streets and risking giving their employers the justification to fire
them for being “troublemakers”. The lines of the unemployed ready to take their
jobs were they to be fired limited their participation in the revolution.
Losing the luxury of employment was a risk many contracted workers were not
usually willing to take.
The implementation of new economic paradigms since 1968 has
further concentrated capital in the hands of the rich while reducing the
livelihoods of everyone else. These policies have brought about the conditions
whereby the Lumpenprecariat have become the radical element within
revolutionary struggle, having proven themselves to be a force to be reckoned
with. The taking root of deep economic stratification in this neoliberal era
has provoked new forms of resistance; it is this condition that brought Egyptians
to the brink of revolution, and it is this condition that will continue to
determine future lines of protest.
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On Saturday June 19, 2012, a group of Mubarak supporters
gathered outside a military hospital on the shores of the Nile after reports of
the former dictator’s death emerged. One of demonstrators held a sign for
drivers-by to see: “January 25 Revolution: History Will Judge.”
You decide how January 25 goes down in your annals of
history. Is it another 1968, a revolution of your liking? Or is it a movement
that goes beyond the meaning you’ve given to the few images you have seen, and
may one day soon confront you at your front door?
