Revolution? Coup d’état? The Certain Thing Is We Broke the Boxocracy

[28 June 2013, anti-Morsi protester holding a sign in Arabic that reads: \"Leave\", in preparation for the 30 June nation wide protest against Mohamed Morsi. Image originally posted to Flickr by Lilian Wagdy] [28 June 2013, anti-Morsi protester holding a sign in Arabic that reads: \"Leave\", in preparation for the 30 June nation wide protest against Mohamed Morsi. Image originally posted to Flickr by Lilian Wagdy]

Revolution? Coup d’état? The Certain Thing Is We Broke the Boxocracy

By : Amr Ezzat عمرو عزت

Remember the guy who owns the sugarcane juice store from my previous article? He did not come out on 30 June to demonstrate. He did not protest even though he blew off the Muslim Brotherhood supporter who tried to engage him. The Brother told him, “It is important to organize, dive into the elections.” He just laughed, “Just a second. Let me go get involved and I will be right back.”

Of course, he did not join up with anyone. But he became an activist in his own way.

On the morning of 30 June, he put an Egyptian flag up in front of his shop. He stuck a little “Irhal!” [Leave!] sticker up on the wall. And he went on making cane juice and selling bottles of water to the crowds of people heading toward Tahrir Square.

“It was a constant stream,” he told me. “People just kept coming and coming toward Tahrir, carrying flags and chanting, ‘Irhal.’ Good Lord in heaven, at night it was the same thing, only now people were going in the opposite direction.

I am sure there is another guy, whose juice shop is somewhere near the Muslim Brotherhood’s Square, Rabia Adaweya, who is telling the same exact story about crowds. Only these were chanting, “La tirhal! [Do not leave!]”

This confrontation between one popular will and another is the part of the story that needs to be made complicated.

There are millions who came out to say, “This regime is threatening our freedom and our future, and we cannot stand by and look on as it happens.” And there are millions who came out to say, “What is the problem? This regime enjoys our full faith. We cannot let them be thrown out of office.”

These two positions are unbridgeable. There is no way to move from these two very different popular wills, let alone move forward in the direction of “democracy.”

Ever since Mohamed Morsi was elected, it has been as if the whole thing was nothing but a winner-take-all contest conducted through ballot boxes. Ballot box rule means the opposition needs to be subjugated, and supporters won over. Once the voting was over, it meant that there were two parties—on the one hand, a triumphant winner who demanded all advantages of power, and on the other, the defeated losers. Ballot box does nothing to guarantee civil freedoms and rights. Ballot box rule encourages the winner to do anything to seize the levers of state power. And on 30 June, the flimsy legitimacy of ballot box rule finally crumbled.

Some people do not want to peer into this aspect of the battle that took place. They prefer to look at it in terms of a struggle between a state power and an opposition, security apparatuses and regional and global alliances; or between elements of the old Mubarak regime and men from the new Morsy regime; or between the old institutions of the Egyptian state (that the new men never figured out how to penetrate) and those old institutions (that the new men had managed to take over). All of these dynamics are there, some explicitly, some only implicitly. But if we seek to understand democracy, we must first correctly appreciate the role played by millions of people who went out to the streets. We must first grapple with the clashes and contradictions posed by these millions of demonstrators, pro- and anti-Morsi alike.

Some observers think both sides are dupes. They believe that demonstrators are out to lunch or in in someone’s pocket. That they are immature or that they will rally around anything like dreamers pulled on strings by others offstage. This theory is utterly baseless—it assumes that people are nothing more than stuff to be used during struggles over power.

Some interpreted the events of January 2011 the same way. One version goes like this: the people toppled the head of the regime, but the army stepped in to protect everything else about the regime. Another version goes like this: they got rid of one authoritarian regime, but opened the way for another, more authoritarian Islamist regime to take over. A third version goes like this: in undermining the authority of the constitution, the people opened the door to chaos, and brought about a constitution that was even more authoritarian in its spirit than the last. Whatever the version, the verdict is the same: Egyptians who demonstrate are deluded, Egyptian protesters are dupes.

And is this not, with very few modifications, the same thing being said again right now?

The millions who stood up on 30 June—as they have before and since—are the ones who threw a wrench in the flimsy kind of legitimacy produced under ballot box rule. These same millions overthrew another Egyptian “Boxocracy” once before, in January 2011.

These millions have this to say to the naysayers: Yes, it was always possible that our revolution would attract authoritarian Islamists. Yes, the army managed to repress the street at first. But it was pressure from the street that made them retreat from their efforts to control “the transition period,” and ended up forcing them to hand power over. We were always there, in the street. And we are still here. Now here we are breaking the Boxocracy of those authoritarian Islamists that you have said “rode to power on our backs.” We will break the Boxocracy of the transition period, which the army directed the first time around. We are not afraid to open the door to the unknown. We are not afraid to risk something new.

We are not afraid face new waves of naysayers, and new forms of stupidity from losing factions who cry over the loss of state authority. Enemies of the revolution. Yes, the people who tell us not to dare, not to risk, are enemies of the revolution.

Thousands of briefings and articles will study the influence of various social forces at play here. These studies will try to write you—the millions who have come out to demonstrate—into the background. And that is what will happen if you agree to their terms. But you can imagine yourselves as the true protagonists of this drama. You, not they, are the real heroes. You are the protagonists in this struggle, not the dashing military officers, nor the leaders of the opposition, nor even the representatives of the protest movements.

To name something is to claim something. To call this moment a “revolution” or “coup” is an attempt to capture that moment and control it. And just as they are trying to define and label this moment, so too do you need to name it yourself.

It is a political act to draw attention to the critical role of millions in the street seeking their freedom. It is a biased gesture to insist that demonstrators count for something, a call for them to go forward. The kind of analysis that emphasizes the role of millions taking to the street is never cold, objective or distanced.

What happened in January-February 2011 was not a revolution. It was the start of a revolution. What SCAF did in February 2011 was not a coup. It would have been a coup had you returned to your homes. It would have been a coup had you given up the public square. In the aftermath of 30 June, we can see the outlines of a military action and also the outlines of millions of people marching in the direction of the revolution. Both are there.

Those who say that this was simply a military coup have no place for you. Their imagination of 30 June excludes your massing in the streets. They have little regard for you. They could care less about what you are doing and what your demands are. Suppose the military brass and their clients  assume you to be army supporters. Suppose you go home and leave it to them to manage the details. Then, and only then will it have been a military coup to restore the old machine.

What has taken place since 30 June is only the latest episode of a revolution that has continued apace since January 2011. On display was nothing less than all the social and political forces that still remain in the country. These events may drive the revolutionary struggle forward, or they may push it back. It could be that a vacuum has been created into which the army will move. It could be that another Boxocracy will be created, or a wave of nationalist fascism that will repel all outsiders. There could be a war of attrition between two competing forms of authoritarian fascism. But the pressure from the street might also mean that another bloc might learn enough from its battles to open the door onto a new form of democracy expansive enough to contain freedom for all rather than merely the desire to rule.

The choice is yours, or at least I hope it is.

[This article originally appeared in Al-Masry Al-Youm on 10 July 2013. It was translated by Elliott Colla.]

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Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]