The Journey of Protests in the Mediterranean and Beyond: A Discussion About and For Social Movements (Part 2)

[\"Dégage\" by Rero, in Paris. Image by Isabelle Moulis via Flickr.] [\"Dégage\" by Rero, in Paris. Image by Isabelle Moulis via Flickr.]

The Journey of Protests in the Mediterranean and Beyond: A Discussion About and For Social Movements (Part 2)

By : Paola Rivetti

There has been significant interest in the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia among Italian authors. However, the majority of works on the topic follow a very traditional schema: a narrative of the events in the context of mainstream discourses on liberalism and democracy, usually imbued with implicit normative claims. The only exception to this trend is represented by two books that Agenzia X—a Milan-based activist publishing house—published in 2012: Lorenzo Fe and Mohamed Hossny’s In Every Street: Voices of Revolution from Cairo; and Fulvio Massarelli’s The Rage of the Casbah: Voices of Revolution from Tunis. This is the second of two interviews, in which the authors talk about the rationale of their works and discuss the recent protest movements. This first part addressed Egypt (Part 1), and the second part of the interview brings us to Tunis. Fulvio Massarelli authored a volume on the Tunisian revolution which is quite particular in the context of the attention Italian authors have devoted to the Arab uprisings. The author, who is himself an activist who travelled through North Africa and southern Europe to follow the protests, talks about the rationale of his work and discusses the global protest movement that gained momentum between 2011 and 2012. The interview was conducted in June 2013. 

Paola Rivetti (PR): You recount the Tunisian revolution from an unusual point of view. Your book is in fact a book for political practice. It offers a sort of “aesthetic of action” rather than focusing on analysis. What was your goal in adopting such a perspective? Talking about political action, do you remember any moment as particularly meaningful and inspiring? 

Fulvio Massarelli (FM): The Rage of the Casbah is above all a tool of communication between the two shores of Mediterranean. In particular, I interviewed some of the key players of the revolutionary process in Tunisia who, among other things, commented on the anti-austerity movements in Italy and offered to the Italian movements some useful tools for reciprocity and action. The point of observation I adopted in the book does not stem so much from political action. I would rather say that it stems from struggles. My attention was focused on the social and political composition of the revolutionary masses, and on its antagonist forms of expression. This is relevant because mainstream media have been using a narrative about the Tunisian uprising aimed to disembody the revolutionary process from its materiality, its corporeity. In Italy, for instance, they came up with notions suited for the European audience, such trash as the “Facebook revolution” or, even worse, “the jasmine revolution.” My focus on antagonism and on the social composition of the revolutionary movement was therefore not only a method of research, but also an occasion to question this mainstream narrative. I also reflected on the potential influence of the North African mobilizations on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and the political tendency that permeated the Tunisian square as determined by its social composition. This was by no means different from the social composition of the poverties in Europe. I remember the occupation of the Casbah, the physical core of power in Tunis, and the exceptional mass re-appropriation of the public space where diverse struggles were present. I remember the slogan “dégage,” which recalled the slogan “they all must go” of the Italian student movements struggling against the education reform implemented by the Berlusconi government in 2008-2010. By appropriating Ben Ali’s loci of power—the loci of social cohesion imposed by Ben Ali’s police state and the Casbah square, overlooked by the presidential palaces—the people experimented with the construction of a counter-institutionality and alter-institutionality. That has been the greatest challenge to the “regimes of poverty and austerity.” It was not a coincidence that such practices were later adopted and implemented elsewhere in other contexts. 

PR: In your book, you underline the relevance of the workers’ participation and contribution to the uprisings. The miners’ strikes in Gafsa have played an important role in proving that political action was possible. Later, the alliance between the workers and the urban youth was been fatal to the dictator. Could you elaborate on the composition of the revolutionary mass, the goal of the uprisings as well as their origins? What was the role of the workers’ organizations? What did the protagonists you met and interviewed tell you about that?

FM: The revolutionary process in Tunisia, which began with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, had a young and educated proletariat at its forefront. This social group was able to turn “the knowledge of the school, of the street, and the stadium” into a useful tool for revolution. Trade unions’ headquarters, the stadium terraces, and social networks were used as spaces for organizing early revolts. These three spaces became the meeting point of the “workers of the arm and brain.” Day by day, as the revolt spread all over Tunisia and reached the coastal regions too, the social composition of the movement was enriched by the poor and by different political and cultural opposition groups. At that time, the targets of the uprising were the symbols of the regime and its project of social cohesion engineering: police headquarters and stations; some companies viewed as symbols of patronages; and the governorates. Yet, the genealogy of such a diversified movement has to be traced back to the workers` struggles in Gafsa and more broadly to the great Tunisian mining basin. The revolutionary potential of this struggle was until 2010 often neglected. The miners’ revolts in 2008 and the revolutionary process in 2011 evidence that the means employed by Ben Ali’s regime to save social cohesion, such as local patronage networks or the bargaining game between the UGTT secretariat and the regime, were not sufficient to mediate and resolve the conflicts. Such incapacity is also present today, as the crisis and the recent restructurings of production have broken down the function of mediation that trade unions and the new system of parties should carry out. This is evidenced by the fact that the population continues calling for a “dégagement.” Trade unions and the UGTT have been instrumental in boosting the revolutionary process, but it is quite clear that today they are not a tool of social cohesion. 

PR: You explicitly talk about a “Tunisian revolutionary proletariat,” whereas Lorenzo Fe and Mohamed Hossny stress the role of the middle-class urban youth. Do you think that the two revolutionary masses were to some extent different in terms of composition?

FM: As for as the composition of social movements is concerned, I am interested in what I would call the downward compression that breaks or at least makes problematic the category of middle class. Or, better, it shows the inherent political nature of the definition of “middle class.” It seems to me that in these last years, social movements all around the world have shown the ambivalence of such a notion, highlighting its political value, which is today in crisis. This is what we have seen in Tunisia and in Egypt, but elsewhere too. The youth is violently kicked out of the middle class which, above all, is a political space of consistence with a project of modernity now completely in crisis. There is no new deal on the horizon, and there is no project of social cohesion not resting on the increasing expulsion of generations of men and women from social wealth guaranteed—until recently—by the welfare state, especially when it comes to health and education. Today, the sons of the crisis are determined to resolve this dynamic by re-appropriating the tools of politics in an antagonist and collective fashion. That is why I prefer to talk about a revolutionary proletariat. The social movements against the “regimes of crisis and poverty” in the Mediterranean are reversing such a downward compression of the middle class, and are strengthening the dynamics of upward pressure against poverty. Thus, a new proletarian youth has burst into the capitalist crisis and is strong enough to open up a welcoming space for the diversified anti-poverty struggles. As for the anti-poverty and anti-austerity movements, I can find some continuity not only between Tunisia and Egypt, but also among other Mediterranean countries and beyond.

PR: Your “voices from the revolution” stress the anti-neoliberal character of the protests and their claim for a more fair and just society. Considering the electoral victory of the Islamists, who do not plan for any radical measure of wealth redistribution, do you think that the anti-neoliberal nature of the protests is still there?

FM: Among the many political and cultural merits of the insurrections in Tunisia, I think the disruption of the dispositifs of the endless war and of the so-called “clash of civilizations” has to be included. Indeed, the notion of “clash of civilizations” is seriously hit and replaced by the “clash in the civilization” of capitalism in crisis, according to which the issue of wealth redistribution and the struggle against neoliberalism make their way as political hypothesis of peace and for peace. In Sidi Bouzid and everywhere else in Tunisia, “dégage” was not simply aimed against Ben Ali himself. Rather, as the protagonists of the movement explained to me, it was aimed against the whole system, deemed as corrupt, and against a neoliberal model of development. Thus, those narrations turning the uprisings in Tunisia into pro-liberal ones, or into movements hegemonized by the Islamist framework, represent an effort to redeploy and whitewash the conflict, which is not between Islam and the West anymore, but between the exploited, bombed, rejected, and the poor on the one side, and the exploiters on the other side—the so-called one percent that rules the world and makes big profits at the expense of the others. The Islamist victory in the Tunisian elections is a political reaction the regime implemented to restructure that developmental model challenged by the square–whose institutions were thrown into crisis and still are, thanks to social mobilization. According to me, we are talking about a fragile Thermidor, pressured by the claim for wealth redistribution and by the inflexible assertion that the time of dignity has finally come.

PR: Some scholars have talked about “unfinished revolutions” in the case of the North African uprisings. You also seem to suggest the same. You open the book by recounting the efforts for establishing a “third casbah” and describing the resilient popular dissatisfaction with the electoral process and current government. Your perspective on the events does not only unveil the unfinished nature of the revolutions, but also stresses the centrality of the people’s requests in establishing political possibilities. This reminds me of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s idea of the constituent power of the multitude/people/mass. What are the theoretical perspectives or the practical experiences informing your views on the events?

FM: Surely we are dealing with an unfulfilled revolutionary process! I like to recall some graffiti I read on the wall of the Casbah of Tunis: "This is just the beginning!" and "We will never turn back!" To understand the meaning of these slogans, we must perform a methodological operation alike the one carried out by the Parisian insurgents during the Paris Commune. When the Commune was proclaimed, they shot the clocks, politically declaring the end of the time of exploitation, humiliations and abuses of the capitalist system. We have to appropriate an autonomous temporality and spatiality defined by the struggles themselves, their local rhythms. Those who want to declare “the end” are not the revolutionary subjectivities usually, but their counterpart. How hastily, after the elections of the Tunisian constituent assembly, the conclusion of the revolutionary process was declared by all sides! The actual facts tell us the opposite, and the insurgencies shaking Tunisia demonstrate the fragility of the Islamist Thermidor. After all, what a nice paradox the strategy “of the democratic transition” has to offer: as the crisis of representation shakes the statute of sovereignty in Europe, there is an effort to impose liberal-democratic regimes in Northern Africa through moderate Islamism–which is considered, according to the precepts of the Western tradition, to be experiencing an ongoing secularization. From this point of view we cannot but notice the contradiction between the material constituent process coming from below and the National Constituent Assembly. The latter seems to stand out as a reactionary force against the political, social and cultural needs expressed by the former. As for the method I used to do research, I employed the co-research methodology, as elaborated by the Italian operaismo and systematized for the first time in Italy by Romano Alquati. It allowed me to move between social inquiry and political participation. Thus, the book was about putting in literary form blooming political and social tendencies. At the core of my attention there is the emerging of an antagonist form of knowledge and the construction of counter-institutionality and autonomous institutions, ranging from the Tunis Casbah to previous experiences of people`s self-government, their durations and spatiality beyond the mere events. 

PR: You underline the importance of the North African uprisings in inspiring the movements that have spread from Spain to London, Athens, New York. You recently published a book on The Strength of Syntagma Square about the Athens uprisings (AgenziaX, 2013). What are the similarities and differences among the squares you visited?

FM: Until 2011, new generations could only dream or read about revolution. Now, it entered in our lives. Traveling through Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Slovenia doing co-research, I could observe and participate in the rise of these movements which, after breaking out in the Mediterranean area, have reached the Atlantic shores and the Pacific gulfs. Although there are superficial differences, it is remarkable to note how the practices of the struggles and the knowledge springing off from them move between countries. This is the case for the re-appropriation of public space against the loneliness of neoliberalism or against the symbolic boundaries and fear produced by police states. This is also the case of the rejection of the institutional expressions of the one percent: “dégage”, “que se lixe”, “irhal”, “que se vayan todos”, “gotof si.” And finally, this is the case for a common effort in establishing alternative forms of social organization beyond the state. From this point of view, we can talk about a constituent process, a sort of “koiné dialektos” emerging from the struggles of the precarious workers, the unemployed and the poor from all over the world. However, this is not a linear process with a univocal direction; on the contrary, this process is full of sticking points and deadlocks. I think that the real challenge the global movements have to engage is the composition of the constituent process with the destituent energy. In a few words, the "koiné dialektos" has to learn a new language in movement, which is able to mirror the requests of the insurgencies against neoliberalism along with the alternative and autonomous institutions they establish. 

PR: An exception to the diffusion of the Occupy movement in the West is Italy. This is despite the presence of well-established anti-neoliberal movements, and despite the fact that Italy is often regarded as an example of the “convergent (il)liberalism in the Mediterranean” (Cavatorta 2010; Teti and Mura 2013), which underlines the political and economic similarities between southern European democracies and North African regimes. Fulvio, what in your opinion are the reasons for the lack of an Italian occupy movement? Some argued that Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars Movement has prevented the flourishing of an Italian Occupy by hijacking popular discontent. Do you agree with this?

FM: It seems wrong to me to deem Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars Movement for the lack of an Italian occupy. I think we are mistaken if look for the reason of an absence. On the contrary, we should start from the anti-austerity struggles which are alive and kicking in Italy. In Italy, anti-capitalist struggles showed up earlier, with the secondary school and university students` movement, addressed as the “anomalous wave” movement, crying “we won`t pay for the crisis!” and “que se vayan todos!” The student wave reached remarkable peaks of protest, with the disruption of the 2009 University G8 in Turin and the uprising in Piazza del Popolo in Rome on 14 December, 2010. Other social and mass struggles, like the No Tav movement against the high speed train in Val Susa (Piedmont), the struggle for housing rights and social welfare, expressed new political leanings. It is a still ongoing process, whose next results are not easily predictable. Undoubtedly, what happened in Northern Africa resonated in Italy. For example, a great rising tide with Tahrir Square has been visible in the loaders` struggles, who are mostly migrants from the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and work in the logistics sector. In the strikes organized by the loaders, and during the prolonged blockades of goods in front of the companies` gates, the slogan “Here is Tahrir Square too!” has been chanted. The struggles of the logistic sector seem to point to a re-appropriation of the public space against the rule of the one percent. The proximity with Tunisia is not only geographical for the European Fortress. It is also evident in the struggles, starting from that dégage which is much needed in Italy too in order to disrupt the rule of the one percent.

If, as it has been considered, there is a progressive convergence of the institutions` political forms of organization between the northern and the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, what is most striking is the prominent role the social movements play in such a convergence and the fact that social movements have actually preceded such convergent dynamics. Social movements are today tracing a cartography of struggles that redraws and redefines spaces and borders. “Occupying” is an ever-changing space which constantly expands its borders. It will likely be the great chance for the new generations of proletarians—between the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea—to conquer both a dignified life and social justice. 

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.]