Letting Go of Revolutionary Purity

Letting Go of Revolutionary Purity

Letting Go of Revolutionary Purity

By : Hesham Sallam

Three years have passed since the outset of the January 25 Revolution. Egypt remains a nation wrongfully imprisoned. The year 2013 in particular has brought the believers in January 25’s promise even more disappointments than the previous year. An authoritarian military regime reasserted its openly harsh rule first by ousting President Mohamed Morsi on 3 July, and then by publicly massacring the deposed president’s supporters in the aftermath. Sectarian violence against Copts has proliferated and intensified. Prior to and after the coup, state security forces stepped up their use of deadly violence against expressions of political dissent across the political spectrum. Political leaders and activists who oppose the new junta are persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Xenophobic, pro-military chauvinism is at an all-time high. And finally, a heightened sense of insecurity has pervaded the lives of Egyptians in light of the growing human loss resulting from explosions and attacks on public spaces.

Immediately following Morsi’s ouster, observers and activists debated the question of whether 30 June 2013 signified a second wave of the January 25 Revolution or simply a ruthless coup that killed Egypt’s “young democracy.” Let us set aside the sheer simplicity of this debate. It is clear today that reducing these complex events to “just a coup” will not redeem the Morsi government’s exclusionary policies or negate popular opposition to his rule. In contrast, calling it a “revolution,” as pro-military commentators continue to do, can never magically impart democratic legitimacy to Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s military regime. Nor will it mask the fact that the current regime’s abuses have surpassed anything Egypt witnessed during the Morsi administration. In fact, the narrative of a June Revolution serves the current regime’s efforts to negate the memory of the January 25 Revolution, and the basic demands for bread, freedom, and social justice around which Egyptians rallied three years ago. That same narrative also attempts to mask the growing list of crimes that army leaders and their allies in the domestic security apparatus have committed before and after 30 June. In this context, it is an act of resistance just to remember January 25, since to do so forces one to consider the chasm between the ideals of January 25 and the oppressive political order that rules the present.

Yet this recovery of a “revolutionary purity” is for many a near impossible task. It is true that many activists continue to confront the military regime’s abuses. Yet over the course of the past year the mood has clearly shifted in the way observers throughout the world perceive the quest for revolutionary change in Egypt. The faces and voices that international media used to associate with the idealism of this revolution are either in prison, in exile, silent, marginalized, or have tacitly or actively supported the military. To many outside (as well as inside) observers disappointed at the events of the past year terms like “revolutionaries,” “youth activists,” and “January 25 youth” no longer evoke the courage, conviction, and principle they did three years ago. After witnessing many, though certainly not all, of these same actors condone the downfall of a democratically elected president last year and their subsequent silence on the military’s abuses, for some observers these terms have come to denote naiveté, impulsiveness, and hypocrisy.

But even if we are to assume that the so-called revolutionaries who failed to stand up to the military before it was too late are guilty of naiveté, one could argue that those critics who believed that such revolutionary purity actually existed in the first place are no less guilty of the same charge. Perhaps the events of 30 June and the developments that followed them are a wake-up call for those who bought into the fairytale narrative of January 25, namely that it reflected primarily a youth-led, liberal, pro-democracy movement. While this utopic image may have dominated mainstream Western narratives of the revolution since its outset, there is a pressing need to critically reassess the assumptions that such accounts have imposed on January 25, and that have contributed to numerous disappointments. Equally importantly, we may also need to disentangle the realities of these struggles from our own normative commitments as observers. 

The events of the past year only underscore the reality that the popular mobilization that overthrew Hosni Mubarak entailed a complex movement that included multiple long-standing struggles, in which democratization was only one dimension. These struggles also encompassed a host of other ambitions such as demands for social and economic rights, distributive justice, and state institutional reforms that far surpass what liberal democracy alone can offer. These struggles did not articulate in concert. On the contrary, they have often clashed over the course of the past three years, just as they did during the lead up to 30 June 2013. 

Following Mubarak’s downfall in 2011, moreover, many of the January 25 Revolution’s partisans sought to work through the military-sponsored transition and the “democratic” process it generated in an attempt to bring to state institutions the type of far reaching reforms that speak to the ideals of January 25. They engaged in everything from building parties, to writing draft laws, to drafting institutional reform documents. That many of these experiences consistently failed to yield any meaningful results only reinforced the perception that the realm of formal politics, however “democratic,” is not a natural ally to the ambitious agendas that advocates of the revolution have sought to advance. These tensions that have emerged in post-Mubarak Egypt between democratic process and revolutionary movements are not unrelated to the current state of the January 25 Revolution. If there is one clear message one finds in the story of the last three years, it is that democratic outcomes are not always revolutionary, and revolutionary outcomes are not always democratic.

In Egypt, democratically elected leaders have been at odds with revolutionary demands, while revolutionary movements have clashed with democratically elected leaders. This is to say that the fairytale narrative of a pure, democratic revolutionary struggle that can do no harm is no longer viable and has failed to capture the complexities and messiness of the social conflicts in which the January 25 Revolution was anchored. Within the multidimensional struggles that January 25 signifies, not all good things go together, as reflected in the apparent tensions we have observed between what is popularly viewed as revolutionary and what is deemed democratic. In fact, the lead up to the 3 July coup speaks to how Egypt’s rulers have exploited these tensions and the predicaments they impose in order to divide-and-rule their challengers.

Maybe the time has come to ponder these complexities critically, and begin understanding the struggles of January 25 on their own terms, and not our own as observers. Maybe it is time to let go of the mirage of revolutionary purity and the dangerously misleading narratives it all too often propagates.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Grooming and Gaslighting in Egypt’s New Republic (Part 2)

      Grooming and Gaslighting in Egypt’s New Republic (Part 2)

      Central to the NDPers’ integration into Mustaqbal Watan Party (MWP) was the association (and later “political brand”) known as Min Agl Masr (MAM), Arabic for “For Egypt’s Sake.” Seeking to cultivate public support for President Sisi and his policies, the organization made its debut in May 2016 under the official leadership of Mohamed Mandhour. An entrepreneur hailing from a family of retired generals, Mandhour had run unsuccessfully for parliament, once in 2011-12 as an independent and another in 2015 under MWP’s banner. After 2016, he emerged, à la Ahmed Abou-Hashima, as the public face of various non-profits and media outlets with ties to security agencies.

    • Grooming and Gaslighting in Egypt’s New Republic (Part 1)

      Grooming and Gaslighting in Egypt’s New Republic (Part 1)

      #The_New_Republic (الجمهوريةــالجديدة#) was the hashtag featured on every television screen in Egypt last month to mark ten years since the birth of the political order that came into being after the coup of 3 July 2013. The anniversary coincided with a tense moment in the age of the regime of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. The president has been grappling with a deepening economic crisis and international pressures to adopt “corrective” reforms likely to anger important social groups and key interests inside the state bureaucracy.

    • From the State of Vanguards to the House of Kofta: Reflections on Egypt’s Authoritarian Impasse

      From the State of Vanguards to the House of Kofta: Reflections on Egypt’s Authoritarian Impasse

      “It doesn’t get more democratic than this,” remarked Zakariya Azmi at the Seventh Annual Congress of the National Democratic Party (NDP) held in October 2010. Azmi, then-assistant secretary-general of the party and longtime aide to President Hosni Mubarak, was praising the ruling party’s process of candidate selection in the lead up to the 2010 legislative election. For the first time in its history, he said, the NDP is entering the election season with a strong party organization in all of Egypt’s governorates. Through transparent, democratic primaries, Azmi explained, the party’s regional subunits selected two NDP candidates for the two seats available in each electoral constituency.

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.]