Saturday, February 2, 2013

The revolution, back in black


The black bloc must provide Egyptians with a positive vision if they want their struggle to succeed.

ANOTHER EXCELLENT PIECE
By Mark LeVine
Al-Jazeera

".......Revolution as creative destruction

In the wake of the Brotherhood/FJP's electoral victories, the anemic performance of the official "opposition" represented by the "National Salvation Front" and a population desperate for some sort of economic recovery, revolutionary forces were on the defensive in the last few months. But the mass protests and then violence surrounding the Port Said verdict and the second anniversary of the start of the uprising on January 25 has generated a recalibration of the political scales. The black bloc has become a public (and even more so media and government) symbol of the militant opposition that is quite literally on the march against the still unstable emerging order.
It's hard to overstate the dangers a well- yet self-organised and decentralised protest movement could present to Egypt's power elite. The country's military chief, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, is not exaggerating when he says ongoing protests threaten a "collapse of the state"; nor are prosecutors wrong in considering those deploying black bloc tactics as "terrorists". For what is the goal of revolution if not the collapse of the existing state, and how can protests aimed at that end not terrorise those presently in power?
All true revolutions involve a supreme act of creative destruction - an anarchic and ordering impulse that both destroys the old order while creating something new to take its place. The reason most revolutions either fizzle out or are hijacked or taken over by forces other than and often opposed to those who first led them lies precisely in the failure to move successfully from the destructive to the creative phase and discourse. This is as true of the axial religious revolutions, including the Abrahamic faiths, as well as for modern political revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, or Iran.
It's anarchic impulse stems directly from the fact it is directly taking on the existing system. But if one state - that is, arrangement and network of power relations - is to be replaced by another one, a new system has to replace the one that disintegrates. Similarly, every true revolution is a powerful combination of what the sociologist Manuel Castells calls "resistance" and "project" identities; the former being narrow, closed and hostile to outsiders, the latter open, inviting and future-oriented.
You can't bring about the "downfall of the system" and the creation of one in its place without both. As important, you can't in the long term keep tens of millions of people supporting destruction if the positive vision of the future is not there for them to see. The problem is that while the two halves of the creative destruction equation naturally overlap for much of a revolutionary period, at some point the destruction has to subside and the creation has to become the dominant process, otherwise the revolution becomes either self-destructive and nihilistic, coopted, or redirected (often by the military, as epitomised by the phenomena of Bonapartism or Caesarism). In such a situation, one time supporters will turn against it in favour of the stability of a restored if changed ancien regime (if in new clothes).
What made Tahrir truly revolutionary during the 18 days, but sadly too few days since, was that in the Square you could see, feel, the possibility of a new Egypt, a different Egypt, an Egypt that could fulfill the dreams of the majority of its inhabitants. Young and old, rich and poor, Muslim and Copt, metalhead and Sufi, everyone radiated "silmiyya" - peacefulness - even as they screamed at the top of their lungs for days on end.
It was clearly a liminal, paradoxical experience, and one which, as Georgetown professor and Jadaliyya co-editor Adel Iskandar reminded me in a recent conversation on the present situation, was itself a two-part phenomenon: "the one from January 25 to February 4 which was violent, confrontational and black bloc-esque... and the Tahrir of the Utopian imaginary that dominated between February 4 to 11... The two continue to exist and manifest with oscillating frequency."
The key question is, of course, how to control the oscillation, particularly when you can't really tell either when the tipping point has arrived and which way it is tipping. For two years now the Egyptian "state" has been in this liminal state; the structure at its core - that is, the deep state of power holders through whom the vast majority of the networks of power and wealth flow in Egypt - has remained seemingly stable, and is enlarging a bit as the Brotherhood and its own networks of power and patronage are, with some difficulty, absorbed into this elite. But the state remains gelatinous and porous outside of the core nucleus, and if the opposition can siphon enough power and legitimacy away, the system could, as General al-Sissi warns, move towards collapse.
Millions, if not tens of millions of Egyptians understand that if the state structure rehardens or concretises in the shape it's apparently taken, they will be either frozen into pretty much the same place they were under Mubarak, or pushed even closer to the margins or completely outside the state. Indeed, the "state of emergency" once again declared, now by a democratically elected President, and the organised attacks on women by forces clearly aligned with the existing power regime, reflects this desperate need to clear as many people away from the power networks as possible before the new system hardens.......


However we might want to judge their tactics more broadly, their commitment and loyalty to other protesters are hard to question. When women were being brutally attacked in Tahrir Square last week, beyond the ability of groups like Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment to protect them, black block activists have literally appeared out of nowhere to take on the often armed groups of attackers and protect the women and other activists.......

It's clear that black bloc tactics and the militant revolutionaries deploying them will not on their own carry Egypt further than the Zapatistas have pushed Chiapas (which, interestingly, has a Human Development Index ranking of .646, almost identical to Egypt's .644), never mind Mexico as a whole. But if they succeed in throwing the country's power-holders off-balance and reinvigorating the youth led-opposition, and can provide a creative and ultimately positive vision and strategies for continuing the revolution into its third year and convincing increasing numbers of ordinary Egyptians to keep up he struggle for real freedom, dignity and social justice, they will have played an important role in Egypt's tortured transition from an authoritarian to truly democratic system."

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