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Title: Egypt Today, Tomorrow the World Author: CrimethInc. Date: February 2, 2011 Language: en Topics: Egypt, 2011, Arab Spring, Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2011/02/02/egypt-today-tomorrow-the-world
North Africa is in revolt. As usual, the most striking thing is how
familiar everything is: the young man with the prestigious degree
working at a coffee shop, the unemployment and bitterness, the protests
set off by police brutality—for police are to the unemployed what bosses
are to workers. These details cue us in that what is happening in Egypt
is not part of another world, but very much part of our own. There are
no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21^(st) century. Make no
mistake—though these events dwarf the riots in Greece and the student
movement in England, they spring from the same source.
To keep up with events, we urge you to read our comrades’ dispatches
from Egypt and anti-authoritarian perspectives from the Middle East in
general. But for these uprisings to offer any hope, we have to
understand ourselves as part of them, and think and act accordingly. To
that end, we’ve solicited this analysis from a comrade in North Africa.
What is happening—first in Tunisia and now in Egypt—is the beginning of
the wave of full-scale revolutions that will inevitably follow the
global financial crisis of 2008. Taking place in the wake of the failed
“War on Terror,” these revolutions combine the latent force of massive
numbers of unemployed youth with the dynamism of modern communication
networks. They signal the conclusion of the decade of counter-revolution
that followed September 11, 2001. Although they continue the exploration
of new technologies and decentralized forms of organization initiated by
the anti-globalization movement, the form and scale of these new
revolutions is unprecedented. Largely anonymous groups are using the
ubiquitous World Wide Web to spark leaderless rebellions against the
pharaohs of the global empire of capital.
The self-styled rulers of the world are truly at a loss as to how to
understand the new social and technological forces at play; the aging
dictator Mubarak is a perfect example of this, but he is hardly the only
one of his kind. One can almost smell the fear, not only amongst the
despots of China and Saudi Arabia but also the supposed leaders of
representative democracies. The contortions the US government has been
going through are the most grotesque of all; it isn’t lost on the
Egyptian people that the bullets striking down their comrades came from
the USA. Egypt receives $1.3 billion dollars of military aid from the US
every year. The suppression of “democracy” in the Middle East has been a
deliberate policy of the US government: they know popular sentiment
would never support their agenda as the military enforcement of global
capitalism.
The best efforts of Mubarak’s dying regime to put its fingers in the
ears of the world have not silenced the people on the streets of Cairo.
Even blocking cell phones and trying to turn off the entire Internet
have proved futile. For generations, Arabs and Africans have been
silenced, represented by various colonial governments and portrayed as
“primitive” and “terrorist” in Europe and the US. Now the people of
Egypt are speaking in thunderous unison for freedom—not for political
Islam, as demagogues from Iran to Israel would have the world believe.
In doing so, they are realizing the ideals to which the US government
pays only hypocritical lip service.
Today, the common condition from Egypt to Tunisia is approaching
universal unemployment—especially among the younger generations, which
comprise the vast majority of population. This is increasingly the case
in the United States and Europe as well. Unemployment is no accident,
but the inevitable result of the last thirty years of capitalism.
Capitalism reached its internal limits at the end of the 1970s; now the
factories of every industry produce ever more commodities, while
increasing automation renders workers less and less necessary. The only
way to make profits off these commodities is to eliminate workers or pay
them next to nothing. To discipline the skyrocketing unemployed
population and prevent revolt, the police wage a never-ending war on the
population. We live in a world overflowing with cheap shit, in which
human life is the cheapest of all.
In these conditions, people have nothing to left to lose. Nothing, that
is, but their dignity—and it turns out they will not surrender that. It
was precisely this innermost core of dignity that led Mohammed Bouazizi
to light himself on fire rather than face humiliation at the hands of
the police, who in seizing his fruit-selling cart took away the only way
he could feed his family. The blaze lit by Mohammed Bouazizi has spread,
carried by other unemployed people who thereby transform themselves from
abject beggars into world-historical heroes. The people of Egypt are not
only burning police cars, they are organizing popular committees to
clean the police and other trash off the street, and the streets of
Cairo have never felt safer.
It is not surprising that a wave of revolutions should begin now. Not
since the days of pharaohs and monarchs has the world been controlled by
as senseless a force as the global financial market. As capitalists
became less and less able to produce profit from industrial production
over the past decades, they had to invent means of profiting based on
expected future returns. But in a world of increasingly cheap
commodities and poor consumers, how could capitalists keep people buying
stuff and still make a profit? They had to invent a way for consumers to
continue buying even when they weren’t paid living wages: thus the
invention of mass debt. When the sale of real goods can no longer
produce profit, profits must be made on increasingly fantastic expected
future returns—in other words, on finance.
Yet like any house of cards, debt cannot be built up forever.
Eventually, someone wants to be paid back—and so the entire house of
cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008. The financial crisis
signals a deeper metaphysical crisis of our present order: capitalism is
unable to provide for the real material needs of the global population.
The high poverty rates in Egypt are not simply the result of
mismanagement by Mubarak, but the inevitable consequence of the
contradictions of our era.
Their eyes hopelessly clouded by their own ideology and lack of vision,
heads of state can only stand dumb and surprised as the crisis goes on
and on. They lamely hope to re-start the financial markets through
“austerity” or “green” capitalism, refusing to consider systemic change
despite the fact that the system cannot even deliver jobs and affordable
commodities to people—much less a good life. Just as it took an era of
revolution to overthrow the divine right of kings, it will take new
revolutions to overthrow the divine right of things: the power of
financial capital and its puppet dictators.
Revolutions are never brought about by technology, but rather by the
collective action of human beings who radically transform their
relationships with each other and the world they share. However, one
cannot deny what an important role the World Wide Web has played in
Egypt and Tunisia. Especially among cybernetically skilled and
predominantly unemployed youth, it enabled people to call for and
participate in mass mobilizations without any need of leaders. The
demonstrations in Egypt on January 25 were called for by a Facebook page
called “We Are All Khaled Said,” named for a victim of police brutality
much like Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece. The page itself was set up by
the anonymous “El-Shaheed”—that is, “martyr” in Arabic. Meanwhile, youth
throughout the world are mobilizing as Anonymous; in the battle over
Wikileaks and more recently in actions against the Tunisian government,
Anonymous has showed itself to be a potent new international with an
awakening political maturity beyond the message boards of 4chan.
Demonstrators’ ability to communicate with large numbers of people and
react immediately to events via mobile phones, Twitter, and Facebook is
swiftly making previous forms of Leftist and industrial-based political
organization obsolete, along with other hierarchical formations such as
political Islam.
This revolutionary use of social media should come as no surprise. In
the hands of an elite few, expensive communications technology will
naturally be used for self-aggrandizement and consumerism. In the hands
of unemployed youth and other excluded classes, this technology can be
re-purposed to organize revolution. The Internet is the new global
factory floor, and we are seeing its first workers’ councils form—a new
kind of collective intelligence that enables people to organize
themselves directly without representation.
The blank confusion of global capitalists as to who is “really behind”
the mysterious resistance in Egypt and Tunisia is revealing. It’s
obvious how desperately US politicians wish they had anyone, such as
Mohamad ElBaradei, with whom to negotiate. These revolts are anarchist
in form if not content—and even the content is becoming increasingly
radical. The absence of any organized group or leader in the early days
of the protests speaks volumes: increased information technology has not
only destabilized the old Leftist forms of organizing, but also the
justifications for having hierarchical government in the first place.
When people can communicate, they can organize their own lives.
Expanding such horizontal structures to a global scale no longer seems
impossible, even if it is not yet well thought out.
To make things even worse for capitalists and nation-states, the massive
secret apparatus of the state has been revealed in all its incompetence
by sites such as Wikileaks. While Wikileaks had nothing to do with the
Egyptian revolution, the cables describing Ben Ali’s pet tiger being fed
a luxurious diet while Tunisians starved further stoked the flames in
that country. Wikileaks has produced paranoia in the global state
apparatus itself, as the state cannot function without the subjugated
population believing that it is necessary and according it the right to
exercise violent force. Now the empire has no clothes—and its naked
corrupt power is disgusting to behold. There is a growing consensus that
the state apparatus is an archaic holdover no longer worthy of respect.
The Mubarak regime made the classic mistake of conflating technological
structures with the people using them, an error typical of Silicon
Valley and certain theorists as well. In a poorly thought-out move, the
regime shut down all four ISPs in the country, effectively turning off
the Internet. In addition, cell phones have been intermittently blocked
before major demonstrations. If anything this only enraged the Egyptian
people more. It may even have interrupted their spectatorship—it is
easier to watch a demonstration over the Net than to participate—and
driven more and more people into the street.
The lesson here is clear: the supposedly decentralized Internet is quite
centralized, and while it may be useful, it is a mistake to depend on it
as long as it remains in capitalist hands. Yet rulers such as Mubarak
face a no-win situation. If they keep communications technologies up and
running, these will be used to organize against them—but if they take
them down, it will provoke worldwide outrage.
How do you organize without the Net? You might start with existing
social institutions; in Egypt, this meant the mosques. The “Days of
Wrath,” characterized by street-fighting with the police far more
intense than the Greek insurrection of 2008, culminated in the torching
of the headquarters of Mubarak’s party. Afterwards, in a brilliant move,
the protesters called for people to gather after prayer at mosques—where
most Egyptians would be gathered anyway. In this regard, the mosques
served the same purpose that social centers and squats did during the
Greek insurrection, only for a much greater part of the population.
So while communications technology may be advantageous in the early
stages of organizing, a movement must become powerful enough not to need
the Internet once it takes to the streets. In Egypt, the revolt actually
grew in intensity after the Internet was shut off.
If there is one regard in which the Internet is indispensable, it is in
spreading the news of disorder elsewhere. As the Empire’s power has
become increasingly spectacular, it has become more vulnerable to being
damaged on the terrain of the spectacular. Obama’s first response to the
uprising was to call for the “violence” to cease—even though his
government routinely administers violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan
and inflicts it on US citizens through the world’s largest prison
system. He and Mubarak are not against violence, but they appear to be
afraid of images of violence. If these images escape, they undermine the
state’s cover story about maintaining order.
At the same time, the state desperately needs people to distrust and
fear each other. This explains why Mubarak released undercover police in
civilian uniforms to pose as looters in order to justify his crackdown.
When that failed, he turned off the Internet and denied media access in
order to prepare the conditions for the kind of massacre it would take
to restore his control. Yet now it seems doubtful that the army is
willing to carry out such a massacre.
The insurrection that began by burning down police stations then shifted
to massive peaceful demonstrations intended to win over the army.
Pamphlets that have circulated indicate that Egyptian organizers planned
from the beginning to pit the army against the police. Insurrectionists
in Europe and the USA should take note of this clever strategic move.
After the front line of the party of order was effectively defeated, the
Egyptians clearly understood that the only force capable of stopping
them was the army. Instead of attacking it directly, which would surely
have resulted in a massacre, they undertook to win over the hearts and
minds of the soldiers. Thus far they have been successful in this,
demonstrating that they can self-organize and maintain a leaderless yet
disciplined rebellion that makes the streets of Cairo safe and clean for
the first time in years.
This leaves the army without a reason for existence, let alone any
excuse for a massacre. Once an insurrection has reached a certain phase,
as a friend has said, weapons are unnecessary. For a revolution to
succeed in overthrowing the state, the army must refuse to shoot its own
people and instead join them in revolt. In Egypt, the army is at least
paralyzed enough right now not to start shooting; it may yet join the
people, or more likely attempt to broker a transition to representative
democracy.
All this shows that billions of dollars of military equipment can’t stop
a revolution. Once things reach a certain point, military force is no
longer the determinant factor. If the Egyptian people persist in revolt,
the military can hardly bomb its own cities.
Yet even if a military defeat is avoided, the insurrectionary process
begun on the “Days of Wrath” is more likely to be side-tracked into
representative democracy than to end in a genuine communization of
society—that is, in the immediate sharing of all production for the
survival of the people. This is not to be pessimistic—already the
neighborhood assemblies and defense committees resemble nothing more
than the Paris Commune. But Mubarak is a dictator, and the youth of
Egypt have not yet tasted the bitter fruits of representative democracy.
They may have to learn about them the hard way. Even if a representative
democracy is established, it will not be the end of the story—witness
the continuing protests in Tunisia. There would inevitably be another
insurrection sooner or later, although that could take years or decades.
In this context, it is promising that many young Egyptians seem aware
that representative democracy will only limit their movement and
redirect into yet another form of enslavement. This is visible in many
ways—for example, in the message sent to self-appointed leaders like
ElBaradei, “Shall we just call your mobile when we have finished the
revolution for you?” The insurrection has also seen unparalleled action
and power of the Egyptian women, who will not go back to being
subservient under the Muslim Brotherhood after these upheavals.
Yet the popular occupation of Tahir Square cannot last forever; there
must come a moment when food will be produced, train lines reactivated,
and the Internet turned back on. These are the real keys to the success
of the insurrection and to preventing the return to capitalism, even
under the mantle of representative democracy. It seems that the steps in
this direction have not yet begun.
Let’s step back now and ask larger questions. If Egypt is not
fundamentally different from Europe and the US, why haven’t such
insurrections happened there as well? First, let us not be too hasty—the
dominos are already falling, with massive protests in the streets of
Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and Mauritania. One reason the insurrection has
such popular power in Egypt is that, as many Arabic-speaking countries,
the Egyptian form of life has not yet been fully subsumed into
capitalism. For example, in many cases one only pays as much as “one
feels” one should pay for goods. Haggling is not so much a way to
maximize micro-profits as to ascertain an affordable and ethical price
for an exchange. The commodity exchange itself is often less important
than the social relationships that the commodity symbolizes. The
collective responsibility and power of the family knits people together
over generations, in contrast to the alienated individuals of the United
States and most of Europe. The vibrant and public street life of the
Middle East is a natural fomenting ground for insurrection.
Yet are there not dark forces waiting in the wings? This seems unlikely,
as the protest is clearly focused on “freedom” rather than Islam, with
those wanting to lead religious chants being shouted down on occasion.
This is not to say that Egyptians are not Islamic—indeed they are—yet
there are subtle distinctions. Political Islam is effectively the Tea
Party of Egypt, a hierarchical religious movement mostly of the older
and conservative generation; but Islam exists in other variants, binding
social relationships and promoting a collective ethics. One can even
interpret the giving of alms in Islam as a ritual to avoid excessive
centralization of wealth. “Allah” does not necessarily denote a
commanding deity; the notion may also point to the ineffable, the
invisible excess of life that denies reduction and resists the
catastrophic harnessing of all to the imperatives of profit.
Of course, currents far older than Islam hold sway in Egypt as well.
Unlike many in Europe and America, many Egyptians are profoundly aware
of their history from antiquity onwards, and feel deep shame at their
present state of impoverishment. The dignity and respect they show each
other in the streets in midst of the insurrection attests that this
revolution is not abstract, but rooted in everyday lives; it is the deep
metaphysics of these forms of life that provide the subjective
conditions for transformation.
Communism is older than Marx, just as anarchy is older than Proudhon.
The age of revolutions did not begin with the Paris Commune, nor did it
end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As capitalism now encircles the
earth, the one thing that could unite the world would be a common
rejection of it and the police that defend it. The communism of Marx was
trapped in the abstract metaphysics of economics and poisoned by a
misunderstanding of the danger posed by the state; this sabotaged the
revolutions of the early 20^(th) century, bringing about the catastrophe
of Soviet-era state capitalism.
But the age of revolutions is not over; on the contrary. In a song of
the Tuareg—“the desert is our mother, and we will not sell her”—we can
glimpse a form of communism far more alien and hostile to capital than
anything imagined by Lenin. Many of the calls for “freedom” in Egypt
have little to do with the freedom to elect a president or choose among
commodities on the market, but resonate with a common desire to live
with their heads high and not cowed to any ruler. For this they are
ready to die, whether by self-immolation or in the streets together.
Yet one can sense a profound need at this time for a common
international revolutionary purpose that resonates outside of the Middle
East, for something truly universal to fill the void left by capitalism.
The nationalist flags of the protesters were tactically effective at
confusing the army, but they also reflect a lack of critique of the
conceptual apparatus of capital and the state. While the conditions are
right for revolution, over the last thirty years revolutionaries have
largely failed to create and spread the organization and analysis
necessary for insurrections to become genuine anti-capitalist
revolutions. What does it take for people to realize that the true
potential of their neighborhood defense committees is not as a means of
temporarily replacing the police, but of prefiguring the abolition of
all police, in every country?
No event occurs in a vacuum; events originate in concrete conditions,
and consequently they tend to come in waves. The events in Egypt show
that the center of revolutionary impetus is no longer “the West”; this
new age of revolution will culminate first in areas where the living
conditions are becoming unbearable and the ways of life are not yet
completely colonized by capital. However, it would be a mistake to see
this as merely the conclusion of an unfinished anti-colonial revolt. It
is something much bigger and deeper. The financial crisis is a sign that
capitalism is on a declining trajectory. The conditions that
precipitated the events in Egypt are rapidly becoming universal across
the globe, spelling another cycle of revolution and possibly war.
Eventually these same forces will hit Saudi Arabia, Europe, China, and
finally even the United States with the strength of a tidal wave.
Make no mistake about it, we are entering an era of revolt. These
revolts will reject and attack capitalism in their concrete practice,
even if the systematic destruction of earlier revolutionary currents has
left a vacuum. Hopefully the participants will realize that freedom is
impossible without the destruction of capitalism and the state, and a
new generation of revolutionary thought will update the concept of
revolution for the dawning era. We are at a point now where it should
become clear to all that we can direct our own lives—that the state is a
historical fossil holding us back. As shown in Egypt, the stranglehold
of the state and capitalism must be broken in the streets; over the
coming decades the results of this ultimate struggle will likely decide
the fate of humanity itself.
All Power to the People!
— A dissident exiled in North Africa with assistance from the
CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective