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Title: A Pluriversal Manifesto From the Perspective of an Egyptian Libertarian Socialist Language: en Topics: Egypt, libertarian socialism, manifesto, decoloniality
Libertarian Socialist
Egypt sits at a geopolitical crossroads, being located geographically
mainly in Africa and partly in Asia and being politically situated as a
cultural powerhouse in the Arab world, so pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism
are relevant, particularly as pluriversal questions. When I use
pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, I am indexing international
organizations that do not exist yet. Of course, the names African Union
and Arab League represent symbolic organizations that exist today;
however, I am thinking of international organizations that would look
somewhat like the European Union, except they would be more radical,
neither capitalist nor statist per se. Therefore, for the sake of
clarity, I am not referring to either nationalist or authoritarian
renditions of these terms, such as Afrocentrism and Ba’athism; instead,
I am referring to libertarian socialist and democratic confederations to
be! Whether they shall materialize one day or not is a separate
question; thinking utopia is driving this essay to imagine new
possibilities beyond the current deadlocks that plague West Asia and
North Africa in particular. Furthermore, whereas Africanness refers to a
concrete connection (historical or actual) concerning the African
continent in general with its many languages and cultures, Arabness
signifies a concrete connection to the Arabic language and culture
specifically. In other words, I am not using these signifiers (African
and Arab) to index ‘race’ and/or ethnicity, but to signify place,
language, and culture.
Egypt, the second-largest recipient of military aid from the United
States (US), also shares a border with Israel, a former enemy state if
we believe the Camp David Accords--not mentioning the importance of the
Suez Canal as the jugular vein of the capitalist world-system.
Furthermore, Egypt is on the Meditteranean and therefore has historical
links with Meditteranean cultures. Of course, the signifier Egypt is a
loaded one for it conjures images in the minds of many non-Egyptians of
Ancient Egypt going as far back as the 3rd millennium BCE. But Egypt’s
history is complex if we consider the Greco-Roman, medieval, and modern
eras. This complexity informs the contemporary reality of Republican
Egypt, or Egypt after the revolution of 1952, which ended the rule of
the Muhammad Ali dynasty. Growing up in km.t (Black Land) or miṣr
(garrison town), I learned in my history classes that Egypt is commonly
referred to as the graveyard of invaders because the country was
colonized many times over, particularly in the modern era by the
Ottomans, the French, and the British (note 1). However, history shows
that these colonizers always ended up being defeated. Egypt itself, as
abstract as that may sound, is typically framed as the actor defeating
these colonizers, which suggests that given the country’s complex
history it may be too difficult to rule. Authoritarian regimes--even if
postcolonial--are not sustainable in the long run for they tend to rely
on the will of a despotic ruler, and rulers come and go. However,
complex systems of organization and governance are sustainable because
they derive their power from the complexity of life itself.
Since 1952, Egypt has been ruled by military officers except for Mohamed
Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who was elected in 2012 to be
the 5th president and who served for about one year before his rule came
to an end as a result of a coup d’état in 2013. The military officers
who have been ruling Egypt since 1952 are ambivalent figures, for while
some are often framed as postcolonial liberators in the context of the
decolonization of Asia and Africa (1945 - 1960) or even as non-aligned
socialists; others are positioned as neoliberal capitalists and as
totalitarian. The Egyptian uprising of 2011 opened up the political
space, but Egyptians were presented with a contradiction between
militarism and Islamism. The third option of an anarcho-socialist
secular democracy was out of the equation. The uprising did not
materialize as a revolution because the revolutionaries did not come to
power to make the necessary changes publicly called for in Tahrir
Square: bread, freedom, social justice, and human dignity.
Islamism was squashed in 2013 when the Egyptian state banned the Muslim
Brotherhood by designating it as a terrorist organization and arresting
and imprisoning all of its leaders and key members. In the last decade,
the political space in Egypt transformed from a struggle between two
reactionary forces to the hegemony of militaristic nationalism:
Nasserism sans socialism. If the Muslim Brotherhood signified the return
of the repressed--given the international organization’s founding in
1928--then Egypt’s security apparatus is a defense mechanism, a
repressive state apparatus. The function of this defense mechanism is
clearly to protect the ego of the state: its image of itself and the
projection of this image for other states. But the liberation of
Egypt--and here I am referring to the decolonial dimension--must entail
both facing the anxiety that Islamism provokes for many and lowering the
defenses of paranoid militarism.
Unfortunately, the political unconscious of contemporary Egypt is not
wide enough to encompass these militarist and Islamist currents without
falling into some form of totalitarianism. The current political crisis
is a function of an attachment to a fixed image of Egypt, which is out
of sync with Egypt’s complex history and reality; we can call this
second Egypt the Real Egypt to use Lacanese. Both militarism and
Islamism are ideological in the sense of suturing their incoherent
Symbolic discourses through recourse to Imaginary fantasies of
greatness, be they medieval or late modern. However, these fantasies
cannot account for the Real Egypt, which includes Ancient and
Greco-Roman historiographies. A liberated or decolonial Egypt would be
able to come to terms with this Real dimension, which is to embrace the
complex history and reality of this legendary place along with its
diverse peoples, who are Copts, Nubians, Siwis, and Arabs--not
mentioning the Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Turks, Albanians, etc. Most
Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and Coptic Christians, but even those labels
do not capture their heterogeneity, which speaks to the importance of
the singular dimension, which would account for the degree of
religiosity or secularization and would also include religious
minorities like Jews and Bahá’ís, sexual minorities, and so on.
To be Egyptian is to be many things. Reducing Egyptianness to a specific
identity (say, religion or ethnicity) is the ideological work of
particularity, which must be transcended not towards an abstract notion
of human universality but a concrete praxis informed by pan-Africanism
and/or pan-Arabism. I question the abstract idea of human universality
because historically, the concept of the human excluded many
non-Europeans who were rendered as sub-/non-human, which was the case
under slavery and continues to be the case with racism today along with
other forms of oppression. Therefore, I find the decolonial idea of
pluriversality to be more attractive, for it rejects ethnocentric
visions of universality while affirming human difference. For example,
whereas the European Enlightenment took place in the 18th century, the
Arab Awakening (al-nahda) was a 19th-century affair. Therefore,
referring to the Enlightenment without qualification or any form of
historicizing is the fallacy of false universality--i.e., when what is
provincial is taken to be universal. In other words, the pluriversal
challenge is: how do we account for human difference without falling
into the traps of racism or culturalism? And the answer, in my opinion,
is to accept the aporia of human difference as a Real difference, which
can never be accurately symbolized or imaginarized. Any attempt to do so
typically results in Orientalist stereotypes or creates more confusion
than bridging cultural differences. For this reason, I have written
about the merits of “learned ignorance” in my work as the path of least
resistance compared to phobic or philic forms of racism and oppression.
It is also crucial for us to think seriously about Walter Benjamin’s
notion of “divine violence” and its application today, mainly because we
are surrounded primarily by the “mythic violence” of global capitalism
and climate breakdown. Divine violence has been interpreted in multiple
ways as, for example, nonviolence or revolutionary violence. In his
essay, Benjamin positions himself as an anarchist and provides a
concrete example of divine violence: the general strike. Therefore, our
struggle is against the mythic violence of authoritarianism, be that
capitalist or socialist. A commitment to anarchism does not mean a
dogmatic rejection of the state; I have written, for example, about what
I call an “impossible republic.” The challenges with any state include
centralization of power, draconian bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies,
endless corruption, etc.
Consequently, I am more interested in internationalist tendencies, such
as pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, which would offset the nationalisms
we see from autocratic regimes and their seductive cults of personality.
Recall my earlier analogy between the state and the psyche: both have an
ego and an unconscious. The key is decentering the state’s ego in favor
of the political unconscious of international solidarity, which will not
be smooth. Still, it is the necessary liberatory process towards some
form of anarcho-socialist secular democracy.
Many of the regional conflicts in North Africa and West Asia (note 2)
that we see today can be traced back to the Arab Cold War (1952 - 1979).
Egypt, for instance, was one of the leading countries in the Non-Aligned
Movement, refusing to be aligned with either Euro-American capitalism or
Soviet communism (note 3). I find this ethic of non-alignment to be
inspiring, but it must be stretched. In other words, non-alignment
cannot simply be a metaphor; it must amount to what Samir Amin called
delinking, which is ultimately a material praxis that is rooted in
changing society by changing the political economy. A concrete (i.e.,
non-metaphorical) example of non-alignment is the EZLN in the Chiapas.
This example speaks to another dimension of international solidarity:
the Global South, a crude reference to the non-European world that
includes Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures in both the Northern
and Southern hemispheres: the US and Australia, for example. I bring up
the Arab Cold War in my conclusion to this essay because the US empire
chose to align itself with Islamism to defeat Arab socialism. This
alignment between global capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism is
crystal clear when we survey the US support for Mujahideen during the
Soviet-Afghan War (1979 - 1989) and the US hybrid wars against Iraq
(1991; 2003 - 2011), Syria (2011 - present), and Libya (2011 - present).
Ba’athism was defeated in Iraq, but not yet in Syria. Gaddafi’s brand of
socialism (jamahiriya) was also crushed. In the political vacuum
succeeding these authoritarian socialist regimes, the world continues to
witness endless civil/proxy wars that made the ground fertile for both
formidable Islamic terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and democratic confederalism (e.g., Rojava).
My vision in this pluralist manifesto, which is written by a singular
subject, who happens to be Egyptian, is what I call an anarcho-socialist
secular democracy. We have already seen and continue to witness the
disastrous outcomes on the environment from the mythic violence of
authoritarian socialism, capitalism, and fundamentalism. Therefore, we
must give the divine violence of libertarian socialism, direct
democracy, and secular humanism a chance! Liberation is a process and a
collective one at that, which means that liberation is for both the
oppressed and oppressors; however, the oppressed must lead the way and
in order for that leadership to take place the oppressed of the world
must unite, be they victims of class struggle, racism, sexism, or any
other form of oppression! Pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism are two
contingent names for this pluriversal solidarity.
1. Hence, the Arabic name for Cairo: al-qāhirah (the conqueror)!
2. I refuse to refer to this region as the “Middle East” for that is an
imperial phrase signifying that the region is East of the British Empire
and in the Middle vis-à-vis the “Far East.”
3. Which was, in fact, state capitalism.