Group items tagged

Since the death of Nasser 30 years ago, the top leadership of the army has been controlled by the US and corrupted by the money of the US and the Gulf countries; and they accepted the polices of submission of Mubarak and Morsi. But everybody should know that the Egyptian army is not just its top leaders but also thousands of officers who remain patriotic. They are not necessarily progressive, nor socialist, but they understand that the people don’t want Morsi. The new Prime Minister, Hazem Al Beblawi, I knew him personally. He was a brilliant student of economics. I don’t know what his mind is like today, but he’s a clever man, able to understand that continuing neoliberal policies would be a disaster.

Hundreds of thousands who are organized. They are those who started Tamarod. These young people are politicized, they discuss politics continuously. They do not accept following parties; they have no confidence in bourgeois parties, democratic parties or even socialist parties.

To have a movement getting together with a minimum common program is important: there are discussions among various partners, particularly with the organizations of the youth. There is a need for a common program which is to meet the immediate challenge; it is not a program for socialism, but a program to start moving out of the trap of neoliberalization by restoring the power of the state, and the other dimensions of starting to move out of the rut of the alliance with the US, Israel, and Gulf countries, and to open new relations with partners, particularly with China, with Russia, with India, with South Africa, so that we can start having independent policies and therefore reducing the influence of the US, of Israel, and of the Gulf countries.

First is the task of social justice: it is not socialism. It is a set of good and important reforms of management of enterprises; the end of privatization; recapturing of the enterprises which have been given at very low prices to private companies; a new law of minimum wages; a new law for working conditions, a new law of labor rights – strikes and so on; a new law of participation of the working people with the management of the enterprises in which they would have a say.

second task is to address the national question. It is a question of dignity. People want a government that represents Egypt with dignity and self-respect. It means a government which is independent, not one accepting the US’s orders, not standing with Israel’s repression of Palestinians. A government independent of the Gulf countries who are allies of the US, they can’t be anything else. In this context, China has a big responsibility. It would be great if some people in China say frankly : “we are with you and we are prepared, if you ask, to help you solve your economic problems.” Such a declaration would have a tremendous echo in Egypt. There are slogans on the streets of Cairo, “we don’t need US aid, we can also get it from other countries”. We don’t need US aid - which is associated with corruption and political submission. This is called a national independent policy, in order to be able to develop a sovereign Egyptian project.

We should have a popular parliament, which is not an elected parliament. It is a parliament which consists of people sent by the organizations of the movement, by the trade unions, by the women organizations, by the youth organizations. This is the true parliament, more than a so-called elected parliament in which the distribution of party is so unequal and biased. You can call it not-a-socialist-program, but a national, democratic, sovereign, and progressive program.

On one hand, we can say the US accepted and supported the army and the new government, but on the other hand, they tried to put pressure to bring back the old reactionary, which is not Muslim Brotherhood but the salafists. This is the plan of the US, which is not to help Egypt out of the crisis, but to use the crisis to destroy more.

These groups are coming from Libya. Since Libya has been destroyed by the western military operation, Libya has become the base for all kinds of Jihadists. There are Jihadists with strong arms including missiles coming from the desert, this is the real danger. Also in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai small Jidahist groups supported by Israel and the Gulf countries are carrying out terrorist actions.

these responses are the latest manifestation of a silent yet powerful recalibration of the terms democracy and revolution within our collective imaginations, a recalibration that has been ongoing since 1989. The revolutions of 1989 and their afterlives inaugurated a historical taming of the term, a taming that has carried over into the 21st century. This historical taming consists of two interrelated “police operations” conducted by Western liberal democracies: the first involving a particular way of talking about non-democratic revolutions, the second consisting of a conservative periodization of their own foundational pasts.

From a 21st century perspective, these revolutions are increasingly being judged not by what they achieved (the overthrow of the previous socio-political order) but by the new regime’s convergence or divergence from a free-market liberal democratic state.

The mass political uprisings that occurred after the establishment of democracy have, by this same narrative, been interpreted in a markedly different light. In the new American Republic, the crushing of the Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions have been seen as the (necessary) assertion of federal power and sovereignty, while in France the continued intrusions of the will of the French people into the National Assembly after 1789 are commonly cited as causes of the descent of the French Revolution into demagoguery and terror.

To get an idea of what differentiates the 2011 uprisings from previous forms of popular political struggle, let’s start with a short vignette from a protest action that typified the expression of extra-parliamentary discontent with governments before the 2011 uprisings.

Althusser’s image of the hailing of the police officer speaks of a state apparatus (and a correlative subjectivity) that is premised on the idea of arrest. The policeman’s shout essentially stops whoever hears it in his/her tracks, freezes the comings and goings of people.

But this anecdote underscores, albeit in hyperbolic fashion, the effective crisis in the theory and practice of social movements that defined the closing decades of the 20th century — a crisis linked to the very category of motion itself. It was the death rattle of a type of politics which — from the calls to abolish world slavery to the struggle for gender equality, from communism to civil rights — has defined contentious political struggle over the past 200 years through the category of movement. Instead of asking what kind of movement the new uprisings of the 21st century represent, the time has come to review the relevance and efficacy of the term itself. To do so we need to reconsider, both epistemologically and in praxis, the kinetics of contentious political struggle.

In its place, as another French political theorist, Jacques Rancière, has pointed out, has come an altogether different policing function, one encapsulated by the police officer urging bystanders to “move along!”, that “there is nothing to see here.” While the former is predicated on disruption, the latter above all ensures the constant circulation of people, goods, and services: “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.”

all of these sites and banners of contentious politics are directed not at a static state structure that arrests movement but are themselves in fact about stopping or arresting an unbridled and accelerating capitalist system. In this light, the very names given to struggle — the environmental movement, the anti-globalization movement, the slow food movement — become at best oxymoronic and at worst open to co-optation by the very forces they oppose (green-washing, the fair trade industry, etc.). We need to ask ourselves: why do we — and should we — still use the term movement to characterize contentious politics? What political conceptions and practices does this term privilege? What forms and histories of resistance has it obfuscated?

It became, through the life of the occupation, the stage on which the new Egyptian society was performed and presented. In their generosity, their tolerance, their humor, camaraderie, and song, the Egyptian people asserted their values and boundaries both to themselves and the whole world.

Alain Badiou once wrote, “In the midst of a revolutionary event, the people is made up of those who know how to solve the problems that the event imposes on them.” The people of Tahrir organized and orchestrated their own security, dealt with human and regular waste, and opened and operated a kindergarten so that mothers with small children could come to the square. They converted a Hardees restaurant into a free kitchen, a Kentucky Fried Chicken into a free clinic, organized networks for digital and print information, set up a pharmacy, handled hired agitators, and protected each other’s religious practices.

n the first week of June 2013, the actions taken by a coalition of activists against the destruction of a public park in central Istanbul spread to more than 60 cities and provinces, bringing several million people onto the streets. By June 8, the police had withdrawn from Taksim Square, leaving it at least temporarily in the hands of protesters. The protesters erected networks of makeshift barricades at 50 meter intervals along all major routes leading to the square. Within a week, Taksim and the adjacent Gezi Park became a “liberated zone”, a fragile oasis amidst the ongoing and increasingly violent clashes with police forces throughout much of Turkey.

There is as much attention devoted to how political and social life should be structured in the square — the ban on party and union insignia, the drawing of lots and time limits governing speech in the assembly, the coordination of meetings with public transit to assure greater participation, etc. — as there is to the what: articulating political manifestos and the position of the Assembly to its outside (whether in relation to the protests in the upper square or to Greek society more broadly).

The police conception of revolution and the crisis in the theory and practice of social “movements” form the dual backdrops for the global uprisings of 2011. Beginning in January of that year, a new form of revolt emerged in North Africa and spread, within months, around many parts of the globe. What actually took place at the sites of these revolts, in Zuccotti and Gezi Park, in the squares of Tahrir, Puerta del Sol and Syntagma, offered a seismic challenge to both the police conception of revolution and the theory and practice of political struggle. What happened in these squares was not movement but arrest, not dispersal but permanent occupation.

There is no doubt that the Greeks, Egyptians, Americans, Spaniards, Tunisians, and Turks first occupied the public spaces of their urban centers to voice political opposition. They came, as Stathis Gourgouris has pointed out, to “withdraw their consent” from the forces governing their lives. As the days passed, however, people had to figure out how to live and act together inside a square in order to sustain a revolt outside of it. In these sometimes very quotidian decisions, they came to define themselves by how they occupied and existed together.

The 800+ plus murders committed by the Egyptian security forces unfortunately paled in comparison to the atrocities later carried out in Libya and Syria, respectively, by Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Overt police brutality, by contrast, is usually the last resort of well-functioning liberal democratic regimes. It appears when the movies, the football rivalries, and the soul-deadening holiday music no longer suffice. Its entrance into the mainstream spotlight, in the United States, in Turkey, Greece, and Spain, is an indication that the urban occupations pose a fundamental challenge to representative democratic states and the clearest signal that its “soft” ideological apparatus is malfunctioning.

Yet, within two months of the birth of OWS and over 1.000 sister occupations throughout the US, the federal government coordinated a collective assault on these democratic spaces. The FBI and the Bureau of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the mayors and police departments of over 18 cities, forcibly evicted every major occupation throughout the US.

That the monitoring and entrapment of non-violent dissidents has been funded and conducted under the banner of counter-terrorism task forces is an even greater cause for alarm. These signs of an emergent police state within liberal democratic regimes (or more aptly: its passage from shadowed ghettos to front-page visibility) are the strongest testament to the novelty and latent strength of the 2011 uprisings.

Yet there is also no denying that almost all of these uprisings have ended in failure. The urban occupations have been dismantled and the aims of the occupiers have either been largely ignored (representative democracies), brutally suppressed (Libya, Syria), or their victories shown to be premature (Egypt).

Contacts between the global occupations, formed during the height of the uprisings, have persisted after their evictions. The common form of these occupations has allowed participants not only the opportunity to escape their individual isolation by talking and acting collectively, but more importantly, to draw connections across national grammars of discontent.

The last challenge remaining is economic

Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis

Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.

What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.

These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.

The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.

This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.

ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.

The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.

We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.

there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.