Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere
Page 28
The underlying problem throughout was that, even as the popularity of the MB and the Salafists began to wane, liberal and leftist forces proved unable to fill the vacuum. And this was not because they lacked support. In the presidential election of May–June 2012, the veteran Nasserite Hamdeen Sabbahi—a secularist—came third in the first round, just 700,000 votes behind the SCAF’s candidate Ahmed Shafiq. And the two candidates who were to fight it out—Shafiq and the eventual winner, the MB’s Mohamed Morsi—did not even poll half the votes between them in the first round. The election of course was marred by the arbitrary disqualification of other candidates who would have inhabited the secular ground between the MB and the SCAF.
With the MB in power, and consolidating its power in a series of constitutional moves following the presidential poll, the dynamic of the Egyptian revolution changed. It became, for the left, a question of exposing the differences between the social justice rhetoric of the Brotherhood on the streets and its actions in power; a question of organizing the working class in preparation for the moment when political and economic struggles would merge.
As Hossam El-Hamelawy (see Chapter 1) puts it: ‘The leadership is reactionary, reformist, opportunist as with the Labour Party in Britain. But at the same time the base cadres are moving in a different direction. When Morsi speaks about the Islamic Sharia, maybe the Sharia in his head translates into neoliberal norms. But for the Muslim Brotherhood worker it actually means social justice.’4
However, after two years of riots, crises, scandals and crackdowns, Egypt has produced no large force on the left that is simultaneously against Islamism and in favour of a rapid completion of the revolution against the old militarists and businessmen who stand behind the SCAF. The left of all colours remains frustrated by the fact that the revolution has failed to break out of its ‘political’ stage.
Egypt, in short, is the clearest example of the revenge of the hierarchy: the revenge of the twentieth-century ideologies that globalist, secularist netizens had convinced themselves would expire of their own accord. The revolution is not over. Its next phase will seem quite familiar to those who studied 1848, or the classic revolutions of the twentieth century—but with this crucial difference: its fate will depend on whether large numbers of the Islamist poor, the lower middle class and workers can be convinced to break with the MB towards a social justice agenda that is not, at the same time, even more radically Islamist. That, in turn, depends on the ability of those who led the masses to Tahrir in January 2010 to break out of the political ghetto described above. (As I read the proofs of this edition, on 6 December 2012, six protesters have died and hundreds have been injured in clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the radical, more secular forces resisting President Morsi’s grab for extra-constitutional power.)
And while there are many specifics to the Egyptian situation that are not likely to be replicated elsewhere, the year 2012 closed with a foreboding among the social movements of the world that maybe the old forces—religion, fascism, Stalinist communism, militarism—could revive and conquer elsewhere.
5. Women [Are] very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access, the ‘archetypal’protest leader, organiser, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman
With more examples to draw on, this pattern is confirmed. But beyond women’s demographic and political presence, the noticeable thing is how unprepared feminism has been to deal with what’s happened during the struggle.
There’s been an obvious and predictable backlash, such as the sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, the crazy debate in the Egyptian parliament over a husband’s right to have sex with the corpse of a recently deceased wife; the rapes and sexual assaults in various Occupy camps. Within the developed-world occupation movements there’s been the consistent problem of men assuming leadership, and dominating the discussion, even in forums where ‘consensus’ and the various speaker stacking systems were supposed to prevent it.
In general, women have been able to organize to combat such instances of outright sexism. But the wider problem remains: if a movement has no demands, then how does it articulate what women’s liberation consists of? How does it fit the issues raised by women’s long-term and strategic oppression into the immediate social issues of the day?
Such questions perplexed and even tore apart the left-wing movements that emerged after 1968. Once women had won the battle against blatant sexism inside the left, there was still the issue, day to day, of how you advance the self-organization of women in an industrial labour movement that could be simultaneously militant, anti-capitalist and sexist.
In the horizontalist movements, this problem has hardly begun to be addressed. At root it is because feminism has achieved social mobility for some women, and even a symbolically liberated lifestyle, but at the price of a truce over the economic and social subjugation of all women. The journalist Laurie Penny summed up the limitations of what ‘post-left’ feminism has achieved:
I wonder if the shiver of impossible yearning I experience when I watch space-battles on the television is what my nanna and women like her felt when they watched us going to university, having boyfriends … dancing all night… For her, my life was, is, science fiction: strange and frightening, enabled by technology … We handle it all casually because we’re unable to conceive of an even better world. We’ve been told that this shaky picture is the best we’re ever going to get.5
If you take a long-lens view of this dilemma—personal liberation replacing a struggle for general economic and social liberation—you could say it’s simply subset of the overarching problem with the movements of 2011–12. Being a counter-culture—or even a ‘counter-power’—is a viable strategy only as long as the dominant cultures and powers are benign and stable. Here the experience of the early labour movement contains a lesson.
The agenda of women’s liberation—not just women’s rights, but an actual route to sexual and economic equality—had to be imposed onto the early workers’ movement by—guess who?—Marxist men with beards. Written in 1879, August Bebel’s book Woman and Socialism became required reading for working-class men who wanted to be activists in the German socialist party, the SPD. It pledges that the woman of the future will be ‘entirely independent, both socially and economically. She will not be subjected to even a trace of domination and exploitation, but will be free and man’s equal, and mistress of her own lot … In the choice of love she is as free and unhampered as man.’6
But what the male lathe-turners of nineteenth-century Germany took for granted—the goal of economic liberation for the poorest and most downtrodden women—late twentieth-century mainstream feminism could not dare to imagine. It had become embattled by a sexual counter-revolution, detached from the politics of poverty and class, trapped in academic language.
So horizontalism in Europe and America, or the secular activists in the Middle East, often failed to successfully organize working-class and low-income women. Where it did so—as with the Spanish indignado movement once it moved out of the tent camps and immersed itself in everyday life—you find women, again and again, at the forefront of the resulting actions. The Coralla Utopia squat in Seville, where evicted working-class families took over a deserted apartment block, was run by a core of poverty-stricken women in their forties and fifties.
In the debates outlined below, about how the social movements of 2011–12 might break out of their isolation, the ability of feminism to see beyond the ‘personal’ into issues of economic freedom and a redesigned society will probably be decisive.
However, the scale of the sexual counter-revolution in some countries means women are not going to wait for the social movements to get their act together. Mitt Romney’s stunning defeat among women voters in the November 2012 US presidential elections can be seen as the direct result of the Republicans’ obsession with attacking abortion and contraception rights. The GOP’s state-level wa
r on abortion rights in particular during 2011–12 mobilized tens of thousands of women in local campaigns, not to mention the overwhelmingly female and minority workforce of the abortion clinics themselves. Nevertheless, their most effective defensive act in all this was to vote, and to vote in that most hierarchical of competitions: the race for the White House.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before—and the quintessential experience of the twentieth century—was the killing of dissent within movements, the channelling of movements, and their bureaucratization
With hindsight, late 2011 was the moment the sheen on horizontalism faded. In Egypt, the atmosphere of networked tolerance that had prevailed during the initial Tahrir Square occupation dulled as real, hierarchical forces emerged. In Spain, the leading voices within the indignado movement became frustrated as the obsession with ‘process’, the tyranny of consensus and the refusal to advocate political demands sucked away its momentum. With Occupy Wall Street, critics point to an emergent self-obsession, which the philosopher Slavoj Žižek warned about when he spoke in Zuccotti in October: ‘There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?’7
The journalist Thomas Frank excoriated Occupy for its self-obsession, its refusal to express demands, comparing its minimal achievements with those of the Tea Party, which abandoned horizontalism and moved into the hierarchies of the Republican Party—gaining heavy representation in Congress, state legislatures and their own man on the ticket for vice-president.
‘It is as clear to me today as it was last year’, Frank wrote, ‘that the conservative era will be brought to a close only through some kind of mass social movement on the left. But what kind of movement might succeed? Well, for one thing, a movement whose core values arise not from an abstract hostility to the state or from the need for protesters to find their voice, but rather from the everyday lives of working people.’8
However, both in the USA and Spain, the occupiers did—once their ability to capture physical space was suppressed—attempt to move towards ‘everyday’ or ‘normal’ life. By mid 2012, wherever you went in Spain you could find movements of the working class and poor that had become infused with a maybe 5 per cent dose of horizontalist activism. The landless labourers I found occupying and working a deserted farm in Andalusia had attracted a small band of itinerant indignados: they slept on the concrete floors of the abandoned farm and tended the sheep in their Che Guevara t-shirts. Likewise it was 15M activists who acted as a kind of facilitation service for the mainly working-class occupiers at Coralla Utopia in Seville. Castells writes of the Spanish indignados:
The movement did not disappear; rather it spread out into the social fabric, with neighbourhood assemblies, defensive actions against injustices, such as opposition to evictions of families, and the spreading of alternative economic practices such as consumer cooperatives, ethical banking, exchange networks and many other such forms of living differently so as to live with meaning.9
In the USA, though the Occupy movement had been reduced to a smaller bunch of activists by mid 2012, you began to see, around the edges of their attempts to infest Union Square on a nightly basis, small clusters of activists from what Zizek might have called ‘normal life’: Orthodox Jewish youth complaining of being oppressed by their community’s internal security force; African American kids—from projects, not colleges—who’d mobilized in their thousands in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. When Superstorm Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in November 2012, overwhelming the federal emergency response services, Occupy activists surged into the breach, organizing food kitchens, rigging emergency power supplies, setting up informal car ferry schemes and emergency shelters. Soon the hashtag #OccupySandy was trending.
So, if you look hard enough, the Occupy protests did leave an imprint on ‘normal life’—and of course they made a massive imprint on intellectual and cultural life. But to those who know the history of radical politics, the pattern of ‘reaching out’ as facilitators towards the struggles of the severely dispossessed bears a fatal resemblance to the actions of the Russian ‘Narodniks’ of the 1870s.
The student Narodniks, or Populists, left Moscow and St Petersburg in their thousands in what became known as the ‘mad summer of 1874’. Dressed as labourers or peasants, they sought jobs alongside the recently emancipated serfs, whose village communes they believed to be the basis of a future economic system that could bypass industrial capitalism. Equally important to the Narodniks was the perfection of the self: revolutionaries ought to be ‘fully rounded characters who opposed the crushing of individuals under the wheels of a runaway historical tractor’.10
Though their work was later derided by Marxists, and after it failed some became terrorists, it was not a total waste of effort. Over its forty-year arc of development, Russian Populism would produce numerous activists who eventually concluded that it was better to spread radical politics among the workers rather than the peasants, because the route to social justice lay through seizing hold of capitalist industry, and indeed government—not in the attempt to avoiding a capitalist stage of development. Some became reformist social democrats, others, leaders of the Bolshevik Party: the phrase quoted in the paragraph above was flung by Leon Trotsky, then a teenage Narodnik, at his Marxist girlfriend at a clandestine meeting in the 1890s.
But the route away from horizontalism to more traditional structured politics looks blocked today: blocked by consciousness of how entrapped activists become when they enter structures like the trades unions, the US Democrats, social democracy and even the major NGOs. Though many activists do live parallel lives—working for a union by day, for example, mobilizing for occupation protests by night—it is rare to find horizontalist practices imported into unions and official parties. It is far more common to find social movement activists complaining that their time is wasted working for the union bureaucracy. Castells argues that this is logical, and that the turn to ‘alternative economic practices’—by choice among the activists and by necessity among the poor—is where the movement goes next, along with the spread of anti-establishment consciousness.
But a changed consciousness is not enough. It does not resist austerity, stop fascism, or liberate women from drudgery and sexual violence. Though they have developed in fertile directions via communes, land occupations and hurricane relief work in 2012, the social movements have not yet found a tactic that can dictate the agenda on the scale it did during the occupation of symbolic space in mid-to-late 2011.
7. Memes: ‘A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures’ (Wikipedia). So what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly ‘market tested’ and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or, if no good, they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an overstatement, but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
When the history of this crisis is written, one of the most fascinating tasks will be to comprehensively document the memes that flowed throughout it. It will not be easy: the digital human consciousness is playful. Thousands of jokes are made each day on Twitter consisting, for example, of fake book titles on some iconoclastic theme. It will not be enough to document what they were, but who made them—the speed at which the irony flowed; were people at work when they retweeted, or added their own contribution? Did the meme stay local, or did it go global?
And not all memes were digital. The ‘V for Vendetta’ mask associated with the Anonymous hacker coll
ective was physical: it was worn on faces, and spray-canned on the bent shutters of the posh hotels in Syntagma Square, by people with no links whatsoever to Anonymous.
There is the global phenomenon of holding up verbose, personalized hand-drawn placards, whose clear subtext is defiance of the pithy, uniform, printed ones supplied by trade unions and leftist groups. ‘We want everyone to wake up to the beauty we can create’, read one I spotted on the first day of the Occupy protest at St Paul’s in London. ‘This is not a violent riot. This is a human awakening,’ said another.
Then there is the chant—‘Ash’ab nurid izqat al-nizam’ (the people demand the fall of the regime)—which spread from Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt to Libya and Syria without textually morphing at all. Journalist Suby Raman has produced a ‘deconstruction’ of the slogan for non-Arabic speakers that reveals fascinatingly significant choices in the words themselves: the term for ‘the people’ is the most radical, most secular on offer; the term for ‘the fall of is not radical at all—signifying more ‘the cutting down to size’. The term for ‘regime’ means more than just government: ‘Instead, it refers to a sociopolitical order that the people are trying to bring down, an entire mechanism of terror and discipline that they have broken free of.’11 This, in turn, allowed the slogan’s meaning to morph from literal to metaphorical, as noted early on in the process by the Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi: ‘They are not only referring to their corrupt governments; they also mean the old regime that has prevailed for decades in the entire Arab world, from the Atlantic to the Gulf.’12