It’s undeniable that we are being pushed by the ruling authority to the corner of reactiveness; that most of the battles we that have been through since Mubarak fall were imposed and defined by the authorities and the revolutionaries were just dragged to them, while in a revolution, it should be the other way around. It’s true that we’ve managed to end some of the battles with some gains but if we are thinking about continuing this way, the separation between the revolutionaries and the masses will continue to deepen which in turn will transform the rupture between the masses and the revolutionaries to be a rupture between the masses and the revolution at whole. Hence, revolutionaries will end up being paralyzed facing the authorities which will result in failure to push the revolution towards achieving its real goals: radical change in the relation between the state and the society i.e. the redistribution of wealth and power among the society.
This constant dragging to the false battle is a contribution of two main factors. One has to do with the nature of the Egyptian authorities and the other has to do with the nature of the Egyptian revolution. As we all know that the nature of the Egyptian state, especially in the last ten years, was of extreme weakness that the state apparatus wasn’t able to monopolize the authority and reproduce a central discourse. So, the authoritarianism was distributed among the interest groups who managed to infiltrate the society using the state apparatus without being subject to its legal framework. In light of this phenomenon we can understand how these interest groups managed to continue functioning after Mubarak has been displaced and after a parliament has been elected and they will continue functioning to a great extent even if one of the revolutionaries managed to win the presidential position.
In order to analyze the second factor contributing in our failure to make our battles, we have to be harsher on ourselves and do some self-criticism having before our eyes that we are talking about a future we are all responsible for with variant degrees. I’m explicitly saying that our childish repulsion at theorizing and organizing considering the former a waste of time and the latter is synonymous to authoritarianism, is what hindered us from analyzing, planning and making the proper calculations before making any step. Enough with this childish attitude now since the masses who were ahead of the elite, and made the revolution, compel us to be humble enough to learn from its movement and think of creating a new form of non-authoritarian organization, that rest on an innovative theorization, which departs from ready-made thoughts, analyzing and interpreting a new lively reality which is still in the making.
The organization we need is not an organization with its conventional meaning. Instead of being a static system, it’s rather a perpetual dynamic process of managing the societal interaction. It’s not an ideological organization making crowd mobilization over false consciousness its strategy and goal. It’s rather a socio-economic organization that articulates its political programs from below upon good understanding of the “real” socio-economics of the society rather than imposing a political agenda from above which overlooks the reality of the masses. It’s not also a conventional communist organization which makes the factory its own focal point and central sphere of action, since however valid was this theme for a certain historical context it became obsolete as the machinery replaced the workers and the industrial type of production is not the dominant theme for today’s Capitalism anymore. So, I would say that the factory is not the place where the masses are, and thus the revolutionary organization we need for today is not an economic organization; it’s rather a socio-economic organization which understands the relationship between economics and social composition and how geographical spaces are being shaped by economics and it will find that the masses are mostly concentrated in the poor crowded areas where poverty compels people to depend on each other in their daily life and hence create the public sphere which is being to a great extent privatized in rich areas given the economic ability of the people living there.
So, it’s a socio-geo-economic organization that pushes to enroot the revolution socially in the areas where is being shaped by common economic factors so that it can reproduce the revolutionary discourse from below to face the authority discourse coming from above. It’s an organization which is not pursuing winning the masses, as it will be the masses. And for the organization to achieve this purpose, three main tasks have to be on its agenda. Firstly; creating – or to be more specific discovering – the organic leadership implanted in the socio-economic soil of the society. The second task should be creating a network of the revolutionary spots on a socio-economic basis in order to develop a wider sense of a common ownership to the public sphere which in turn should result in a creating a spirit of solidarity on a wider geographical scale that outweighs the authority discourse which depends on dividing people on the basis of false consciousness. Finally, the third task for the organization should be constructing upon this revolutionary network and articulating the revolutionary discourse into a constructivist political agenda; and hence find an internal and external decentralized way of the communication and the movement, so that instead of being dragged into the battles we impose our own battles in which we will be able to push the revolutionary agenda forward little by little until we dismantle the authority altogether.
Bassem Zakaria Al-Samragy
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The original Arabic version was published in Al-Shorouk Newspaper in May 9th 2012
