Central to De Smet’s argument is Gramsci’s interpretation of ‘Caesarism’, an occasion in which two evenly matched political opponents reach a potentially catastrophic stalemate; such an interplay between these forces can only end in mutual destruction. In applying this to the Egyptian revolution, we see how the Egyptian state was bereft of strong hegemonies and the people were replete with capable counter-hegemonies. Through this analysis, we can see how the current situation in Egypt demonstrates how both national histories and global power relations enable, define and displace popular resistance and social transformation.
Central to De Smet’s argument is Gramsci’s interpretation of ‘Caesarism’, an occasion in which two evenly matched political opponents reach a potentially catastrophic stalemate; such an interplay between these forces can only end in mutual destruction. In applying this to the Egyptian revolution, we see how the Egyptian state was bereft of strong hegemonies and the people were replete with capable counter-hegemonies. Through this analysis, we can see how the current situation in Egypt demonstrates how both national histories and global power relations enable, define and displace popular resistance and social transformation.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Central to De Smet’s argument is Gramsci’s interpretation of ‘Caesarism’, an occasion in which two evenly matched political opponents reach a potentially catastrophic stalemate; such an interplay between these forces can only end in mutual destruction. In applying this to the Egyptian revolution, we see how the Egyptian state was bereft of strong hegemonies and the people were replete with capable counter-hegemonies. Through this analysis, we can see how the current situation in Egypt demonstrates how both national histories and global power relations enable, define and displace popular resistance and social transformation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783713462 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2016 |
| Series: | Reading Gramsci |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 909,817 |
| File size: | 572 KB |
About the Author
Brecht De Smet is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University. Since 2008 he has been studying strike movements and political protests in Egypt from a Marxist perspective. De Smet is the author of several academic articles and opinion pieces about the workers' movement in Egypt. He is the author of Gramsci on Tahrir (Pluto, 2016) and A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt. Gramsci, Vygotsky, and the Egyptian Revolution (Brill, 2015).
Brecht De Smet is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University. Since 2008 he has been studying strike movements and political protests in Egypt from a Marxist perspective. De Smet is the author of several academic articles and opinion pieces about the workers' movement in Egypt. He is the author of Gramsci on Tahrir (Pluto, 2016) and A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt. Gramsci, Vygotsky, and the Egyptian Revolution (Brill, 2015).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Egypt 2011. A small group of activists from a variety of leftist organizations, youth movements, opposition parties, human rights centres, and football clubs has called for a demonstration in Midan Tahrir (Liberation Square) on Tuesday 25 January. The protesters demand 'the sacking of the country's interior minister, the cancelling of Egypt's perpetual emergency law, which suspends basic civil liberties, and a new term limit on the presidency that would bring to an end the 30-year rule of president Hosni Mubarak' (Shenker 2011a). Neither the activists nor the security apparatus really expect the demonstration to attract tens of thousands of ordinary Egyptians, let alone be the herald of a mass uprising (Sowers 2012: 4). After their initial bewilderment, the Central Security Forces (CSF) try to repress the peaceful protests with water cannons, sound bombs, batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. Demonstrators retaliate with rocks and bricks. Cairo becomes an urban battlefield with unremitting street fights between police forces and thousands of protesters. The protests in Egypt's capital spark off similar demonstrations in Alexandria and in cities in the Delta, the Canal Zone, and Upper Egypt. Throughout the '18 Days' of popular uprising, mass gatherings and violent countermeasures up the ante, transforming the original, tame demands into the revolutionary slogan al-shab yurid isqat al-nizam (the people want the fall of the regime). Protesters occupy Tahrir Square, workers strike, and ordinary citizens burn down hated police stations and party offices of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Suddenly people realize they are making a revolution–there is no way back. Pressured by Egypt's panicking elites, Mubarak, Egypt's president since 1981, steps down.
The revolutionary events, first in Tunisia and then in regional heavyweight Egypt, reinvigorated mass emancipatory politics throughout the Middle East and the world at large. Protest movements such as Indignados and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were directly inspired by the apparent success of the Tahrir occupation. Through Al Jazeera and other (social) media outlets the uprising was literally projected into the living rooms of the global community, offering a powerful, contemporary example of a genuine popular revolution. Whereas alter-globalization and anti-war mobilizations in the decade before 2011 had reinvigorated a critique of capitalism and imperialism, the revolutionary movements in the Middle East functioned as a salient reminder of the possibility of a spontaneous popular mass movement in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the interpenetration of the political and the social struggle, expressed in the slogan aysh, horreya, adala egtemaeya (bread, freedom, social justice) and the material conjunction of political protests and economic strikes underlined the continued validity of Marx's and Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution (see Choonara 2011). The workers' movement played a crucial role, not only in disorganizing state power during the final days of Mubarak's rule, but also in the decade-long preparation of the uprising. The insurrection fertilized the organizational seeds of independent trade unionism that were already planted before 2011. New syndicalist formations popped up at the local and national level and every section of the Egyptian working class became involved in strikes and collective actions to defend material livelihoods and the right to organize. Permanent revolution, in its core meaning of a transition from political to social emancipation, was not an empty slogan or wishful thinking, but a real possibility. Additionally, the wave of international protests inspired by Tahrir illustrated the geographic dimension of the 'uninterrupted' revolution. Tahrir came to represent the potential for a global rupture of what Antonio Gramsci called the duration of capitalism–the 'empty time' of a social formation that had outlived itself (see Thomas 2009: 152). Duration is history twiddling its thumbs, not in the sense that nothing is going on, but that individual events progress linearly and sequentially, without really becoming entwined and capable of unleashing a transformative dynamic. Conversely, an epoch is a 'historical break, in the sense that a whole series of questions which piled up individually ... have precisely formed a "mound", modifying the general structure of the previous process' (Gramsci 1971: 106, Q15§59). Could the events of the 'Arab Spring'–an orientalist misnomer constitute a new epoch?
Yet by 2015 the outcomes of the Egyptian uprising were all but revolutionary. The military, bureaucratic, and civil security elites from the Mubarak era had reasserted their full control over the state apparatus. The economic structure, based on a neoliberal strategy of accumulation, remained unchanged. After four years the popular movement was, at least momentarily, smothered by a triumphant counter-revolution. However, the most peculiar feature of the ongoing counter-revolution was not its success, but the fact that it had been accomplished on the waves of mass mobilization. The current military strongman, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was elected president in 2014, came to power through a clever and agile appropriation of the Tamarod (Rebel) campaign, which rallied hundreds of thousands, if not millions of ordinary Egyptians in the streets. The Egyptian experience raises important questions about the agency of counter-revolution, the protagonists of which are able to dislodge the dynamic of permanent revolution and gain popular legitimacy despite the enduring crisis of state and economy.
Reading (with) Gramsci
Just a few months after the uprising, Bassem Hassan claimed that 'the way things have been unfolding since last January resembles more Gramsci's notion of caesarism than the scenario of a victorious popular revolution' (Hassan 2011: 4). In this book I hope to shed light on the dynamic of revolution and restoration, not only by 'reading Gramsci' to unearth the meaning of central concepts such as hegemony, passive revolution, and Caesarism, but mainly by reading the Egyptian Revolution with Gramsci to understand the processes at hand. Conversely, through a discussion of the Egyptian case, I aim to contribute to the field of Gramsci studies and especially to the discussion of his notion of Caesarism, which has not yet been the object of much scholarly debate (see Fontana 2004). Nevertheless, my goal is not to investigate Gramsci's thought in a genealogical or philological way, but to deploy his concepts in order to construct new forms of understanding appropriate to the present. I admit that this approach runs the risk of turning into what Hal Draper (2011a: 21) called 'quotation-mongering' and Roccu (2012: 20) 'a prêtà-porter version of Gramsci': using decontextualized fragments of the Prison Notebooks as sources of authority to 'prove' one's own point. However, such fragments can also be deployed in a less apologetic and a more dialogical way, as conceptual threads that weave together a new narrative, which engages with problems relevant to our time and place. Moreover, as Gramsci himself appears to indicate (Q4§1), there is a coherent leitmotiv or 'rhythm of thought' operating throughout the Prison Notebooks that transcends its atomistic character. But how are the ideas of a Sardinian Marxist who was politically active almost a century ago relevant for our current day and age?
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), born into a Sardinian middle-class family, joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913, becoming an editor and journalist. His political views were influenced by socialist and nationalist circles and by the industrialization of Turin, which attracted proletarianized farmers from the Italian South. Building on thinkers such as Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) and Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Gramsci complemented the 'vulgar' Marxism that circulated in the party with a more sophisticated Hegelian outlook. During the First World War Gramsci was active in the organization and education of Turin workers. After the war, he set up the revolutionary socialist weekly LOrdine Nuovo (The New Order) which became the voice of Bolshevik politics in Italy. In 1920, the group around L'Ordine Nuovo played a crucial role in assisting the workers' councils that emerged spontaneously during the general strike and factory occupations in Turin in 1919 and 1920. The compromise negotiated between moderate trade union leaders, the Socialist Party, and the state representing the interests of landholders and factory owners not only stabilized the capitalist system for a brief period, but it also blocked the self-emancipatory movement of the Italian working class (Le Blanc 1996: 281). Disillusioned with the reformist policies of the Socialist Party, Gramsci and many other Italian socialists founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921.
Until 1924, the leadership of the party was in the hands of Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970), who was criticized by Lenin in 'Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder' (1920) for his ultra-left politics. Whereas Gramsci advocated a united front against the rise of Fascism, Bordiga insisted on shielding the party from 'bourgeois' influences such as the Socialist Party. In 1924 Gramsci was elected into parliament. In the same year Bordiga was arrested and Gramsci took over the leadership of the Italian Communist Party until he was himself imprisoned in 1926, despite his parliamentary immunity. He remained in prison until 1937, when he died following a deterioration in his already weak health. While imprisoned, he wrote 34 notebooks, which dealt with diverse topics, ranging from political theory, through philosophy, to Italian history.
Only after the Second World War, when the Italian Communist Party published select sections of the Prison Notebooks, did Gramsci's ideas begin to circulate. Gramsci's thought was appropriated by the Italian 'Eurocommunist' movement, which sought to anchor its reformist politics in the works of the respected Marxist. In 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci' (1976) Perry Anderson famously criticized this reformist instrumentalization of Gramsci's ideas. While defending Gramsci's revolutionary project, Anderson rejected the coherence of his thought, which, due to Fascist censorship, the use of obscure terminology, and its fragmented form, appeared contradictory and multi-interpretable. Recent scholarship, however, has affirmed the internal consistency of Gramsci's concepts (see Thomas 2009).
Gramsci clearly positioned his thought in the debates about the development of capitalism and revolutionary strategy after the First World War. Consequently, he should not be read as a cultural or political 'theorist, but as a Marxist concerned with developing a philosophy of praxis: theory as a necessary tool in the emancipatory struggles of subaltern groups. In this regard, Gramsci should be read along with other Marxists–in the first place Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but also Trotsky, who functions in many ways as a complementary thinker (see Burawoy 1989: 793; Thomas 2015). The starting text for such a reading is Marx's 'Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' (1859), as Gramsci himself indicated: 'It would seem that the theory of the passive revolution is a necessary critical corollary to the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy' (Gramsci 1971: 114; Q15§62; see also Gramsci 1971: 106-7; Q15§7). In the 'Preface' Marx famously claimed that:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure
No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. (Marx 1987: 263)
Gramsci's concept of passive revolution directly addressed Marx's general remarks regarding societal crisis, revolution, and transformation. These three concepts serve as threads that tie this book together.
Discarding millenarian interpretations of the First World War and the rise of Fascism, Gramsci transcended the eschatological binary of 'socialism or barbarism'. Instead of taking capitalist crisis as his main problematic, he tried to comprehend capitalism's historical stubbornness and agility in the face of its recurring crises. His insights are important to our understanding of the persistence of capitalism today, despite the ongoing political and economic crisis of its current, neoliberal form. Arguably, his concept of passive revolution stands at the centre of such an analysis, functioning as the conceptual antipode of permanent revolution (see Thomas 2015).
Outline
After this introductory first chapter I have organized the book into two parts. Readers are warned that Gramsci arrives in Egypt only in the second part of the book. Part I, 'On the Subject of Revolution, offers a theoretical discussion of Gramsci's concepts of passive revolution and Caesarism, whereas Part II, 'Gramsci in Egypt', engages with the specific case of the Egyptian revolution. When I was writing 'On the Subject of Revolution' I chose not to present Gramsci's 'theory' in a schematic, 'logical' manner, but instead to let the concepts emerge organically as part of a historical narrative about the constitution of the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois society. The goal here is not to present the past, but to evoke the rich, historical concreteness from which Gramsci distilled his concepts. Chapter 2, 'From Bourgeois to Permanent Revolution', kicks off the story by discussing the English and French trajectories of 'bourgeois revolution'. Concepts such as 'hegemony' and 'intellectuals' are, for example, explained by bringing them into the orbit of Jacobinism. The chapter ends with a comment on Marx's notion of the revolution 'in permanence', which delivers a historical promise that remained unfulfilled. This sets the stage for the next chapter, 'A Criterion for Interpretation', which is devoted entirely to the concept of passive revolution. I closely follow Gramsci's narration of the 'Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, in order to arrive at his passive-revolutionary interpretation of the process of Italian state formation. I continue with his extension of the concept to the domain of the constitution of European capitalism in general. Subsequently, I illuminate Gramsci's application of the interpretative criterion of passive revolution to the process of the reconstitution of capitalism as a means of understanding its stubborn survival. Attention is paid to imperialism, Fascism, and Fordism/ Americanism as global reconfigurations of existing historical blocs that temporarily displace both the fettering of productive forces and the threat of social revolution. At this point Gramsci's understanding of passive revolution as a critical corollary to Marx's 'Preface' shows its true significance. Finally, I pose the question of whether neoliberalism can be interpreted from the perspective of passive revolution, critically engaging with scholars who suggest that neoliberal counter-reform is of a different order. I suggest that we should take seriously Gramsci's own definition of passive revolution as a criterion of interpretation, and deploy it accordingly.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Gramsci on Tahrir"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Brecht De Smet.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Series PrefaceAcknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
Part I: On the Subject of Revolution
2. From Bourgeois to Permanent Revolution
3. A Criterion for Interpretation
4. Caesarism
Part II: Gramsci in Egypt
5. Passive Revolution and Imperialism
6. Lineages of Egyptian Caesarism
7. The 25 January Revolution
8. Revolution and Restoration
9. Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index