The politics of mobilization and demobilization (Part 2)

The 2011 revolution was essentially a game changer, but from Hosni Mubarak stepping down and throughout the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, most of the rules of that game had not changed. Nonetheless, there were certain dynamics that paved the way for a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and society, a new dynamic governing the relation between police and protesters, between political parties and movements and the general public.

For the past six months, however, dating back to June 30, these rules have collapsed and the new rules of the game are no longer clear. We cannot always predict the ramifications of going out into the streets and protesting today, for instance, or the ramifications of the turnout of the 2014 constitutional referendum, for that matter.

The building phase of this new regime is taking a great deal of time. There seems to be an internal debate going on within the new regime as to how to turn the condition that the country is living into a governable situation. This is going on in the midst of a state of near-oblivion concerning the accelerated decay of the state and its ability to perform basic state functions.

The rules of engagement with the public seem to have changed, however, and I personally need to understand: What is the current shape of the political landscape in Egypt?

This is precisely why a discussion of the modes of governance and the mechanisms of control — as covered in Part 1 of this article — should not be considered intellectual embroidery, simply because we are all “subject to oppression.” I genuinely need someone to clarify what happened after June 30 and through the course of the last six months.

In my mind, the way things unfolded since 25 January evokes the following blurry imagery: Imagine, for an instant, the blinding flare that follows a giant explosion, the type we see in the movies. January 25, 2011 was similar to that. You then gradually and slowly regain your ability to see the details.  June 30, 2013 was another one of these moments, for it reshuffled everything once again. Think of the opposite of the once-imagined effect of a neutron bomb: In the aftermath of the explosion, buildings and infrastructures fall apart, but all the parties at play remain in the vacuum. This is what the current Egyptian political landscape feels like.

I am reminded of an episode of Futurama, which featured the end of the world and the beginning of an afterlife of perpetual swimming in nothingness. The world had ended, and in the next frame, we could see that everything had disappeared, except the characters who were trapped in an eternal void — depicted in the cartoon as a simple white background. So they went about swimming in the void, asking themselves what had happened, and then finally resigned themselves to playing board games for all eternity.

Things have fallen apart, leaving only the people who were around to see it happen. Some of them are armed and have some form of political legitimacy, and they seem to have gone mad. They fire rounds of bullets, hundreds die in just a few minutes, but they don't seem to have any idea what to do after. They try to grasp at anything around them, but nothing that is familiar remains in place. All of the defining characteristics of this world are now gone.

A car bomb explodes and a few people die, and we don't know what to do after that either. We don’t know what will happen next and neither does the military — nor does anyone, for that matter.

As a people, we haven’t declared our withdrawal from the political scene yet. And I believe the military institution is ambivalent about Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's candidacy, and has lingered over the decision for a whole number of reasons that are not worth getting into here. Suffice it to say that the ramifications of the position are grave and intimidating, even for someone of the field marshal’s popularity.

Popularity, in fact, can be deadly.

            How do you plan on tackling the socioeconomic crisis, the core of the revolution?

– We don’t know, but we’ll keep firing bullets until things are a bit clearer.

This scenario, incidentally, is not much different from the strategy of the Brotherhood, whose approach seems to have been to scale up the crisis until something gives. We are all still swimming purposelessly through this political void.

You have a gun and I don’t, but what does killing me achieve when we're both sinking in the belly of the 1952 state's ultimate fall-out?

– I'm not sure, but I will shoot anyway and then think about it.

What about the university students?

– We’ll just extend the mid-year holidays.

Is there any serious effort to establish real authority? All I see is a state of mad vandalism and an attempt to reproduce forms of authority that are untenable in the long run. What do the police want from the new authority? What does State Security, the ringleader of the January 24 forces (that call for a return to the state prior to January  25, 2011), want? What does the Muslim Brotherhood want? What do we want? How is it possible that General Mohamed Ibrahim is still the Minister of Interior? What does Saudi Arabia want? What is this “square one” that everyone keeps referring to? And what the hell is “Neo-Nasserism”?

Will the civil war state of mind persist until we actually end up with a civil war, which would inevitably create an even more militarized state, and even more bloodshed?  We have not seen the end of the possibilities of militarization in Egypt, yet.

The success of this regime, and any regime regardless of whether it is democratic or autocratic, I expect, requires ending this state of wide politicization and mobilization (characteristic of revolutions), and that’s how a revolution actually ends. The increasing politicization of the public is the only true accomplishment of the January 25 revolution so far. I do not underestimate the state’s ability to kill that accomplishment, I just don’t expect them to succeed. Ending the state of public politicization would necessitate a process of assimilation into a new social-political arrangement, a new political economy, which requires something more sustainable than naked oppression.

If, however, the state succeeds in demobilizing society and sustaining this mode of governance on the long run, then this would be my personal worst nightmare, a scenario much worse than fascism: The death of politics as we came to understand and engage with it after 2011. It seems to me that large segments of the public feared fascism (or, to be precise, the fascist aspect of continuous mobilization of one segment of society pitting it against the rest) more than they feared the complete destruction of the newly open political space. It might even be that part of society had become convinced that a free and open political space is the source of the problem.

To be fair, a large portion of those who took to the streets to protest on June 30 did so only so that they would never have to do it again. But I don't think their hopes will be realized. At least, not anytime soon.

This is the second part of an article that has been translated from Arabic. The original can be read here.