The Egyptian Revolution Is Not Miraculous:

Far From Leaderless, Spontaneous, Unplanned, Accidental, or Twitterific, Egypt Provides Resources of Hope for Activists Who Would Be As Resourceful As Egyptian Organizers Have Been

The Egyptian Revolution is not leaderless.

It is not spontaneous.

It did not arise like a spasm in unplanned sympathy with the uprising in Tunisia, or spurred by blind rage at the aged dictator Hosni Mubarak's declared hopes for the kingly succession of his son.

Although it is certainly true that thirty years of oppression have lead to a widespread discontent that proved an incubator for insurrectionary energy, such oppression could just as readily have provided the substance of deepening despair and further generations of oppression in the absence of an actually organized response.

And although it is true that cellphones and twitter feeds and facebook pages were key organizational tools for the Egyption Revolution, what matters is that organizers made use of organizational tools, not that these in particular were the tools they used (which is also true of the faxes, radio broadcasts, megaphones, wheatpaste posters, and pamphlets that were the definitive educational, agitational, and organizational tools of prior revolutionaries).

Cellphones, twitter, and facebook are not inherently or provocatively revolutionary artifacts. It is merely certain deployments of these tools that can be revolutionary. If anything, the default uses of these artifacts have been overwhelmingly reactionary so far, facilitating ubiquitous elite-incumbent surveillance, enabling the radical intensification of targeted corporate marketing harassment, evacuating public discourse of indispensable complexity, depth, deliberation, criticality in a mesmerizing froth of canned one-liners, promotional slogans, and interminable impressionistic, sensationalistic, superficial reportage.

Discussions of Egypt emphasizing social media in the United States may appear to foreground technical concerns about the ease of their use the scope of their reach, and their relative susceptibility or not to censorship, but the focus on such technicality functions in profoundly political ways.

Indeed, this techno-centrist discourse functions primarily to promote an anti-political technologically deterministic fantasy of spontaneism that -- taken together with endlessly repeated declarations about the leaderlessness of the movement and especially of the miraculousness of its nonviolence -- functions to distract countless millions of people from the lessons of the Revolution even while their eyes are fixed on the Revolution: Namely, that well-planned disciplined organized nonviolent resistance to the elite-incumbent authoritarian figures and structures that maintain the profoundly unjust unsustainable corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative global order can indeed be as effective as ever.

It has been said over and over again that it is easier to imagine the end of the world in an environmental collapse or military catastrophe resulting from the greed and stupidity of the current capitalist order than it is to imagine the end of the current capitalist order itself. This is palpably ridiculous, especially when before our eyes we are greeted with literal evidence to the contrary.

I cannot recommend highly enough this informative short documentary from Al Jazeera about the leaders of the April 6th Youth Movement without which the Egyptian Revolution almost certainly would not have taken place or at any rate managed not to founder in the face of the brutal, all too typical and usually effective, counter-revolutionary violence of Mubarak's regime in the Revolution's early days.

The documentary speaks of the beginnings of the Revolution three years ago in the textile strike of April 6, 2008 from which the movement got its name, in the work of activist Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel. Another key figure in the April 6th Movement is, of course, Asmaa Mahfouz, whose work attracted the special attention of Democracy Now! and the New York Times. Coverage of Mahfouz's truly inspiring youtube videos regularly do not go on to point out her crucial connection with a profoundly well-trained well-disciplined well-organized nonviolent activist campaign years in the planning.

It is sometimes noted that the April 6th Movement took up iconography from the nonviolent Serbian Otpor Student Movement which successfully resisted Slobodan Milošević a decade ago (the extent of planning and organization -- with the conspicuous assistance of life-long activist and scholar of nonviolent social struggle Gene Sharp and his colleagues -- is likewise shunted to the side in too many popular accounts of Serbian resistance in my view, for familiar reasons). But it is important to grasp that the connection of the Egyptian April 6th Youth Movement and Serbian Otpor Student Movement was not a matter of superficial appreciation or just some cut-and-paste appropriation of Otpor's raised fist .gif by Egyptian students shopping for slick revolutionary graphics by way of google image search.

Ahmed Maher of April 6th consulted extensively with Serge Popovich of Otpor, and turned to the strategies of nonviolent struggle Popovich learned in turn from Gene Sharp (strategies many of which were gleaned by Sharp, who is sometimes wryly described as the "Machiavelli of Nonviolence," from his extensive research into the successes and failures of King, Gandhi, Thoreau and others). The leaders of the April 6th Movement are well versed in the techniques and, indispensably, the disciplines of a nonviolence well-attuned to the deceptive and distractive tactics of mass mediation and well-prepared for state violence and the difficulties of de-escalation in its face.

Also, young as they are, the leaders of the April 6th movement certainly seem to be very friendly and familiar with the tapestry of Egyptian experienced feminist and labor activists not to mention engaged artists and intellectuals both living quietly in Egypt and, often, less quietly, abroad.

Largely ignorant of far too much of this context myself, even as a highly interested and comparatively well-informed idiot American, I think too much of my own commentary on Egypt here and in the classroom these last couple of weeks has been shaped by my disdain for the ugly conflict-tourism and facile techno-utopianism of so much coverage here in the United States.

Nothing I am saying should be taken to imply that I regard the Egyptian revolution as accomplished rather than only just beginning, that I am blissed-out in celebration and insensible to the dangers ahead, not least because of the actions of my own country in my name. But People Power is real. Education, agitation, and organization is its substance. Egypt is providing still more evidence, in a world with a history brimming full of such evidence, of the real possibilities of nonviolent democratizing revolutionary struggles to defeat corporate-militarism before corporate-militarism destroys the world.