[ Reflections on the Arab Spring After Twelve Years: A
‘failed’ revolution may not be entirely failed if we consider
significant transformations that may transpire at the level of the
‘social"]
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ACTUAL POLITICS  
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Nihal El Aasar
April 10, 2023
Africa is a Country
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_ Reflections on the Arab Spring After Twelve Years: A ‘failed’
revolution may not be entirely failed if we consider significant
transformations that may transpire at the level of the ‘social" _

, Image credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr CC BY 2.0, 2011.

 

Twelve years have passed since the Arab Spring, and both Egypt and
Tunisia are facing a stark economic crisis. Both are currently under
the mercy of extremely unfavorable structural adjustment programs
imposed by the International Monetary Fund, relying heavily on food
imports, mired in debt, and facing historical inflation rates with
unprecedented hikes in food prices. This dire economic situation is
made all the worse by a relentless escalation of authoritarian
measures in both countries. The prevailing atmosphere indicates that
the counterrevolution has prevailed and that avenues of emancipatory
possibility have shrunk almost to the point of extinction.

Every year, however, as the anniversary of the January uprisings
approaches, dread ensues, not only because it prompts us to reflect on
the defeat, but also because of the steady barrage of analysis we are
inundated with, grappling with the same questions every year, and
revealing an unsatiated desire to answer questions that we already
probably know the answers to. Questions abound about horizontalism or
verticalism, leadership, or leaderlessness that date back to the break
between Stalin and Trotsky, which have eternally divided those in the
1917 camp vs the 1968 camp. Spontaneity contra organization _ad
infinitum._

A book that stands out in this genre, however, is Asef
Bayat’s _Revo__lution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the
Arab Spring. _Published in 2017, it has become one of the most
referenced in the field. In it, the Iranian-American sociologist
grapples with the idea of what revolution means in a post-Cold War
era. Bayat—correctly in my opinion—attributes the failure of the
January uprisings, despite their extraordinary mobilization and
resistance, to a lack of revolutionary vision, political organization,
and a dearth of intellectual articulation by its leaders. He does so
by comparing them to the revolutions of the 1970s when the concept of
revolution was largely informed by socialism and anti-imperialism.
Adversely, the January uprisings, affected by the NGOization of the
world, seemed to be more concerned with democracy, human rights, and
accountability.

Deviating away from the approach he took in _Revo__lution Without
Revolutionaries_, Bayat—in his sixth and latest
book, _Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring_,
published in 2021—decides to focus on the granular rather than the
structural by focusing on the “non-movements” as he refers to
them, giving primacy to “what the revolution meant to ordinary
people.” Focusing on Egypt and Tunisia, Bayat’s argument is that
the events of 2011 set something in motion, and brought a different
set of social relations in everyday life. The book is rich with
examples of this everyday resistance from both countries, covering
different categories.

With his starting point being the subaltern, Bayat attempts to
investigate the relationship between the “ordinary” and the
“extraordinary,” or the “mundane” and the “monumental.”
Evoking Antonio Gramsci and American anthropologist and anarchist
James C. Scott, his focus this time is civil society and everyday
resistance as opposed to the macro approach he used in _Revo__lution
Without Revolutionaries, _with the aim of finding the connection
between both. He also aims to give the subaltern “agency” in
relation to revolutionary moments. This is made manifest even in the
naming of the chapters of the book (the poor and the plebian, women,
children of the revolution, etc.), assigning a separate experience to
every group. In doing so he tries to make us consider the meaning of
revolution, providing us with an alternative narrative that doesn’t
fall under the binary of “success” and “defeat.” Its strength
lies in that it rejects the defeatist paradigm that has become the
prevalent narrative of the uprisings.

“A ‘failed’ revolution may not be entirely failed if we consider
significant transformations that may transpire at the level of the
‘social’,” Bayat contends. Arguably, one can attribute this
approach to a sort of theoretical optimism that refuses to give in to
defeat. However, it prompts us to think about the bleakness of the
current post-counterrevolution reality that these everyday
resistances—which one can argue are universal and present in all
societies, not just societies that have undergone recent political
transformations—are something to be celebrated.

Although the attempt to reframe the revolution from being seen through
the lens of “failure” or “defeat” is notable, the premise of
the book itself is indicative of the current impossibility of actual
politics, be it in Egypt or Tunisia. The absence of which gives cause
to the celebration of and the need to document the minutiae of these
quotidian acts.

The book’s heavily researched chapters are divided thematically,
each tackling a different demographic of the revolution. While these
chapters are brimming with examples, the choice to divide them into
categories that are arguably liberal watchwords is expressive of this
absence of politics, defaulting to the reproduction of cultural
subjects. Wouldn’t we rather develop class positions that traverse
these social categories than have signifiers like “the poor” or
“the children?”

In the chapter, Mothers and Daughters of the Revolution, Bayat
references at least three different examples of women taking off their
hijab as an example of changing social attitudes. One example was a
woman who left her advertising job in the corporate sector to work in
civil society and human rights and took off her hijab. Another example
was a woman who took off her hijab and married a human rights
advocate; another one obtained the courage to travel alone and also
took off her hijab. While these examples do not make up the majority
of examples of everyday resistance given in the book, they suggest an
overreliance on anecdotal experience and cast what are extremely
individualized acts of rebellion as resistance.

Nonetheless, Bayat explains that he understands that these categories
are more complex than their titles and that they can be divided along
class or racial lines. However, he is cautious of a “reductionist
Marxism” that tends to “reduce the multilayered sources of
subaltern dissent,” and emphasizes the importance of civil society
formation, invoking Gramsci’s utilization of civil society as a way
to counter Leninist vanguardism (understood as a small elite group
leading the revolution on behalf of the working class). In the
Gramscian sense, the method through which the working class can
challenge this hegemonic dominance is through creating cultural
institutions mired in broad-based, popular movements that would
develop organically through civil society. However, I do not think
this translates to the concept of civil society as it is used today.

As Adam Hanieh argues in _Lineages of Revolt_
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idea of civil society is mostly championed by international
organizations and international financial institutions, linking it
with free market economic policies as a xxxxxx against
authoritarianism. For Hanieh, “the state/civil society dichotomy
serves to ‘conceptualize away’ the problem of capitalism, by
disaggregating society into fragments, with no overarching power
structure, no totalizing unity, no systemic coercions—in other
words, no capitalist system, with its expansionary drive and its
capacity to penetrate every aspect of social life.” He posits
instead for class to be used as the “key social category from which
to comprehend the dynamics of any society, distinct from the catchall
notion of civil society (as it is conventionally understood).”

Bayat also refers to the work of James C. Scott as a necessary
departure from this Marxist “economism” when it comes to thinking
about resistance, and attributes the concept of everyday resistance to
him. However, Bayat maintains that there is a certain reductionism in
Scott’s work through his sole focus on everyday resistance as the
structure for change, and aims in this book to bridge the gap between
the study of everyday resistance and the study of revolutions by using
a combined approach to analyze the Arab Spring. Scott coined
“everyday resistance” in his 1985 book _Weapons of the Weak _to
describe everyday acts of resistance that are not as impactful or
obvious as other forms of organized, collective articulations of
resistance, such as revolutions. Everyday resistance or infrapolitics
as he sometimes refers to it, is more dispersed and is not as visible
to society or the state. While Scott conceives of resistance as an act
or acts that could be taken by a collective, his conception of a
collective is merely a group of unorganized individuals. In this
conception of resistance as the lived experience of scattered
individuals with specific grievances choosing to act outside of
calculated collective action, it is unlikely that this resistance will
grow into broader political dissent that can lead to more organized
action.

While the “idea, the ideal and the memory of Revolution need to be
maintained,” as Bayat mentioned in a December 2017 interview
in Open Democracy
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the idea of an unfinished revolution or an unfinished project is one
that I largely agree with. However, these forms of resistance that
Scott and in this case Bayat bring forth, challenge Marxist accounts
of theories of revolution by insisting that political action can also
happen on a smaller scale—that way giving up on the more material
and structural factors. And while Bayat recognizes in the introduction
that these structural and macro factors exist and that _Revo__lution
Without Revolutionaries _was entirely devoted to them, an
acknowledgment of the fact does not explain this Scott-like
romanticization of the quotidian in _Everyday Life. _This
horizontally determined view of politics is difficult to square with
the more structural analysis he offers in _Revo__lution Without
Revolutionaries _and offers little politically emancipatory potential
for any revolutionary movements to emerge. It leads us to a
depoliticized place, unable to conceptualize how political agency is
exerted at a structural level.

We can even go as far as to argue that this everyday resistance is a
knee-jerk reaction to the counterrevolutions that took place and are
therefore defensive and reactive. It fails to offer a transformative
political project and is more interested in asserting individual
choice and autonomy than the assembling and channeling of collective
capacity to act to produce political effects. Of course, that is not a
failing on the individuals mentioned but is demonstrative of how grim
political prospects currently are and have been since the
counterrevolutions.

The spontaneity of everyday resistance can provide insight into how
oppressive societies operate. However, in order to overturn these
structures, it is unlikely that the separated and defensive actions of
individuals would pose an actual threat to the status quo. Such
resistance is too disparate and scattered, therefore unable to affect
society in a material way. What we need to think about here, what we
need to prioritize, is the project of building collectiveness—the
radical restructuring of society rather than acts of individual
agency.

Is there really a need to differentiate between “everyday life”
and “the revolution?” If Bayat’s theory of change is that
scattered acts of protest can have a multiplier effect, and accumulate
into collective power, then surely the goal is to build the latter.
Ultimately, there must be some degree of political organization that
can mobilize disparate actors. To that end, everyday resistance in and
of itself is ineffectual, and can only mitigate existing social
conditions.

In the introduction, Bayat says he attempts to “establish an
analytical link between the everyday and the revolution.” He argues
that “subaltern everyday struggles came together in the Arab
uprisings to forge a collective and contentious force coalescing with
the political mobilizations that had been initiated largely by young
activists.” However, we saw that this was not sufficient.

Bayat says, “A surprising revolutionary moment may emerge from the
underside of societies that appear safe and secure.” Is there even a
causal relationship between the macro and the grassroots? There is an
assumption that the plurality of organizational forms is a given, and
that this plurality of forms in and of itself has an inherent value.
If anything, history has shown us that not all forms of resistance can
form blocks to morph into macro resistance, especially during times of
political thinness and the absence of real political organization.

If resistance is indeed found in everyday life—yet does not evolve
or account for further political ramifications in terms of political
organizing beyond its moralizing qualities—all it serves to imply is
an individualistic conception of politics or an assertion of politics
as identity or affirmation; one that showcases the thinning of
political formation in the region rather than resistance that can
amount to tangible political transformation. The combined vision Bayet
thinks or does not exist. In fact, politics within this context can at
best be a means of reconciling ourselves to our precarious conditions,
rather than a way out of them.

Macro and revolutionary moments have their own micropolitical
transformations that emerge in tandem. One does not have to seek the
emergence of the latter on its own; in fact, the former often informs
the latter. We do not need to pose a false choice between the micro
and the macro or the structural. Wouldn’t it be better to seek a
structural change that is informed by the possibilities of politics?
Attention to the micro is helpful when embedded within a larger
political project, and when it can be considered to be developing
political consciousness and shifting orientation towards the
collective.

While the resonance is great and the memory of 2011 remains, we need
to be wary of supporting cautious and defensive reformism, cloaked in
the guise of everyday resistance and lacking the antagonisms of
political struggle and successful processes of social change.

_Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring_
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by Asef Bayat is available from Harvard University Press.

_Nihal El Aasar is an Egyptian independent researcher currently based
in London._

_Africa Is a Country is a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing
on and from the African left. It was founded by Sean Jacobs
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the content on Africa Is a Country is published under a Creative
Commons [[link removed]] license._

* Arab Spring
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* Egypt
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* revolution
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