Tunisia and Egypt: The Universal Significance of the Popular Uprisings
Published in Le Monde, 18 February 2011, under the title ‘Tunisie, Égypte: quand un vent d’Est balaie l’arrogance de l’Occident’.
1. The East Wind Prevails over the West Wind
For how long will a futile, crepuscular West, the ‘international community’ of those who still consider themselves masters of the world, go on giving lessons in good governance and correct behaviour to the whole planet? Is there not something risible about the spectacle of intellectuals on call, disorientated soldiers of the capitalo-parliamentarianism that serves as our moth-eaten paradise, donating themselves to the magnificent Tunisian and Egyptian peoples, in order to teach those savage peoples the ABC of ‘democracy’? What a pathetic survival of colonial arrogance! In the condition of political misery that has been ours for three decades, is it not obvious that it is we who have everything to learn from the current popular uprisings? Should we not with the utmost urgency very closely study what made possible the overthrow by collective action of governments that were oligarchic, corrupt and, in addition – perhaps especially – in a state of humiliating vassalage to the Western states? Yes, we must be the pupils of these movements, not their stupid teachers. For in the peculiar genius of their inventions they are reviving some principles of politics that people have long sought to persuade us were obsolete. Especially this principle, which Marat constantly recalled: when it comes to liberty, equality and emancipation, we owe everything to popular riots.
2. It Is Right to Rebel
Just as our states and those who vaunt them (parties, trade unions and servile intellectuals) prefer governance to politics, so they prefer demands to revolt and ‘orderly transition’ to any rupture. What the Egyptian and Tunisian peoples are reminding us is that the only action commensurate with a shared sense of the scandalous occupation of state power is a mass uprising. And that in this instance the only slogan which can unite the disparate components of the crowd is: ‘You there, clear off!’ The exceptional importance of the revolt in this instance, its critical power, consists in the fact that the slogan repeated by millions of people gives us an idea of what will be – unquestionably, irreversibly – its initial victory: the flight of the man thus referred to. And whatever happens thereafter, this triumph of popular action, which is inherently illegal, will have been eternally victorious. Now, that a revolt against state power can be absolutely victorious is a teaching of universal significance. This victory forever indicates the horizon against which every collective action subtracted from the authority of the law stands out – what Marx called ‘the withering away of the state’. In other words, one day, freely associated in the deployment of their creative power, the peoples will be able to do without ghastly state coercion. It is indeed for this, for this ultimate Idea, that a revolt toppling an established authority is eliciting unqualified enthusiasm the world over.
3. A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire
Everything began with the suicide by self-immolation of a man reduced to unemployment, a man they wanted to prohibit from engaging in the pitiful street vending that enabled him to survive, and whom a female cop slapped to make him understand what is real here down below. In a few days, a few weeks, this gesture extended to millions of people who shouted their joy in a remote square, and to the departure of powerful dictators in a blind panic. Where did this fantastic expansion come from? The spread of an epidemic of liberty? No. As Jean-Marie Gleize poetically puts it, ‘A revolutionary movement does not spread by contamination, but through resonance. Something constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.’ Let us call this resonance an ‘event’. The event is the abrupt creation not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities. None of them is the repetition of what is already known. That is why it is obscurantist to say ‘this movement is demanding democracy’ (meaning the kind we enjoy in the West), or ‘this movement is demanding social improvement’ (meaning the average prosperity of the petit-bourgeois among us). Starting from virtually nothing, resonating everywhere, the popular uprising creates unheard-of possibilities for the whole world. The word ‘democracy’ is practically unspoken in Egypt. People there refer to the ‘new Egypt’, the ‘real Egyptian people’, a constituent assembly, an absolute change in existence, possibilities that are unprecedented and previously unknown. This is the new prairie to come when the one to which the spark of the uprising has finally set fire is no more. This future prairie stands between the declaration of an inversion in the balance of forces and the declaration of an assumption of new tasks; between what a young Tunisian said – ‘We, the sons of workers and peasants, are stronger than the criminals’ – and what a young Egyptian said: ‘From today, 25 January, I am taking my country’s affairs in hand.’
4. The People, and the People Alone, Are the Motive Force in the Making of World History
It is very surprising that in our West the rulers and media regard the rebels in a Cairene square as ‘the Egyptian people’. How come? For these folk, is not the only reasonable, legal people usually reduced to the majority either in an opinion poll or an election? How is it, all of a sudden, that hundreds of thousands of rebels are representative of a population of 80 million? It is a lesson not to be forgotten, and which we shall not forget. Beyond a certain threshold of determination, tenacity and courage, the people can in fact concentrate its existence in a square, on an avenue, in a few factories or a university, and so on. The whole world will witness this courage, and above all the astounding creations accompanying it. These creations will count as proof that a people has stood up there. As an Egyptian demonstrator powerfully put it, ‘Before, I was watching television; now it is television that’s watching me.’ In the wake of an event, the people comprises those who know how to resolve the problems posed by the event. Thus, in the occupation of a square, there are the problems of food, sleeping arrangements, guards, banners, prayers, defensive actions, so that the site where everything is happening – the site that constitutes a symbol – is guarded for its people, at all costs. Problems which, at the level of hundreds of thousands of people who have come from all over, seem insoluble – and all the more so in as much as in this square the state has disappeared. Resolving insoluble problems without the help of the state – such is the destiny of an event. And it is what causes a people suddenly, and for an indeterminate period, to exist where it has decided to rally.
5. There Is No Communism without a
Communist Movement
The popular uprising we are talking about is manifestly without a party, a hegemonic organization, or a recognized leader. There will be time enough to determine whether this characteristic is a strength or weakness. In any event, it means that the uprising possesses in a very pure form – no doubt the purest since the Paris Commune – all the features of what must be called a movement communism. ‘Communism’ means here: the creation in common of the collective destiny. This ‘common’ has two particular features. Firstly, it is generic, representative in a site of humanity as a whole. In this site there is to be found every variety of person of whom a people is composed; every speech is listened to, every proposal examined, and every difficulty dealt with for what it is. Secondly, it overcomes all the major contradictions that the state claims it alone can manage, without ever transcending them: between intellectuals and manual workers, men and women, poor and rich, Muslims and Copts, people from the provinces and people from the capital, and so on. Thousands of new possibilities arise in connection with these contradictions at every instant, to which the state – any state – is utterly blind. We see young female doctors from the provinces care for the wounded, sleeping among a circle of fierce young men; and they are calmer than they were before, knowing that no one will harm a hair of their head. We also see an organization of engineers addressing young people from the suburbs, begging them to hold the square, to protect the movement through their energy in the fight. We further see a row of Christians on the lookout, standing guard over Muslims bent in prayer. We see shopkeepers feeding the unemployed and the poor. We see everyone talking to neighbours they do not know. We read a thousand placards where each person’s life joins in the History of all, without any hiatus. The set of these situations, these inventions, constitutes movement communism. For two centuries now the sole political problem has been this: How are we to make the inventions of movement communism endure? And the sole reactionary statement remains: ‘That is impossible, even harmful. Let us put our trust in the state.’ Glory to the Tunisian and Egyptian people, who are recalling us to our true, sole political duty: in the face of the state, organized fidelity to movement communism.
6. We Do Not Want War, But We Are Not Afraid of It
The peaceful calm of the gigantic demonstrations has been universally noted and linked to the ideal of elective democracy attributed to the movement. However, let us note that there have been hundreds of deaths and more are occurring every day. In many cases the victims died as fighters and martyrs of the rebellion at its inception and then protecting the movement. The political and symbolic sites of the uprising have had to be guarded at the cost of ferocious battles with the militia men and police of the threatened regimes. And who has made a personal sacrifice if not youth from the poorest part of the population? May the ‘middle classes’, of whom our undreamt-of MAM [Foreign Affairs Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie] has said that the democratic outcome of the events depends on them and them alone, remember that at the crucial moment the uprising’s duration was ensured exclusively by the unbounded commitment of popular detachments. Defensive violence is inevitable. It is continuing in difficult conditions in Tunisia, after the young activists from the provinces were returned to their poverty. Does anyone seriously think that the fundamental goal of these countless initiatives and cruel sacrifices is nothing but getting people to ‘choose’ between Soulieman and El Baradei, just as at home people are pathetically resigned to arbitrating between Sarkozy and Strauss-Kahn? Is that the only lesson of this splendid episode?
No, a thousand times, no! The Tunisian and Egyptian people are telling us this: to rise up, construct the public site of movement communism, and defend it by all possible means while inventing the successive steps of our action – such is the reality of the popular politics of emancipation. The states of the Arab countries are certainly not the only ones that are anti-popular and, regardless of elections, substantively illegitimate. Whatever their development, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings possess a universal significance. They prescribe new possibilities whose value is international.