Coming in the wake of intense political and academic debate on the nature and development of the Arab Uprisings, Gramsci on Tahrir zeroes in on the complex dynamic of Egypt's revolution and ...counter-revolution. It shows how a Gramscian understanding of the revolutionary process provides a powerful instrument for charting the possibilities for an emancipatory project by the Egyptian subaltern classes. 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. The current situation in Egypt demonstrates how both national histories and global power relations enable, define and displace popular resistance and social transformation.
In A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt Brecht De Smet integrates the political thought of Antonio Gramsci with the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky into an original perspective on revolutionary ...subjectivity that is deployed to understand the Egyptian "Tahrir" Revolution.
The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or ...Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 1906, London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco.Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.
Coming in the wake of intense political and academic debate on the nature and development of the Arab Uprisings, Gramsci on Tahrir zeroes in on the complex dynamic of Egypt's revolution and ...counter-revolution. It shows how a Gramscian understanding of the revolutionary process provides a powerful instrument for charting the possibilities for an emancipatory project by the Egyptian subaltern classes.*BR**BR*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.*BR*
The 2011 Egyptian revolution and its concrete outcomes of military rule and Muslim Brotherhood governance demand a thorough analysis that transcends the archetypical binaries of revolution and ...counter-revolution, uprising and transition, dictatorship and democracy. A Gramscian interpretation, deploying the concepts of historical bloc, passive revolution, and Caesarism, embeds the contemporary events within a historical process of post-colonial state formation and reconfiguration and the local implementation of global neoliberal accumulation strategies. These lineages elucidate the capacity of the Armed Forces to play a specific Caesarist role during the revolutionary process. The January 25 insurrection and its counter-revolutionary appropriation by the military and the Brotherhood are rendered intelligible as alternating moments of one and the same process, in which the revolutionary mobilization of the masses is intersected, on the one hand, by hegemonic relations between ruling and subaltern groups, and, on the other, by political fights internal to these discrete factions.
After a renewed scholarly interest in the politics of revolution and societal transformation following the uprisings of 2011, the defeat of the revolutionary tide in the MENA region has drawn ...attention to the dynamic of counter-revolution and authoritarian resilience. I criticise binary approaches to the process of regime restoration in the region. I argue that 'authoritarian resilience' should be interpreted in terms of Gramsci's concept of 'passive revolution'. I explain that this concept should be used not as a regime typology, but as an analytical 'criterion of interpretation', revealing the capacities and constraints of elites to deflect popular initiative and restructure historical blocs from above. Through the prism of passive revolution 'the regime' appears not as the constant factor, but as one of the forces that constitutes and is constituted by revolutionary struggle. I look concretely at the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2013, disentangling the 18 Days of the uprising from the subsequent 'counter-revolution in democratic form' and the coda of the military-led 'counter-revolution from below'.
This article analyzes the development of the Egyptian workers' movement in the face of the 25 January Revolution through the notion of dialectical pedagogy. This Gramscian concept is extended by a ...Vygotskyan analysis of the reciprocal learning processes, which stimulate a proletarian activity system to overcome its economic-corporate predicament. The concrete case study of the Mahalla strike movement (2006-2008) elucidates the transformative-instructive dynamics of autoprolepsis and heterolepsis and the importance of solidarity in developing the worker Subject. The 25 January Revolution expanded the proletarian Zone of Proximal Development and created new possibilities and constraints for the development of the workers' movement.
SUMMARY
This introduction to the
ROAPE
debate reasserts the centrality of revolutionary theory to understand the dynamics of social and political struggles in contemporary Middle East and North ...Africa. Framed around the conceptual and political interventions brought about by Brecht De Smet’s
Gramsci on Tahrir
(2016), we discuss the utility of Gramscian concepts in explaining the trajectories of social mobilisations in the peripheries of global capitalism.
Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities—Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, ...London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna—the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response to the persistent rift between disciplinary Marxist approaches to culture, this book prioritizes the urban problematic and builds implicitly and explicitly on work by numerous thinkers: not only Karl Marx but also David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, among others. Rather than reanimate reductive views either of Marx or of urban theory, the chapters in Marxism and Urban Culture speak broadly to the interdisciplinary connections that are increasingly the concern of cultural scholars working across and beyond the boundaries of geography, sociology, history, political science, language and literature fields, film studies, and more. A foreword written by Andy Merrifield (the author of Metromarxism) and an introduction by Benjamin Fraser (the author of Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience) situate the book’s chapters firmly in interdisciplinary terrain.
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