International Socialism 137 Winter 2013 Never Going Back - Egypt's Continuing Revolution - Phil Marf

Summary

For 35 years Egypt was a laboratory for neoliberalism—a local state in which hegemonic world powers and financial institutions played out their strategies for the global economy. It was also a stage on which the United States and its allies rehearsed policy for control of key assets in the Global South. From the mid-1970s their support for the regimes of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were means of containing collective responses to an increasingly aggressive neoliberal agenda. When the Tahrir uprising began in January 2011 the stakes were high: could Egyptians contest al–nizam (the order), a state machine which bore down brazenly upon the mass of people in a local expression of global inequality and inequity? The slogans of the movement, and its aspirations, echoed worldwide—in removing Mubarak, Egyptian activists made tahrir (liberation) a synonym for wider resistance. Two years later Egypt’s revolution is still the epicentre of opposition to capitalist “liberalism” and to the machineries of state which support its relentless search for profit. Where does the revolution stand today? What are its potentials? What is to be done?1 Obituaries for the revolution are produced daily in the European and North American press. Its detractors maintain that the Tahrir events were no more than a “reflex”, at best a “revolt” which shortly exhausted participants. They maintain that a grim reality has settled over the Egyptian movement—the rise of Islamism and the certainty that atavistic religious currents will crush democratic aspirations. In an analysis of developments across the Middle East since January 2011, Agha and Malley maintain that “This is not a revolution”: