Coming in the wake of intense political and academic debate on the nature and development of the ... more 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.
In A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt Brecht De Smet integrates the political thought of Antonio Gr... more 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.
This paper contributes to the study of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution and to a more general unders... more This paper contributes to the study of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution and to a more general understanding of revolutions and counter-revolutions. I turn to Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, passive revolution, and the Modern Prince to understand the weakness of revolutionary subjectivity. Moreover, I argue that the concept of prefiguration serves as a critical addendum to Gramsci’s discussion of a new emancipatory politics embodied by the Modern Prince. Conversely, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps us to understand the theoretical and practical limits of prefigurative politics. By presenting the Egyptian counter-revolution as a labyrinthine structure, the paper cautions against simplistic views of reaction and the lure of processes of ‘democratic transition’ and mass movements ‘from above’ that derail revolutionary agency from its key, emergent purpose: to develop itself into a social power able to construct the alternative society it imagines.
Prefigurative politics is understood as a practical and critique of democracy, as an open-ended s... more Prefigurative politics is understood as a practical and critique of democracy, as an open-ended strategy for social change, and as the "mini form here and now" of a better society, offering an alternative to power relations. Anarchist-inclined alterglobalization activists argue that the collaborative activity of the movement itself functions as a critique of hierarchical and authoritarian power relations reproduced by the institutions of representative democracy, corporations, political parties, and even trade unions: "new forms of organization are its ideology". Direct action could be designated as the "leading activity" of anarchist prefigurative politics, as the end is already present within the means, and as the actors leading the activity are the direct beneficiaries of the action - e.g. the homeless squatting derelict houses, workers occupying and running factories, etc. From the collaborative perspective, such a concept of prefigurative politics is deeply problematic, as it is unclear what precisely is being pre -figured. Keywords: alterglobalization; anarchist prefigurative politics; open-ended strategy ; social relations
Almost ten years have passed since the Arab uprisings of 2011 turned the social-political equilib... more Almost ten years have passed since the Arab uprisings of 2011 turned the social-political equilibrium of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region upside down. Despite successful counter-revolutionary policies, protests continue to challenge the status quo. The main difference with the 2011 is that current and ongoing political and social protests are less "visible" as they happen at the "margins" of society. This paper investigates the role of marginality and marginalisation in the cycle of protests and the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution in the MENA region. The continuous eruption of social contestations in the rural and urban margins of North Africa forces us to reconsider previous academic analyses which understood the so-called "Arab Spring" as a predominantly urban youth movement, principally from a middle-class background. Protests at the margins not only constitute the hidden history of revolts of 2011, they also continue these...
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 675566. R... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 675566. Record Type, journalArticle. Author, Brecht De Smet [802000447145] - Ghent University Brechttie.DeSmet@UGent.be. Title, Caïro : vormen, ruimtes en subjecten. Publication Status, ...
In A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt Brecht De Smet integrates the political thought of Antonio Gr... more 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.
De Arabische opstanden van 2011 en de Tunesische en Egyptische revoluties hebben zowel tot wijdve... more De Arabische opstanden van 2011 en de Tunesische en Egyptische revoluties hebben zowel tot wijdverbreid enthousiasme als tot realistische angsten geleid. Hoewel elk land in de regio een ander soort protesten heeft gekend, of kent, is het duidelijk dat er geen kant-en-klaar model is voor wat er nu gaat komen. Internationale waarnemers en academici hebben er vrij snel op gewezen dat de oprechte roep om vrijheid en rechtvaardigheid vanuit de regio tot slechts twee mogelijke resultaten kan leiden: ofwel zal het Arabische Midden-Oosten een fundamentele democratisering doormaken, ofwel zullen contrarevolutionaire krachten de volksopstand 'kapen' en een uitbraak van confessioneel of sektarisch geweld in het vooruitzicht stellen. Sektarisme gaat niet alleen over de relaties tussen soennieten en sjiieten, maar evengoed over de relaties tussen moslims en niet-moslims, vooral christenen. De voortdurende gevechten en spanningen tussen moslims en koptische christenen in Egypte doen velen...
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the development of the Egyptian workers' movement in the f... more ABSTRACT 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.
On 25 January 2011 a diverse group of Egyptian social media activists, leftists, youth organizati... more On 25 January 2011 a diverse group of Egyptian social media activists, leftists, youth organizations, political opposition forces, human rights proponents, Islamists, and hardcore football supporters had called for a demonstration in Tahrir Square. This chapter investigates the process of 25 January uprising as a collaborative project. On one hand, by deploying the concept of project, one hopes to disentangle some of the theoretical knots in the study of revolutions and the understanding of the current Egyptian revolution in particular. On the other hand, by confronting the concept of project collaboration with a case, one explores the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the study of revolutionary movement. From this perspective, discussion of the 25 January revolution is guided by five theoretical questions. The chapter explains that the 25 January revolution was not only a project of revolution, but it also represented the revolution of existing projects. Keywords: Egyptian revolution; Egyptian social media activists; human rights proponents; Islamists; revolutionary movement; Tahrir Square
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 1123365. ... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 1123365. Record Type, journalArticle. Author, Brecht De Smet [802000447145] - Ghent University Brechttie.DeSmet@UGent.be. Title, Politieke uitdagingen voor de Egyptische linkerzijde. ...
Coming in the wake of intense political and academic debate on the nature and development of the ... more 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.
In A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt Brecht De Smet integrates the political thought of Antonio Gr... more 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.
This paper contributes to the study of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution and to a more general unders... more This paper contributes to the study of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution and to a more general understanding of revolutions and counter-revolutions. I turn to Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, passive revolution, and the Modern Prince to understand the weakness of revolutionary subjectivity. Moreover, I argue that the concept of prefiguration serves as a critical addendum to Gramsci’s discussion of a new emancipatory politics embodied by the Modern Prince. Conversely, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps us to understand the theoretical and practical limits of prefigurative politics. By presenting the Egyptian counter-revolution as a labyrinthine structure, the paper cautions against simplistic views of reaction and the lure of processes of ‘democratic transition’ and mass movements ‘from above’ that derail revolutionary agency from its key, emergent purpose: to develop itself into a social power able to construct the alternative society it imagines.
Prefigurative politics is understood as a practical and critique of democracy, as an open-ended s... more Prefigurative politics is understood as a practical and critique of democracy, as an open-ended strategy for social change, and as the "mini form here and now" of a better society, offering an alternative to power relations. Anarchist-inclined alterglobalization activists argue that the collaborative activity of the movement itself functions as a critique of hierarchical and authoritarian power relations reproduced by the institutions of representative democracy, corporations, political parties, and even trade unions: "new forms of organization are its ideology". Direct action could be designated as the "leading activity" of anarchist prefigurative politics, as the end is already present within the means, and as the actors leading the activity are the direct beneficiaries of the action - e.g. the homeless squatting derelict houses, workers occupying and running factories, etc. From the collaborative perspective, such a concept of prefigurative politics is deeply problematic, as it is unclear what precisely is being pre -figured. Keywords: alterglobalization; anarchist prefigurative politics; open-ended strategy ; social relations
Almost ten years have passed since the Arab uprisings of 2011 turned the social-political equilib... more Almost ten years have passed since the Arab uprisings of 2011 turned the social-political equilibrium of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region upside down. Despite successful counter-revolutionary policies, protests continue to challenge the status quo. The main difference with the 2011 is that current and ongoing political and social protests are less "visible" as they happen at the "margins" of society. This paper investigates the role of marginality and marginalisation in the cycle of protests and the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution in the MENA region. The continuous eruption of social contestations in the rural and urban margins of North Africa forces us to reconsider previous academic analyses which understood the so-called "Arab Spring" as a predominantly urban youth movement, principally from a middle-class background. Protests at the margins not only constitute the hidden history of revolts of 2011, they also continue these...
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 675566. R... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 675566. Record Type, journalArticle. Author, Brecht De Smet [802000447145] - Ghent University Brechttie.DeSmet@UGent.be. Title, Caïro : vormen, ruimtes en subjecten. Publication Status, ...
In A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt Brecht De Smet integrates the political thought of Antonio Gr... more 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.
De Arabische opstanden van 2011 en de Tunesische en Egyptische revoluties hebben zowel tot wijdve... more De Arabische opstanden van 2011 en de Tunesische en Egyptische revoluties hebben zowel tot wijdverbreid enthousiasme als tot realistische angsten geleid. Hoewel elk land in de regio een ander soort protesten heeft gekend, of kent, is het duidelijk dat er geen kant-en-klaar model is voor wat er nu gaat komen. Internationale waarnemers en academici hebben er vrij snel op gewezen dat de oprechte roep om vrijheid en rechtvaardigheid vanuit de regio tot slechts twee mogelijke resultaten kan leiden: ofwel zal het Arabische Midden-Oosten een fundamentele democratisering doormaken, ofwel zullen contrarevolutionaire krachten de volksopstand 'kapen' en een uitbraak van confessioneel of sektarisch geweld in het vooruitzicht stellen. Sektarisme gaat niet alleen over de relaties tussen soennieten en sjiieten, maar evengoed over de relaties tussen moslims en niet-moslims, vooral christenen. De voortdurende gevechten en spanningen tussen moslims en koptische christenen in Egypte doen velen...
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the development of the Egyptian workers' movement in the f... more ABSTRACT 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.
On 25 January 2011 a diverse group of Egyptian social media activists, leftists, youth organizati... more On 25 January 2011 a diverse group of Egyptian social media activists, leftists, youth organizations, political opposition forces, human rights proponents, Islamists, and hardcore football supporters had called for a demonstration in Tahrir Square. This chapter investigates the process of 25 January uprising as a collaborative project. On one hand, by deploying the concept of project, one hopes to disentangle some of the theoretical knots in the study of revolutions and the understanding of the current Egyptian revolution in particular. On the other hand, by confronting the concept of project collaboration with a case, one explores the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the study of revolutionary movement. From this perspective, discussion of the 25 January revolution is guided by five theoretical questions. The chapter explains that the 25 January revolution was not only a project of revolution, but it also represented the revolution of existing projects. Keywords: Egyptian revolution; Egyptian social media activists; human rights proponents; Islamists; revolutionary movement; Tahrir Square
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 1123365. ... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 1123365. Record Type, journalArticle. Author, Brecht De Smet [802000447145] - Ghent University Brechttie.DeSmet@UGent.be. Title, Politieke uitdagingen voor de Egyptische linkerzijde. ...
ABSTRACT The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011... more ABSTRACT 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.
Explores the sense and non-sense of comparing authoritarianism and populism in the capitalist cor... more Explores the sense and non-sense of comparing authoritarianism and populism in the capitalist core and periphery, through a discussion of Bonapartism and state power.
This paper discusses the development of working class struggle, organisations, and forms of consc... more This paper discusses the development of working class struggle, organisations, and forms of consciousness during the last decade in Egypt against the background of neoliberal reform and “reversed” state capitalism. Its presentation is based on original fieldwork conducted by the author over the course of several months between 2008 and 2011. The paper asserts that over the last ten years there have been two projects which challenged the regime: a civil-democratic and a class movement. The workers movement is perceived as a collective Subject which, during its development, creates and interpellates class subjectivities among individuals. Even though this process was well underway before the revolution, the mass mobilisations accelerated and transformed its development. The revolutionary moment united the class and civil-democratic movement. After Mubarak’s resignation these two movements continued their separate ways, but on a higher level of internal development. The paper examines the capacities of the working class as an organized agent of emancipation, before, during and after the revolution. Firstly, the role of the textile workers of the city of Mahalla al-Kubra in transforming the demands of the class from a particular-economic to a universal trade-unionist dimension is highlighted. Secondly, closer attention is paid to this process of class interpellation. How do worker leaders spontaneously and organically emerge from the struggle? How does the class Subject rally activists and intellectuals from “outside” to its cause? Thirdly, the state of the Left in Egypt is investigated, with an overview of some of the most important parties and organizations. How does the Left relate to the workers movement? What role do leftist activists and intellectuals play in the formation and development of the class Subject? Lastly, the formation of a class “party” in its broad Gramscian sense is explored. What are the political articulations of the working class? What are its allies? How can it attain hegemony?
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