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Monday, February 04, 2013

Egypt's Black Bloc

For over a week, street fighting has raged between Egyptian police and demonstrators. Many of the protestors swathed in black. The young protestors are often poor and feel abandoned and oppressed by the state. They have little to lose, are poor and enjoy few rights - including little protection against arbitrary arrests. Everyone is aware that the protestors cannot afford lawyers who would defend what civil liberties they have.

 Mohamed said former President Hosni Mubarak and his successor, Mohammed Morsi, have destroyed Egypt. "I'm from a poor family - we have nothing," said Mohamed. "That's why we come here and fight for our rights. We're people and not animals."

Mostafa said  "The government isn't living up to people's expectations, and so that's why a few people have taken matters into their own hands and formed the black bloc."

Egyptian public prosecutors declared the "organization" a terrorist group whose members should be imprisoned. Since many protestors wear black, some fear that declaration in conjunction with the state of emergency decree in Egypt could result in a free pass for arrests.

Mark LeVine, professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, and visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden, writes :
"Tahrir itself remains in many ways the epitome of the ideas of horizontalism and self-organisation (autogestion) that are at the core of modern anarchist theory and practice...anarchism actually has a long history in Egypt and the Levant more broadly. As the research of Edinburgh University Professor Anthony Gorman has demonstrated, it stretches back to the 1860s when Italian political refugees first made their way to the more hospitable surrounding of Alexandria and other Egyptian cities...Anarchist-agitated strikes were being staged and arrests being made for illegal organising by the 1890s, if not before... The black bloc has become a public (and even more so media and government) symbol of the militant opposition that is quite literally on the march against the still unstable emerging order. It's hard to overstate the dangers a well- yet self-organised and decentralised protest movement could present to Egypt's power elite. The country's military chief, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, is not exaggerating when he says ongoing protests threaten a "collapse of the state"; nor are prosecutors wrong in considering those deploying black bloc tactics as "terrorists". For what is the goal of revolution if not the collapse of the existing state, and how can protests aimed at that end not terrorise those presently in power?...

All true revolutions involve a supreme act of creative destruction - an anarchic and ordering impulse that both destroys the old order while creating something new to take its place. The reason most revolutions either fizzle out or are hijacked or taken over by forces other than and often opposed to those who first led them lies precisely in the failure to move successfully from the destructive to the creative phase and discourse...Similarly, every true revolution is a powerful combination of what the sociologist Manuel Castells calls "resistance" and "project" identities; the former being narrow, closed and hostile to outsiders, the latter open, inviting and future-oriented. You can't bring about the "downfall of the system" and the creation of one in its place without both. As important, you can't in the long term keep tens of millions of people supporting destruction if the positive vision of the future is not there for them to see. What made Tahrir truly revolutionary during the 18 days, but sadly too few days since, was that in the Square you could see, feel, the possibility of a new Egypt, a different Egypt, an Egypt that could fulfill the dreams of the majority of its inhabitants.

 It's clear that black bloc tactics and the militant revolutionaries deploying them will not on their own carry Egypt further than the Zapatistas have pushed Chiapas never mind Mexico as a whole. But if they succeed in throwing the country's power-holders off-balance and reinvigorating the youth led-opposition, and can provide a creative and ultimately positive vision and strategies for continuing the revolution into its third year and convincing increasing numbers of ordinary Egyptians to keep up he struggle for real freedom, dignity and social justice, they will have played an important role in Egypt's tortured transition from an authoritarian to truly democratic system."

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