Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (4 page)

On May Day 2011, as Shafiq and the secular medics jostle with the Brotherhood for control of the stage at the Doctors' Union, workers begin filling Tahrir Square. It is, says Hossam el-Hamalawy, the first real May Day since 1951. The red flag does not predominate: instead people arrive with homemade banners, always with middle-aged men in the lead, chanting and singing. One banner says: ‘Fight for social justice, not your own demands'. At the edge of the square, the top-selling items on the souvenir stands are A4 posters showing Mubarak and all his ministers in orange jumpsuits, with nooses around their necks.

A loud delegation from the Masry Shebin El-Kom textile factory surrounds me. Mahmoud el-Shaar, who's led a thirty-five-day occupation at the plant, says:

We're striking to remove the imperialist presence of foreign elements. Mubarak privatized the company to Indonesian owners and they've shut four out of seven units. We want the prosecution of the corrupt officials who ran the cotton industry, and we want to terminate the contract with the Indonesians because it's destroying our lives. Our average wage is between LE360 and LE700 a month.

The company was the target of a classic Mubarak-era deal: the Indorama group paid LE174 million for 70 per cent of the assets, the state kept 18 per cent and the NDP-run trade union would own 12 per cent. ‘The old, Mubarak union did nothing but corrupt the situation: we're finished with them,' el-Shaar says.
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Rifat Abdul, in the t-shirt of the public transport union, grabs my arm. His banner demands a minimum wage of LE1200. What's changed?

I feel free. We all feel we can say what we think without getting detained for it. At work, though, nothing has changed: wages, conditions, work hours, nothing. But there is a spirit of optimism between all workers, in every sector. During the revolution, we were here from day one. But now it's reached the point where we look around and we recognize these other delegations from the days in Tahrir Square, people from totally different sectors: we know each other's faces, we shake each other's hands, we slap each other on the back.

His mate, Wasim, rips the baseball cap off his bald head. ‘Look,' he says. ‘We're not going anywhere. I'm 100 per cent sure the whole world is behind us. We'll stay here in the sun and heat until it's done.' But it's not done yet.

The question for
Musa Zekry

Back in the Moqattam slum, Musa Zekry's future revolves around a single type of shampoo, brand name Pert. To prevent counterfeits, Procter & Gamble pay the
zabbaleen
to shred every Pert bottle they collect, in return for cash. With the cash—supplemented by money from Bill Gates—they run a school. At the school the kids learn Arabic, English, computing and how to shred the Pert bottles. Zekry learned English at this school and now mentors the kids.

They are bright-eyed and cheerful, but decide to sing me a doleful Coptic song whose refrain asserts the inevitability of being poor and the certainty of salvation. One kid, aged thirteen, explains his daily routine: ‘I go rubbish collecting from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., and at 8 a.m. I go to school.' With free English lessons he's one of the lucky few, so what are his ambitions? ‘To collect so much rubbish we can pay for another school.'

Will he leave the slum? He shakes his head. The combined efforts of Bill Gates, Procter & Gamble and thirty years of Mubarak's rule never managed to raise the aspirations of the Cairo poor beyond a better kind of poverty. By contrast, twenty-one days of revolution have brought freedom.

And freedom poses questions philanthropy does not bother with. Will Musa Zekry get healthcare, a living wage, free education for his kids
as of right,
instead of through charity? Will the ‘Mubaraks-in-every-enterprise' be toppled? Will Egyptian society be scarred by rampant corruption and inequality forever? Or will they get something better?

These are questions which, for twenty years, the policy elite believed were closed. The great surge of freedom that carried Musa Zekry into Tahrir Square has reopened them.

But I'm rushing ahead. We need to backtrack, to the old world, where everything was stable and imagination was dead …

2

Nobody Saw It Coming: How the World's Collective Imagination Failed

President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011. By 11 February, Hosni Mubarak was gone, and protests were spreading across the region: to Yemen, where the first ‘day of rage' took place on 27 January; to Bahrain, where protesters occupied the Pearl Roundabout on 14 February. Then, on 17 February, security forces started shooting marchers in Bahrain and the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi. On 25 March the long, tortured battle for freedom in Syria began.

Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism' and ‘insoluble problems'. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The
Economist
magazine's celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran's economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.
¹
Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Saleh and Assad were deemed to be of no interest.

Even after the fall of Ben Ali, they failed to see it coming. In an article titled ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won't spread', Stephen M. Walt, Harvard professor of international relations, opined that: ‘The history of world revolution suggests that this sort of revolutionary cascade is quite rare, and even when some sort of revolutionary contagion does take place, it happens pretty slowly and is often accompanied by overt foreign invasion.'
²

Even when Tahrir Square was occupied, they could not see it coming. On the night of 25 January, Hillary Clinton told reporters: ‘Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.'
³
On the same day, Israel's military intelligence chief told the Knesset much the same thing. He predicted that Mubarak would ‘be able to keep the demonstrations in check', and echoed Clinton's words: the regime was ‘stable'.
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And even when the revolution was all but over, some could still not see it. Peter Mandelson, the former Labour minister, made an extraordinary plea to the global elite to save the Egyptian dauphin, Gamal Mubarak:

Gamal Mubarak … has been the leading voice in favour of change within the government and the ruling party. Of course, it is easy to cast him as the putative beneficiary of a nepotistic transfer of family power, the continuation of ‘tyranny' with a change of face at the top. This analysis, in my view, is too simplistic.

For a good six months, then, the Western political elite, media, academia and intelligence services were effectively driving with a shattered windscreen. But why?

The specific myopia over the Arab states is not hard to explain. Decades ago, Edward Said tried to warn the West about the self-deluding nature of its narrative on the Middle East:

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
⁵

Said's words were written in 1980: long before 9/11, before two invasions of Iraq had laid the basis for sectarian civil war there, and before the West began to conflate the narrative of Islam with al-Qaeda's narrative of ruthless, nihilistic terror. For Carnegie scholar Tarek Masoud, the misapprehension goes deeper than the problem of cultural stereotypes:

Those of us who study the region not only failed to predict the [Mubarak] regime's collapse, we actually saw it as an exemplar of something we called ‘durable authoritarianism'—a new breed of modern dictatorship that had figured out how to tame the political, economic, and social forces that routinely did in autocracy's lesser variants.
⁶

This gets closer to the root cause of disorientation, and holds lessons valid beyond the Middle East. A flaw in the West's political psyche had convinced people that dictatorships could be stable and sustainable, flying in the face of a 200-year-old doctrine equating capitalism and freedom. But none of this explains the depth of the disorientation: something in the intellectual Kool-Aid had atrophied our ability to think beyond the present.

Indifference to class, the one-dimensional mindset of the professional ‘Arabists' and outright self-interest all played a part in misleading the political right. But the left, too, was disoriented. The key problem was spelled out by the theorist Fredric Jameson in 2003: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.'
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Twenty years of capitalist realism

When a cheetah catches a gazelle there is always a moment where the prey gives up: it goes floppy, bares its neck, becomes resigned to its fate. You have got me, it seems to say, but now you have to kill me; in the meantime I will try to think about something else.

This has been the relationship between the right and the left since the early 1990s. The organized working class of the Fordist era was smashed, the Soviet Union—if no longer a role model, then at least a pole of opposition to US dominance—was gone. State capitalism and Keynesian economics had been supplanted. Modernism, the beloved republic that had begun with Picasso and Kandinsky, had been overthrown by such geniuses as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Rock and roll was dead several times over; the airwaves now sizzled with litanies to rape and murder by black dudes with diamond earrings. What to do?

If we look at the main intellectual contributions from the left in this period, they are effectively rationalizations of defeat. Jameson's seminal 1991 account of postmodernism defines it as a ‘condition', reliant on new technology, a new mass psychology of passivity and the fragmentation of meaning within culture. In this condition, he writes, there is

an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything … What we now begin to feel … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.
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On top of this there was the media: vast, powerful, impervious to criticism, corporate, and monopolized by the rich. Chomsky and Herman's celebrated book on the media,
Manufacturing Consent,
outlined the ways in which control over the media allowed capitalism to assert a new cultural dominance:

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.
⁹

While that may have been correct when the book was first published, it is striking that the emergence of the Internet did not fundamentally change its authors' analysis. In their 2002 introduction to a revised edition of
Manufacturing Consent,
Chomsky and Herman concluded that the Internet, while a powerful tool for activists, would make no difference to the ability of corporate interests to control the media, or to its essential role as propagandist for big corporations. They judged that the rapid commercialization and concentration of the Internet ‘threatens to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle'.

When it came to philosophy, leftists who had railed against ‘bourgeois ideology' now abandoned the very concept. Slavoj Žižek rejected the idea that ideology was ‘false consciousness', arguing, effectively, that ideology
is
consciousness: it is impossible to escape the mental trap created by capitalism, because one's life inside the system constantly recreates it. Instead of rebellion we are reduced to perpetual cynicism: we are trapped, like Neo in
The Matrix,
in a world we know to be half true. But we can't escape: ‘Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.'
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Add it all up and you get the mindset of the left in an era of defeat. Nothing can change. Dissent is not strong enough to break the media's stranglehold; only irony or flight are possible.

By the late 1990s, Western mass culture was dominated by this zeitgeist of impotence. Future movie historians will look at the Hollywood catalogue and see this as the dominant theme of the 2000s: from
The
Matrix
and
The Truman Show
to the Bourne movies, from
The Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
to films as various as
Avatar
and
Inception,
through all of them there flows the notion of ‘manipulated consciousness': the suspicion that the hero is trapped within a malevolent system that controls his mind, but which he cannot defeat. This is no longer the external control of Orwell's
1984,
but a pre-programmed alternative reality against which the hero cannot deploy core human values like love and decency.

In an influential essay, cultural commentator Mark Fisher describes the impact of all this on a generation that has known nothing else. He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism', defined as

the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to
imagine
a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.
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