The Eros Effect Comes
to Cairo
By George Katsiaficas
Two months ago, the
prediction that Hosni Mubarak would be compelled to end his pharonic rule over
Egyptians would have been regarded as ludicrous—or wishful thinking. Yet
today Mubarak’s demise is only a question of time. Whether he leaves tomorrow
or in September, he—and his son who would be king with him—have
already been banished to the dustbin of history.
The chain reaction of
events set off by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, a rural vegetable vendor in
neighboring Tunisia, quickly sent that country’s long entrenched dictator into
exile (along with his powerful wife and as much of the country’s wealth as she
could ferret onto a plane). Besides at least eight other self-immolations in
Algeria, Mauritania and Egypt, the powerful grassroots response to Bouazizi’s
sacrifice caused Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power for more than
three decades, to promise to leave office. Jordan’s king Abdullah, fearing for
his country’s stability after thousands marched in Amman, appointed a new
cabinet.
Suddenly, everywhere in the
Arab world, dictators tremble and governments rush to implement reforms. In
this moment of optimism, powerful forces seek to constrain the movement’s
potential impact. From the halls of power in Cairo and Washington, as they
debate the use of murderous force to quell the unrest, ruling elites
simultaneously attempt to channel the popular energies in the streets into
streamlining the present structures. Through mere changes of the faces of the
rulers—not transformation of the system that empowers the wealthy to rule—they
hope to make the existing system more efficient, more profitable for investors
and corporations.
Despite its appearance as
an Arab phenomenon, the eruption of uprisings that has overnight awakened
people flows from a global source. We saw similar waves of transnational people
power in 1989 in Eastern Europe, when without warning, Communist regimes were
erased from all but memory. Although not as well known, a concatenation of
revolts swept East Asia years before, beginning with the 1980 Gwangju Uprising
in South Korea and spreading like wildfire to the Philippines, Burma, Tibet,
China, Taiwan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Thailand. In six short years from 1986,
dictators in Manila, Seoul, Dhaka, and Bangkok were disgraced and sent into
exile, some eventually imprisoned for years. While grassroots power of the people has finally arrived in the Arab
world, to limit comprehension of the phenomenon sweeping the region to its own
parochial history constitutes a misreading of recent history—and
limitation of the movement’s potential.
Rapid and unanticipated
political change is increasingly a fact of life in the 21st century. In the past 50 years, high-tech media have united
the planet as never before, and people have realized the power of synchronous
popular actions to overturn governments. By occupying public space without
anyone telling them to do so, people have mobilized revolts that spread from
one city to another and from country to country. The first such instance of
spillover of mobilizations into a global uprising occurred in 1968. After years
of research into that period, as I pulled together my empirical studies, I
was stunned when I comprehended the spontaneous spread of revolutionary
aspirations in a chain reaction of occupations of public space—the sudden
entry into history of millions of ordinary people who acted in a unified
fashion, intuitively believing that they could change the direction of their
society. From these case studies, I uncovered the “eros effect,” moments in
history when universal interests become generalized at the same time as the
dominant values of society are negated and long-entrenched rulers forced from
office.
While the stories in the
mainstream media today mainly involve the machinations of Obama and Mubarak or
the positioning of spokespersons like Clinton and Suleiman, the real story is
the transformation of people from passive recipients of dictatorial commands to
active creators of momentum for change. The handwriting is on the wall. The
multitude of Cairo has appropriated the lessons of Bangkok’s Red Shirts and
Yellow Shirts, of Manila’s yellow confetti (that toppled Marcos) and of China’s
occupiers of Tiananmen Square (who failed to accomplish their goals). It would
be nothing new if the US chooses to sacrifice yet another of its pet dictators
on the altar of “progress.” What is newsworthy now is that People Power has
become embraced by the Arab masses. Whether or not the protests in Cairo
succeed, the emergence of an activated citizenry is key to escaping the rut of
absolute rule—and of elite small-group forms of resistance to it, as
opposed to vibrant protests as are now daily occurrences in Tahrir Square.
The real question posed by
protesters is not who is in power but the form of power itself. The ultimate
goal of people power is the institutionalization of popular forms of
decision-making, which involves taking power from the elite and reconstituting
it into grassroots forms. This radical potential of the movement is precisely
why the political elite today scurries to implement the appearance of
change—not system transformation but only rotation of personalities at
the apex of power. It matters little whether Mubarak or his secret police chief
Suleiman runs the country.
The young activists in
Cairo have made Mubarak’s ouster their starting point, but they know well that
freedom is not simply replacing him with someone else. What they need is a
wholly new form of justice, recovery of the people’s wealth that has been so
scandalously appropriated by the rich, and punishment of those responsible for
decades of torture and dictatorship—to say nothing of the recent
slaughter of dozens of unarmed citizens in the streets.
It remains unclear who will
emerge victorious in Egypt—whether people peacefully protesting will hold
sway and move the society to a higher level of democratization, or as seems
more likely, that American and Egyptian politicians will decide to send in the
army. Another possible outcome, that both protesters and elite will be
mollified by Obama's end game of preserving the status quo ante minus Mubarak,
would mean that the current possibility for a leap into substantive democratic
change would have been missed.
February 8, 2011
George Katsiaficas, whose
mother was born in Cairo, is a professor of humanities at Wentworth Institute
of Technology in Boston. He is currently completing Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, a study of recent People Power uprisings.