Asef Bayat Revolution Without Revolutionaries Academic Book Review

Revolution without revolutionaries: Making sense of the Arab Leap

"Book review: Asef Bayat takes a fascinating look at the forces driving the Arab Spring, and the reasons for events that followed, writes Alain Gresh. "

What really happened? How did it come to that? 7 years afterwards, what is left of the Arab revolutions?

These are some of the questions raised past sociologist Asef Bayat in his book, 'Revolution without revolutionaries: Making sense of the Arab Spring' which, though sometimes a trivial disjointed, provides original answers, and is one of the most stimulating reads on the field of study.

Bayat is an internationally recognised researcher who lived through ii revolutionary periods in the region: In Tehran in 1978–1979 during the fall of the Shah, and in Cairo in 2011–2012. Consequently he is a privileged witness, and very well qualified to produce a comparative analysis of the two.

In 1979 Islamic republic of iran, the notion of "revolution" was fraught with pregnant across different sectors of gild, both modern and more traditional. Information technology was as deeply rooted in Marxism as it was in political Islam, and was represented past the emblematic figure of Ali Shariati, an Islamo-Marxist thinker.

With the fall of the Shah, the state appliance collapsed and a broad social movement adult, involving the occupation of farmland, residences and factories. People's minds were alive with Republican ethics, combining pop sovereignty with a dream of social justice.

Information technology was a decade of revolution, especially in what was and then called the third globe, from Yemen to Palestine, and from Latin America to the Portuguese colonies in Africa. A decade marked by the triumph of the Vietnamese people over the might of the United States, and past the collapse of the final remnants of the colonial empires.

All of these struggles fuelled the intellectual imagination of Iranian revolutionaries, whether of Marxist or religious inspiration.

"The fact that no theoretician of the stature of Ali Shariati stood out, confirmed the beingness of an ideological void"

There was general hostility towards the western powers, first and foremost the Usa, and socialist ideas were widespread. Even a movement similar the Muslim Brotherhood, much less radical than its Iranian counterpart, advocated "Islamic socialism". Political transformation was closely associated with economic and social transformations.

A post-ideological era

Thirty years later, the basic status quo has inverse. The revolutionary horizon is lost in fog, and nosotros are experiencing a mail-ideological phase. "Today'southward voices," Bayat observes, "whether secular or Islamist, accept the market place economy, property relations and neoliberal thinking".

This turnaround has depoliticised opposition forces the earth over. Now they focus on the defense of homo rights, private rights, the rights of women and minorities without always realising that obtaining these rights is deeply linked with social and economic issues.

And while the Arab revolutions spread similar wildfire from Morocco to Syrian arab republic, toppling four dictatorships in half-dozen months, they never involved or fifty-fifty demanded any radical break with the old economic and social club.

"Should we even speak of revolution, when the primary protagonists had neither a project nor an ideology which can be called revolutionary? Yes, the book answers"

Are we to arraign the multiple failures witnessed since then on the "counter-revolution?" That explanation is too simplistic, the author finds, because revolutionary movements everywhere accept ever come up against a counter-revolution. "The question is whether the revolutions were revolutionary plenty to offset the perils of restoration." Regarding the Arab world, the reply is no.

In that case, and then, should we fifty-fifty speak of revolution, when the chief protagonists of the changes that took place had neither a projection nor an ideology which tin be called revolutionary?

"Yes", the book argues, which explains its title, "Revolution without revolutionaries", because in part the process went across of the hands of its instigators, with the sudden emergence of the "take-nots" who for decades have developed strategies of resistance and struggle.

At this point, Bayat pursues his analysis of city life nether neoliberalism, begun in 'Life equally politics'. Massive urbanisation and the transformations caused by the shrinking part of the state and the downsizing of the public sector, take boosted part-time and breezy employment and resulted in a state of affairs where "a massive portion of the urban population, the subalterns, become impelled to operate, subsist, or but live in public spaces, in the streets, in a substantial 'outdoor economy'.

"The outdoor spaces serve every bit indispensable assets for both the economic livelihood and social/cultural lives of much of the urban population", including students and academy graduates. The street becomes a space for permanent clashes, with varying degrees of outcry and violence.

This is particularly true, as cities have created new needs and given rise to new demands which the state is increasingly unable to satisfy, especially regarding the provision of services.

The land is perceived by the urban population equally responsible for providing these services (few rural dwellers actually rely on the state) but information technology no longer does and so, information technology just disciplines and punishes. In a poll conducted on the eve of the 2011 revolution, Egyptians lamented their lack of access to drinking water or a proper sewage organization more frequently than insufficient employment opportunities.

'Social non-movements'

Young peoples' collective consciousness is likewise forged on the streets. Whether they are street sellers, young mavericks or avid football fans, they cannot avoid challenging the existing order every bit represented past the police.

And the poor are far from powerless. They organise, and have a street politics which takes the form of what the author calls 'social non-movements'.

"These not-movements are part of daily life and they are what conferred on the "Arab bound" its revolutionary character"

How are these different from social movements? Firstly, they focus on action rather than ideological motivations; they implement their demands immediately; their actions are not separate from their daily lives; they are not carried out by small groups but, as Bayat wrote in 'Life as Politics', "they are common exercise of everyday life carried out by millions of people…

"What is the consequence of 'big numbers'? To begin with, a big number of people acting together have the event of normalising and legitimising those acts that are otherwise deemed illegitimate. The practice of big numbers is likely to capture and appropriate spaces of power in society inside which the subaltern can cultivate, consolidate and reproduce their counter-power… They can associate, generating a more powerful dynamic than their individual sum total."

Read more: Khaled Abol Naga: The revolutionary ability of promise

This resistance expresses itself in everyday life, on the ground, when street sellers take over a territory, when a slice of land is occupied, when an illegal structure goes upwards, when young people affirm their right to have fun, or when Muslim women assert their right to autonomy in public infinite.

"Information technology is unlikely that this new dynamism will fade away, it has simply assumed new guises"

These non-movements are part of daily life and they are what conferred on the "Arab spring" its revolutionary grapheme.

They made information technology possible to move beyond the narrow confines of 'reasonable' thinking but could not be followed up because the political course was steeped in the indestructible neoliberal ideology.

As Bayat points out, "And then while the Arab revolutions embodied in practice radical impulses and initiatives on the part of the subalterns, no serious intellectual articulation, ideological frame, or social motility anchored them." Quite the contrary, "The commonsense neoliberal thinking amongst the elites, liberal equally Islamist" denigrated these initiatives, which is obviously what made the situation and so unlike from the 1970s.

The fact that no theoretician of the stature of Ali Shariati stood out, confirmed the existence of an ideological void, perceptible across the globe with the collapse of the 'third worldist' and socialist vision.

A unsafe lack of horizon

This lack of a horizon laid bare the limitations of 'street politics'. "The protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Madrid's Puerta del Sol, and New York's Freedom Foursquare [Zuccotti Park] were truly the most boggling expression of street politics in recent retentivity. But they were precisely that, actress-ordinary, which in ordinary times reveal their limitations; they cannot be sustained for a long span of time… because they are past definition divorced from everyday life."

"This lack of a horizon laid bare the limitations of 'street politics'"

And this, of course, was fifty-fifty truer in the Arab world than in the West, since, concretely the long-term demonstrations meant a worsening of living conditions for the poor equally a result of 'instability', the falling-off of the tourist trade, the decline in investments and the powerlessness of governments already impoverished and weakened by decades of corruption and neoliberal policies.

Ane of the most meaning and lasting achievements of the Arab revolutions, equally Bayat points out, is the "change in consciousness" marked by the brutal irruption on the political scene of both conservative and liberal ideas in debates as impassioned as they were unprecedented.

Western public opinion, alarmed by glaring headlines about an 'Islamist autumn' was just aware of one side of the miracle: The rise of Salafism and bourgeois ideas — with the appearance of bearded men, women in burqas or vice squads — underestimating the quite powerful mobilisation around the ideals of pluralism, secular and civilian government (dawla madaniyya), women's rights and the public expression of disbelief.

In spite of the backlash and in spite of the wars, information technology is unlikely that this new dynamism will fade abroad, it has merely assumed new guises, some cultural, some hush-hush, but notwithstanding strong.

At the end of the day, we cannot help wondering: Is the "Arab case" all that 'exceptional' after all, in spite of its specifics, in particular the weakening of the nation-land under the repeated assaults of transnational organisations such as al-Qaeda or Islamic Country?

Over the years an ideological straitjacket has taken concur everywhere, summed up in Margaret Thatcher'southward pronouncement: "There is no alternative."

We are told nosotros must surrender the idea of any in-depth transformation, that the only path to a ameliorate tomorrow lies through "reforms" of the labour market and unlimited costless trade. This risks driving to despair those who experience the concrete effects of those policies, and promoting a widespread fascination with bloody millenarian utopias.

Alain Gresh is the Managing director of Orient XXI , a announcer and proficient in Heart Eastward affairs. He is the writer of 'L'Islam, la République et le monde', Fayard, 2014 amidst many others. This article was originally published by our partners at Orient XXI. Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and exercise non necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Alain Gresh

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Source: https://medium.com/thenewarab/revolution-without-revolutionaries-making-sense-of-the-arab-spring-83c20c45f9dd

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