Egypt's Long Revolution: Protest Movements and Uprisings by Maha Abdelrahman

Author:Maha Abdelrahman [Abdelrahman, Maha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317647775
Google: xX49BAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28024830
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Pro-democracy activists: from New Social Movements to revolutionary process

The myriad informal political groups, activist forums, political coalitions and protest activities which have formed the core of the pro-democracy movement have been analysed by many commentators within a framework of New Social Movements (NSMs) under authoritarian regimes (El-Mahdi, 2009; Shehata, 2009; Munson, 2001; Abdelrahman, 2009; Beinin, 2011). These studies emphasize a number of features that characterize new social movements including decentralized, loose organizational structures, a rejection of traditional hierarchical leadership and a reliance on members themselves to initiate activities. In Egypt and across the globe, NSMs have been celebrated as horizontal networks needing no leader, capable of organizing without a central authority and based on a diffuse notion of power. However, NSMs are fundamentally distinguished from ‘old’ social movements not simply by their tactics and mobilization structures but in the fact that their political objective is not to capture the state. In revisiting his earlier analysis of anti-systemic movements, Wallerstein draws our attention to deep suspicion of the state and state-oriented action as the defining feature of NSMs. He argues that in the two-staged formula of old social movements, by which capturing state power was to be followed by transforming the world, committed activists usually ended up discovering that

state power was more limited than they had thought … the cadres of a militant mobilising movement became the functionaries of a party in power. Their social positions were transformed and so, inevitably, were their individual psychologies … the militant, syndicalist tactics that had been the daily bread of the social movement became counter-revolutionary.

(2002: 23)

It is this perceived betrayal of the movements’ goals and the inability of revolutionaries/new rulers to resist the corrupting influence of power and party politics that has created this deep suspicion among members of later generations of social movements. Their objective, therefore, is no longer to take over state power but to challenge the boundaries of traditional politics and to establish decentralized alternatives. The image of a Leninist revolutionary party involving a rigid hierarchy, centralized power and the imposition of iron discipline under the leadership of a professional elite, which had dominated most of the twentieth century, furthered activists’ aversion to centralized organizations. Such a model was perceived as profoundly antithetical to the spontaneity, innovation and even radicalism of activists and protestors (Pratt, 1978: 117).

Wallerstein’s analysis contrasts new social movements with old movements, such as nationalist movements of independence which swept parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, cases of what would be considered ‘new social movements’ have come to reinforce the suspicions among an even younger generation of movements about the perils of competing for and capturing state power. The last decades of the twentieth century abound with cases in which new social movement activists progressed to become part of a new order, once they had achieved their objective of bringing down at least part of the old regime. A comparative study (Grodsky, 2012) of several cases, such as Solidarity in

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