To date, much of the analysis of the Egyptian revolution has focused on the short- and medium-term causes which led to the uprising of 2011, often paying particular attention to the last decade of Hosni Mubarak’s rule and the intensification of neoliberal economic reforms after 2004 (Abdelrahman 2014; Alexander and Bassiouny 2014). Others have made a case for a longer-term perspective. Gilbert Achcar, for example, argues that the cumulative effect of decades of ‘fettered development’ has resulted in the dominance of a kind of ‘crony capitalism’ across the region, and it is the developmental crisis of this peculiar modality of capitalism which lies behind the wave of revolutions and uprisings in 2011 (Achcar 2013, 51–53). Brecht De Smet likewise focuses on the deep roots of the crisis of 2011, connecting the revolution with what he argues are long-term cyclical processes leading to the constitution and reconstitution of bourgeois hegemony in Egypt. We concur that the roots of the 2011 revolution can only be properly understood by critical analysis of the long-term processes through which society and economy in Egypt became capitalist. Thus, the way in which De Smet has placed the contradictions of Egypt’s passage to modernity at the heart of debates in Marxist analysis of the 2011 revolution is to be welcomed.
However, as we will argue here, the interpretations of passive revolution and permanent revolution which De Smet proposes in Gramsci on Tahrir (De Smet 2016) and his reliance on ‘Caesarism’ as an explanation for the dynamics of political change in so many different periods of Egyptian history are deeply problematic. The discovery of a new ‘Caesar’ at every moment risks not only confusion, but eventually the kind of despair experienced by the protagonist in Amal Dunqul’s poem Spartacus' last words.1
In this Debate piece we will outline a framework of the key phases in the development of capitalism in Egypt, paying particular attention to the cumulative effect of several ‘missed opportunities’ which have contributed to Egypt’s location as one of the weakest links in the chain of newly industrialising countries. While there are clear points of agreement between our analysis and that presented by De Smet in Gramsci on Tahrir, we will also outline here how his approach to the long-term causes of the 2011 revolution differs to our own. In discussing the dynamics of the process of revolution and counter-revolution after 2011, we will counter De Smet’s proposal that this is best understood as a series of ‘Caesarist’ episodes. We advocate an alternative analysis to De Smet's argument that the Muslim Brotherhood and the leadership of the Armed Forces can both be considered as representing different wings of the counter-revolution, which in effect equates the limited democratic process leading to the election of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament, and then to the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, with the repression which followed President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s military coup in 2013. Finally, we will return to the question of permanent revolution and the experience of revolution in Egypt since 2011.
Roots of revolution
If we examine the history of capitalism in Egypt, we can see how the roots of the 2011 Revolution are embedded in an uneven and combined pattern of development over the past 200 years, during which time Egypt was first integrated into the world capitalist system, then transformed from a mainly agricultural cotton-exporting appendage of the British empire, to a mainly urban capitalist formation by the end of the 20th century.
The transformation of Egypt’s social formation from pre-capitalist to capitalist took place in five major phases, all of which had an accumulated effect on the Egypt of 2011. The shock of the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 propelled the Egyptian state under Mohamed Ali’s leadership into – with an attempt at what Curtin labels ‘defensive modernisation’ (Curtin 2000) – borrowing some technical aspects of industrial capitalism in order to maintain what was a predominantly pre-capitalist social formation. Mohamed Ali introduced cash crops for export, principally cotton in the Delta and sugar cane in the south, removed the tax farming system known as iltizam by bringing in direct state control of agriculture, followed by further reforms which gradually introduced private property in land.
During the second phase of development in the last half of the 19th century, many of the contours of the specific patterns of uneven and combined development which Trotsky mapped out in Russia become visible, as foreign capital penetrated Egypt through the cotton economy, partnering with the rulers of the local state. The integration of Egypt into a colonial division labour went much further than in Russia, as the local rulers were first disciplined by debt bondage and then formally subordinated to British imperial control after 1882.
Rosa Luxemburg describes this transformation in the Egyptian economy in the context of an attempt by the great centres of capital accumulation to escape from their crisis by opening up new spaces for investment and imperialist expansion. She analysed the violent birth of capitalism in Egypt as taking place through the interaction of three basic factors: major investments by European capital, a rapid rise in the public debt and the collapse of the old peasant economy (Luxemburg 1964a). The rapid accumulation of European capital in Egypt ended in the bankruptcy of the Egyptian state, followed by direct British occupation in 1882. It also created a class of large landowners organically connected to the global capitalist market through investments, products and exports. As Gabriel Baer notes, by the close of the 19th century, the urban rich had come to dominate land ownership, and in addition a significant proportion of large privately owned estates were owned by foreign individuals or companies (23% of all large privately owned estates by 1901) (Baer 1962, 67–70).
This class of capitalist farmers forced through Egypt’s integration into the global capitalist economy, but under conditions where both the Pashas and their imperial allies in Britain could block the route to the next stage in the development of capitalism in Egypt: the emergence of an independent centre of capital accumulation and the rise of an Egyptian bourgeoisie. Egypt remained a key supplier of raw materials for British textile manufacturing, and a key market for British textile goods. Breaking out of this position in the political economy of empire was enormously difficult: importers had the advantage of generous subsidies from their own governments and consumer confidence in their established brands, while would-be factory owners found it difficult to raise credit for short-term capital investment when the banking system was geared towards facilitating investment in agriculture (Owen 1969, 301).
These contradictions, which De Smet describes as both ‘too much’ capitalism and ‘too little’ capitalism (De Smet 2016, 89), in the global context of the end of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were to spark the Egyptian national uprising of 1919. This was the first nationwide revolt that combined peasant movements for land with urban working class demands under a nationalist anti-colonial leadership (Beinin and Lockman 1988). British occupying forces were able to crush the revolt, but were forced to negotiate formal concessions and open up the governing coalition to the leaders of the nationalist movement through bringing the Wafd Party into government. The rebellion did not, however, solve the land question or get rid of British control of the state and domination of the economy, nor did it force the withdrawal of British military forces.
De Smet employs the concept of passive revolution to understand how ‘popular initiative from below was displaced not only by the reform from above of the British colonial state, but also by the conservative landlords who directed the nationalist movement’ (De Smet 2016, 96). However, the very limited nature of those reforms led to crisis and the decline of the Wafd Party’s uncontested leadership of the nationalist movement and to the emergence and growth of Islamism in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood and a small but influential Communist Left. To describe such minimal reforms in the context of continuing economic and political crisis using the criterion of passive revolution overestimates their scale and underestimates the extent to which the bourgeois leadership was losing its ideological hegemony over the masses.
Despite attempts by sections of the Egyptian ruling class during the 1930s and 1940s to move towards the goal of independent capitalist development, through support for industrialisation and import substitution, they could not escape the iron grip of the landowners on the one hand, and foreign capital and banks on the other. The concentration of landed wealth in the hands of the monarchy and a small number of large landowners, both foreign and local, together with the continuing British occupation continued to restrain the process of capitalist development and industrialisation. The social and political pressures generated by the long-term crisis of the Egyptian ruling class exploded again in the mass movements of the 1940s, creating the conditions for the Free Officers’ coup of 1952 which sought simultaneously to remove the political obstacles to reform from above, and deflect the revolutionary energies from below.
A major cycle of protest started in 1946 and only ended with the 1952 Nasserist coup. The continued dominance of the state by big landowners (both those allied with the monarchy and those of the opposition Wafd Party), who were integrated into a colonial division of labour through the political economy of cotton production, created a blockage to further economic development which was only partially resolved by new social forces conquering the state from outside. The bourgeoisie was incapable of playing either the leading political or economic role in this process: it remained politically in thrall to the colonial order. There was a small but combative urban working class, concentrated in the major cities and directly involved in the social and political struggles of the day, although its major political and trade union organisations were handicapped by a Stalinist leadership hoping to delegate leadership of the ‘national-democratic’ revolution to somebody else (Alexander 2007).
The crisis was not therefore resolved in the fashion that Trotsky had mapped out in the theory of permanent revolution (Trotsky 1906; Trotsky 1931a, 1931b), whereby a political revolution under the leadership of the urban working class would deal with the land question and the question of democracy and thus in the process ‘grow over’ into a social revolution. Rather, it was junior army officers who seized the state and eventually propelled the economy in a state capitalist direction, as we outlined above. The Nasserist experiment can be seen as a variation on the theme of deflected permanent revolution, as mapped out by Tony Cliff in order to explain why the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1940s did not follow the pattern outlined by Trotsky’s theory (Cliff 1990). It was not particularly successful, however, in making sustainable breakthroughs in terms of capitalist development.
Following their seizure of state power, the Free Officers immediately embarked on a land reform programme which was aimed at breaking the control of the old land-owning ruling class. Having failed to attract the necessary foreign investment, over the next decade they would also begin a programme of state capitalist industrial development, based on import substitution and modelled on the Soviet five-year plans (as happened in India and China and many other Third World countries during the period of decolonisation and national liberation regimes). Egypt’s five-year plan did indeed raise growth rates, but the economy continued to rely very heavily on imports, and the state was unable to make sufficient investments in fixed capital to make the qualitative shift in import-substitution industrialisation required to match the pace of development in Egypt’s near competitors among newly industrialising countries (NICs).
This does not assume a picture of complete stagnation, but rather one of stunted growth in different economic sectors resulting in a growing gap between countries such as Egypt and many of the NICs which achieved much higher levels of industrialisation since the 1950s, and expressed in the rapid, relative deterioration in fixed capital investment, creating a state of permanent crisis (Achcar 2013).
Thus, the attempts at what De Smet calls ‘popular’ Caesarism were limited and short lived. Economic concessions to workers and peasants were unsustainable and the promises of ‘Arab socialism’ were soon to disintegrate. De Smet rightly describes the Nasserist regime as an inherently unstable and contradictory ensemble (De Smet 2016, 119).
The fifth phase of capitalist development preceding the 2011 Revolution began in the 1970s under the rule of Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor. Since the 1970s the Egyptian state has encouraged exports and sought to attract foreign investment. This was not a ‘counter revolution in democratic form’ as De Smet describes it (De Smet 2016, 122), but the policies of the same state capitalist regime in crisis. These attempts at market reforms triggered the largest mass protests since the 1940s. Millions took to the streets in January 1977 over price increases and the Sadat regime had to abandon an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan agreement and postpone planned liberalisation and privatisation programmes.
Neoliberal reforms only accelerated during the last decade of Mubarak’s rule. Yet it would be difficult to see how the concept of passive revolution would apply to the three decades of neoliberalism under Mubarak.
Egyptian capitalism had failed either to catch up with the West, or even with countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia which were until the mid 20th century at a similar level of development to Egypt in terms of their integration into the global economy and their relative competitiveness in global markets. The impact of this relative failure is cumulative: as Egyptian capitalism has been unable to export to major markets, it has been unable to spend in order to develop infrastructure compared to similar countries, and thus unable to win foreign investment and so has experienced a series of financial crises which the regime has only been able to temporarily escape by becoming more indebted. The price of this failure has been to trap the majority of Egyptians in poverty and unemployment, while neoliberal policies have concentrated wealth far beyond the dreams of the monarchy and the landowners of the early 20th century. By the early 21st century, Egypt had truly become one of the weakest links in the chain of NICs.2
The process of development over the last 200 years has been neither smooth nor linear, but rather punctuated by periods of rapid change, followed by blockage and stagnation, and frequent eruptions of resistance from below. Several times since 1919, episodes of social and political revolt have forcibly challenged the holders of state power, and in some cases not only demanded a change of personnel at the top, but also questioned whether the existing form of the state can resolve the problems of Egypt’s development. As Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution would lead us to expect, the revolts from below which have posed this question most insistently are those with a genuinely national reach, combining social movements of ‘the oppressed classes of town and country’ (Trotsky 1931a) with the urban working class playing a key role in the mobilisation. While Trotsky’s vision of the urban working class forging a political alliance with other oppressed classes under its leadership has not been realised, the potential to build such an alliance has been visible in all of the major episodes of revolt from below since 1919, and the failure to act on it has been a key element in the containment and defeat of the mass movements.
The problems of permanent revolution were posed once again in 2011, this time more dramatically, as the accumulated contradictions of successive missed opportunities to industrialise exploded in a revolt from below which mobilised millions demanding bread, freedom and social justice. The form these problems took had not, of course, remained frozen at the level of economic development of previous generations, but reflected changes both to Egyptian society and to capitalism at the level of the global system. Nevertheless, the key features of Trotsky’s theory remained a vital guide to understanding the causes of the revolution and to the dynamics of the revolutionary process.
First, the legacy of economic development in the colonial era remained a crucial question, because of the cumulative impact of missed attempts to keep pace with other NICs. This is not to suggest that somehow remnants the pre-capitalist social formation were combined with capitalism, but rather because the accumulated weight of decades of failure, and (in particular during the neoliberal era) the polarisation of misery at one end of the social spectrum and wealth at the other, was one of the reasons why the revolutionary process was so intense. Second, the specific features of combined development across state capitalist and neoliberal phases of capitalist economic development shaped the dynamics of the workers’ revolt which was central to the explosion of revolution in 2011. The partial decomposition of the Nasserist model of vertically integrated manufacturing alongside the halting recomposition of the working class in the new industrial cities of the neoliberal era is one example of combined development which had a material effect on the revolutionary process (Alexander and Bassiouny 2014).
The question of political forms also took a shape comparable to that outlined by Trotsky in relation to Russia: specifically the weakness of bourgeois democratic parties and movements in Egypt, in the context of the continuing relevance and strength of bourgeois democracy as an ideology at an international level.
The 2011 revolution also posed the problem of the uneven tempo of revolution in town and country. The town was certainly hegemonic and the countryside followed haltingly, acting as one of the most important social reservoirs from which the major reformist Islamist movements and the military-led counter-revolution mobilised to slow the pace of revolutionary change and eventually reverse it.3 Therefore the specific question of on what basis to construct a revolutionary alliance of ‘the oppressed classes of town and country’ under the leadership of the urban working class was answered in the negative. The issue of the opportunities and dangers posed by raising and implementing bourgeois democratic demands and political reforms was a crucial element here, a point we will return to below.
Behind every Caesar a new one?
De Smet’s analysis of the process of revolution and counter-revolution which unfolded in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 compares and contrasts three distinct ‘Caesarist episodes’: the intervention of the leadership of the Armed Forces to remove Mubarak in February 2011, the assumption of the presidency by Mohamed Morsi in June 2012 and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s coup of July 2013 (De Smet 2016). Looking at these episodes through the theoretical lens of Caesarism encourages us to pay close attention to the relationship between what Hal Draper called the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ dynamics of social struggle in his commentary on Marx’s 18th Brumaire (Draper 1978, 385). The ‘horizontal’ pressures of competition between different blocs of the ruling class are interwoven, Draper argues, with the ‘vertical’ pressure from the exploited classes below:
Conflicts within the ruling class tend to stimulate or unleash intervention from below, and conversely, the threat of subversion from below may divide the tops either on how to deal with the problem or in terms of whose interests are mainly endangered. In practice, therefore, these components of the historical social struggle tend to interpenetrate, with the driving force coming from below (vertically). (Draper 1978, 385)
In Gramsci on Tahrir, De Smet presents a picture of the dynamics of these interpenetrating struggles, which, while it throws into stark relief the competition and conflict at the top of the state, obscures how pressure from the ongoing vertical struggles was transmitted into the domain of parliamentary politics in particular during the fateful year of Morsi’s presidency. As we will outline here, our difficulty with De Smet’s analysis of 2011–2013 is that he overstates the ruling class’s agency and room for manoeuvre in the early part of this period, and thus presents a one-sided account of the role of the aborted ‘democratic transition’ in the revolutionary process (and the contradictory role of the Muslim Brotherhood within it). On the other hand, he also understates (though to a lesser extent) how the downward pressure from the reconstructed institutions of the state under al-Sisi’s leadership, and the reconfigured ‘united front of the bourgeoisie’ (to borrow from Draper again – 1978, 392) which the Armed Forces brought into being, affected the character of the mass mobilisations against Morsi in 2013. De Smet’s designation of the Morsi presidency as an episode of ‘civil Caesarism’ thus runs the risk of presenting key aspects of revolution and counter-revolution as simply manoeuvres in the internal war between wings of the same ruling class. Despite De Smet’s clear identification with the emancipatory experience of Tahrir, and his insistence on the importance of understanding revolution as rupture, his stress on repeated episodes of Caesarism over the longer period of modern Egyptian history has the effect of making it harder, rather than easier, to uncover the agency of the oppressed and exploited or to adequately assess whether permanent revolution can move from the realm of ‘historically contingent possibility’ (Callinicos 1982) into reality.
Taking Draper’s image of interpenetrating horizontal and vertical forces as a starting point, we propose here four stages to building an analytical framework through which to view the events and processes of 2011–2013 in Egypt. First, we need to explore the dynamics of both vertical and horizontal struggles: is the bourgeois ‘united front’ pushing back against resistance from below, or disintegrating as exploited classes make gains? Second, can we connect our conclusions to a real, but simplified schema to help us understand which contending classes or fractions of classes are standing where on the field of battle in relation to both general strategies for capital accumulation (in this case neoliberalism), and simplified abstractions of the institutions of the state (such as the Egyptian Armed Forces, the presidency and the judiciary). By this we don’t just mean an attempt to answer who are the leading personnel in these institutions, and for which class interests they act, but also whether contending classes are capable of paralysing their functions or preventing them from acting on particular policies.
Third, we need to try and relate this simplified and abstract schema to the messy reality of actual social forms (paying particular attention to those social movements, parties and state institutions which are riven with class contradictions). Here we are interested in the question of how classes really ‘act’ in the political field (not just what they do in the abstract as we sketched out above). This is something which cannot be resolved neatly into parties or movements ‘representing’ separate classes (Draper 1978, 389). Finally, we have to understand the specific role of ideology in all the processes above. In the context of Egypt 2011–2013 this means exploring the development and role of ideologies such as Islamism, secularism, parliamentarianism, nationalism, sectarianism and women’s oppression.
How does this method relate to De Smet’s analysis? Working through these steps helps to show both where his theoretical approach illuminates important aspects of the dynamics of the revolutionary process, and areas where it obscures and confuses the picture. If we look at the question of the overall trajectory of the vertical struggle between 2011 and 2013, De Smet is quite right to emphasise that the 18-day uprising of 2011 opened a period where the ruling class rapidly rearranged the ruling coalition in a desperate attempt to cope with the effects of the revolutionary mobilisation (De Smet 2016, 205–206). However, his account understates the degree to which the continuing vertical pressure from below between February and November 2011 constrained the room for manoeuvre of all the different fractions of the ruling class and their allies. Although he notes that Tahrir Square continued to fill with protests after the ending of the occupation on 12 February 2011, De Smet sees these demonstrations as increasingly ‘ritualistic’, as ‘the moment of general insurrection … dissolved back into its constituent parts’ (De Smet 2016, 208). He emphasises that waves of strikes after February 2011 met with rising levels of hostility from political groups across the spectrum, as Islamists, nationalists and some sections of the Left condemned workers for pursuing a ‘sectional’ (fi’awi) agenda of personal gain (De Smet 2016, 208) but does not ask whether these strikes were successful and whether the overall effect was to advance the class struggle or throw it into retreat.
In fact, the removal of Mubarak led initially to an intensification of the revolutionary process: the second half of February and the beginning of March saw a strike wave which ‘cleansed’ thousands of state institutions of officials from the ruling party. Then, as the strike wave subsided, a new wave of regular mass mobilisations in the streets was successful in forcing further serious concessions from the ruling military council, including the trial of Mubarak and his sons and the trial of former Interior Minister Habib Adly.
De Smet’s account asserts that under Morsi, ‘the neoliberal accumulation process continued in full force’ (De Smet 2016, 214). In fact some of the most important neoliberal policies, such as the privatisation programme and the subsidy reforms, were halted by resistance from below during 2011–2012 (with neither the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces [SCAF] nor Morsi able to make any serious progress in restarting them) and, as De Smet notes, Morsi’s attempts to meet the conditions of the agreement provisionally concluded with the IMF in November 2012 quickly foundered (De Smet 2016, 214).4 Strikes in the public sector won significant pay rises during 2011 to 2012, and activists in the best-organised workplaces were able to force important concessions from employers over collective bargaining rights and de facto recognition of independent unions (Alexander and Bassiouny 2014).
De Smet’s emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership as one fraction of capital competing among many others over dominance of the state provides a misleading starting point for an analysis of the revolutionary process (De Smet 2016, 211, 214). The reasons why the alliance between SCAF and the Brotherhood and the whole project of the ‘democratic transition’ came undone, are partly to be found in the irresolvable contradiction between the demands and aspirations of millions of Egyptian citizens for social justice and the constraints of both crisis-wracked Egyptian capitalism and the pressure of the long global depression after 2008. We agree with De Smet’s assessment that that the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership both before and after Morsi’s 2012 election victory offered its services to the Egyptian (and global) bourgeoisie in its attempt to restore conditions under which neoliberal accumulation could continue (although while making entirely contradictory promises to the poor to shield them from some of the effects of this process) (De Smet 2016, 214).The problem was that it proved incapable of achieving those aims.
However, there are also other causes. The Muslim Brotherhood is a contradictory organisation, mainly based in the traditional petty bourgeoisie and its educated urban professional faction. It is therefore conservative and takes reactionary positions on many issues, but was at the same time capable at certain moments of expressing opposition to the Mubarak regime, particularly on issues of democracy, corruption and accountability. The petty-bourgeois core of the organisation meant that it could never consistently oppose either capitalism or imperialism, but at the same time had to challenge central aspects of both.5 Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood’s membership and electoral base also include important sections of the urban working class and poor, as demonstrated by the geographical pattern of its electoral results in 2005, 2011 and 2012 (Alexander and Bassiouny 2014, 252–271). De Smet acknowledges the Brotherhood’s vacillations under pressure from all sides when in office, and notes the organisation’s failure to ‘learn the essential lesson of the Paris Commune’ by assuming that it could use the ready-made state machinery for its own purposes (De Smet 2016, 214).6
The final issue we want to address here is the question of the contradictory role played by the ideology, practices and institutions of bourgeois democracy in contexts such as Egypt in 2011. We agree with De Smet’s assessment that the Damascene conversion of the SCAF to parliamentarianism in mid February 2011 was motivated by the desire to first contain and then abort the revolutionary process (De Smet 2016, 209). But to stop the analysis at this point is dangerous. The modest advances in bourgeois democratic freedoms in the Egypt of 2011 – such as relatively free and fair elections, de facto rights to form political parties and trade unions, and mainstream media prepared to give a platform to a wide range of political viewpoints – were all ‘taken by storm’ (as Rosa Luxemburg might have put it) (Luxemburg 1964b). Before February 2011, the generals, bureaucrats and businessmen who had ruled Egypt for decades did not think any of these things were necessary in the management of discontent from below.7
Therefore, it is not surprising that many people who hoped that the revolution would bring change for the better saw winning these freedoms as a genuine step forward. They did not necessarily see this as a step back from Tahrir but rather the culmination of the battles and struggles and sacrifices since 25 January 2011. For many, participating in the elections represented a dual perspective in which strikes, demonstrations and occupations would interact with the more restricted struggles of elections and parliamentary politics. That continued to be the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, but also of many of the liberal, leftist and nationalist parties and leaders. However, the issue was to split the revolutionary youth as a significant segment advocated boycotting the elections and focusing on street mobilisations.8
The contradictory role played by aspirations for widening the application of bourgeois democracy in revolutions is nothing new. Hal Draper notes that one of challenges facing revolutionaries during the 1848 revolutions was how to ‘sort out’ elements of democracy which were simply a swindle aimed at creating ‘a safety valve for the effervescing passions of the country’ from those which pointed towards the ‘furthest extension of popular control’ (Draper 1978, 366, 305 and 278). In the Egyptian case, it is also worth noting that the ability of the gathering counter-revolution to reverse reforms on the terrain of bourgeois democracy (in large part thanks to the vacillations and cowardice of the bourgeois parties which benefited from their implementation), played a key role in turning the tide against the revolution.
None of this excuses any of the crimes and mistakes committed by the Muslim Brotherhood when it was in office, or reduces the culpability of its leaders for their efforts to demobilise the popular revolutionary movement and rebuild the very same repressive institutions which would turn on them only a few months later. We also recognise that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist ideology made it extremely difficult to build an effective coalition of revolutionary forces, as its weaknesses on the question of sectarianism against the Copts and its reactionary positions on women made it much easier for the counter-revolution to present the revitalised state as a champion of the oppressed (Naguib 2016).
The outcomes of the 2013 coup against Morsi are consistent with our analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the Brotherhood had indeed been simply another faction of the ruling class, we should have seen chaos in the institutions of the state. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood was ejected from office within a matter of days, and – with the exception of the cabinet (which included a number of ‘revolutionary’ elements for cover) – new appointments confirmed the resurrection of the old regime in a more vicious form (Alexander and Bassiouny 2014, 284–318). Nor was there an obvious split in the wider ruling class: there were no signs of capital flight (quite the opposite occurred, as funds flowed into the country from the Gulf states which backed Sisi), no support from major businesses for Morsi, while the media remained overwhelmingly in favour of the coup across both state and private broadcasters.
Conclusion
There are many challenging questions thrown up in the course of debates over how to locate the long-term causes and internal dynamics of the revolutionary process in Egypt since 2011 within a Marxist framework for analysis. Much more work needs to be done. We have argued here that while Brecht De Smet’s Gramsci on Tahrir represents an ambitious attempt to develop such a framework, there are a number of problems with the way he applies key concepts including passive revolution, permanent revolution and Caesarism to a long view of capitalist development in Egypt. In particular we have outlined here an alternative view of how theory of permanent revolution can be applied in the Egyptian case as a tool for understanding why a revolution erupted in 2011 and why it took the course it did. Finally, we offered a contrasting viewpoint to De Smet's argument that the Muslim Brotherhood and the leadership of the Armed Forces can both be considered as representing different wings of the counter-revolution, challenging his equation of the limited democratic process leading to the election of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament, and then to the presidency of Mohamed Morsi with the repression which followed Sisi's military coup in 2013.
Celebrating Tahrir’s moment of rupture and explaining how the forms of self-organisation which emerged there prefigured an alternative society is a necessary first step, but not sufficient basis for revolutionary strategy. Russian revolutionary socialists did not mechanically counterpose bourgeois and proletarian forms of democracy in their agitational work (though they relentlessly polemicised against anyone within the socialist movement who argued that bourgeois democracy was the only form of democracy possible and who wanted to limit the progress of revolution to the establishment of a parliamentary republic) (Trotsky 1931b). On the contrary they used both the demands (universal suffrage, the secret ballot, convocation of the constituent assembly) and the processes and institutions themselves in order to win over the widest possible section of ‘the oppressed classes of town and country’ to the revolution, ‘layer by layer’ (Trotsky 1919).
Amal Dunqul’s Spartacus' last words begins with a shout of defiance in the face of tyranny, but ends in submission. Unless Marxist theory can illuminate in concrete terms how our theories of alternatives can become reality, outlining the process by which a revolutionary minority can become a majority, it risks falling into the same trap.