The destruction of the Left, historically, has been naturalized more completely in present-day Egypt than it had been in Iran by 1979.\u00a0 Going back to the 1950s, because of Nasserism\u2019s subordination and suppression of the Left, the strongest opposition movement in Egypt today is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a longer history and is much stronger than Khomeini-style Islamism had been in Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution.\u00a0 While the Khomeiniite Islamic Republic has destroyed the Left more completely in Iran since 1979, it is also the case that the reform movement in the Islamic Republic has had a longer history of organization \u2014 for almost 20 years, now \u2014 than the opposition in Egypt has at present.\u00a0 The prospects for organized reform, in other words, ran deeper in Iran at the moment of the Green Movement election crisis in 2009 than is the case in Egypt today.\u00a0 This poses both more radical possibilities and dangers for Egypt than in Iran two years ago.\u00a0 The Green Movement could beat a retreat in the face of defeat in ways that the unfolding crisis in Egypt might not be so controlled.\u00a0 But this spiraling out of control that has raised much greater radical prospects in Egypt, as opposed to Iran in 2009, may prove to be the case at least as much for ill as for good.\u00a0 The military has been able to come to the rescue of the state in Egypt, and this has been met with joy not angry disappointment.\u00a0 What links both eruptions of democratic discontent, in Iran and Egypt, then, is their authoritarian outcome.<\/p>\n
Putting aside the rather superficial narratives that emphasize how events in Egypt and Tunisia disprove the supposed intractability and lack of \u201cdemocratic\u201d spirit in the Arab or Muslim world \u2014 as if this needed proving \u2014 we must nevertheless ask about the legacy of the history of the Left \u2014 its defeats and failures \u2014 that condition present possibilities.\u00a0 The history of the Left, both locally and globally, and reaching back for generations, is important, perhaps not so much for the obvious reasons \u2014 a relative lack of \u201cdemocratic institutions\u201d in one or another part of the world, or, indeed, globally, today, by contrast with the past \u2014 as that it raises the question of history per se<\/em>.\u00a0 What resources does history<\/em> provide to the present?\u00a0 For the comparisons \u2014 however invidious \u2014 with the situation in and for Egypt are all historical<\/em> in nature.\u00a0 So the question of history and its effects presses for consideration.\u00a0 Whether one approaches the matter of historical precedence with hope or anxiety, still, there is the question of how appropriate to the present any reach for such precedence may truly be.\u00a0 Like any event, the massive popular uprising in Egypt is in important ways unprecedented<\/em> and new<\/em>.\u00a0 This is its power.\u00a0 It demands its moment in the sun and refuses all comparisons, insisting upon its sui generis<\/em> character, which it cannot be denied, even if it is not yet fully revealed.[2]<\/a> What impresses itself is how much this moment will be allowed to realize itself \u2014 to make its departure from previous history.\u00a0 Or, conversely, how it will be drawn back into and subsumed by history\u2019s ineluctable force.\u00a0 Why should we care about history, when emancipation makes its attempt at escaping its dead hand? \u2014 How is the unfolding present already history<\/em>?<\/p>\n Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez Crisis.<\/p><\/div>\n Beneath the elation \u2014 if not euphoria \u2014 of the international Left at the popular overthrow of Mubarak is the fundamental ambiguity and so radical ambivalence of democratic revolution in our time. But this has been so not only since 1979 or 1989 but 1789.\u00a0 However, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, whatever its tortured career and the opposed judgments about it, democratic revolutions since then have been dogged by the specter of failure<\/em>.\u00a0 One thing that cannot be said of 1789 is that it failed, however ambiguous was its success.\u00a0 Yet a repressed, largely unknown, and importantly failed moment has haunted the history of modern revolutions, the event that prompted Marx\u2019s famous phrase about history \u201cweighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living\u201d: 1848.\u00a0 \u201cThe Spring of the Nations\u201d in 1848, the revolutions in France, Germany and beyond, has completely escaped the imagination of present considerations of the moment of democratic revolution.\u00a0 This present absence is itself quite revealing, and needs to be addressed.\u00a0 For it may be that comparison with 1848 is the most obscure but important of all.<\/p>\n For Marxism, 1848 is the canon of failure.\u00a0 What once made Marxism \u2014 whose founding political statement was 1848\u2019s Communist Manifesto <\/em>\u2014 such an important force in the world was its awareness of the problem<\/em> of 1848, or, why 1789 has kept repeating itself over and over in modern history, but without success<\/em>.\u00a0 The converse of the Manifesto<\/em>\u2019s rousing call to action, to treat history as the \u201chistory of class struggles,\u201d was Marx\u2019s writing the history of his present moment<\/em>, the culminating climax and failure of the 1848 Revolution in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>.[3]<\/a> But these two of Marx\u2019s most widely quoted writings were documents of both promise and defeat.<\/p>\n What made the 1848 Revolution so important to Marx and subsequent Marxism was the light that it shed on the history of the bourgeois revolution.\u00a0 1848 was both the last of the classical bourgeois revolutions and the first of the socialist revolutions that have marked the modern, bourgeois era.\u00a0 Henceforth, the fates of liberalism and socialism have been indissolubly tied \u2014 even if their connection has been extremely fraught.\u00a0 Liberalism could not do without socialism, nor socialism without liberalism.\u00a0 Every democratic revolution since 1848 has faced this two-fold task \u2014 and has, without exception, foundered on the shoals of its contradictions.\u00a0 Marxism was the attempt to transcend the antinomy of individual and collective freedom \u2014 or of liberalism and socialism in \u201csocial democracy\u201d \u2014 to realize both, by transcending both.\u00a0 Marx and Engels emblazoned this demand in their Manifesto<\/em> with the slogan of \u201cFrom each according to his ability, to each according to his need!,\u201d which was to be realized in the \u201cfreedom of each\u201d as the \u201cprecondition for the freedom of all.\u201d \u2014 Importantly, Marx and Engels were the originators of neither of these catchphrases for what \u201ccommunism\u201d meant. \u00a0The twin fates of liberalism and socialism after 1848 have shared in the failure of this Marxist vision for emancipation.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n What explains the undemocratic outcomes of democratic revolution in the modern era?\u00a0 Certainly one can take only so much comfort in Thomas Jefferson\u2019s saying that a revolution every generation or so is a good thing \u2014 as if frequent revolutions are necessary to restore democracy.\u00a0 Or, if so, the reasons for this must still be explained, beyond \u201ccorruption,\u201d the perennial complaint of the subaltern.\u00a0 Whence does this recurrent \u201ccorruption\u201d of the democratic moment spring?\u00a0 And why does it manifest itself so much more dramatically at some times than others?\u00a0 Perhaps revolution is not always such an unambiguously good thing.\u00a0 Especially if, as Marx put it, it threatens to be the \u201cfirst time as tragedy\u201d and the \u201csecond time as farce.\u201d \u00a0What comes of revolution if it is taken to be fate<\/em>?\u00a0 There is nothing so \u201crevolutionary\u201d as capital itself<\/em>.<\/p>\n The 1848 Revolution had secured universal suffrage and established the 2nd Republic in France, but at the price, wryly observed by Marx, of bringing an authoritarian demagogue, Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon\u2019s nephew), to power \u2014 to the horror of liberal democratic sentiment at the time \u2014 as its first elected President, promising to \u201csave society.\u201d\u00a0 It is because Bonaparte overthrew the 2nd Republic, and established a 20-year 2nd Empire that followed at the end of his term as President less than four years later, that the massacre of the workers in June 1848 did not become forgotten as a historical footnote and regarded as merely a bump in the road of democracy, for it came to presage the authoritarian repression of society that followed, in which members of the bourgeoisie became subject to the same treatment first meted out to the rebellious workers.\u00a0 Marxists used the term \u201cBonapartism\u201d to describe this phenomenon of suppression of democracy with popular assent, which has repeated itself so consistently in history after 1848 \u2014 for instance, in \u201cNasserism\u201d in Egypt and other forms of Arab nationalism (the so-called \u201cArab Revolution\u201d) in the 1950s\u201360s.\u00a0 Such Orwellian reality of all subsequent history has its beginning, with Marx, in 1848.\u00a0 The soldier held aloft triumphantly on the shoulders of democratic demonstrators in the streets of Cairo already wears the mask of Bonaparte \u2014 not the greater but the lesser.\u00a0 For such turns of modern revolution, after 1848, do not vouchsafe progress, however dubiously, but rather wager its foolhardy chances, mocking them.\u00a0 As Horkheimer put it in the 1920s, after the ebbing of the failed world revolutionary wave of 1917\u201319, \u201cAs long as it is not victorious, the revolution is no good.\u201d[5]<\/a> So, the question becomes, what would be the conditions for true victory<\/em>?\u00a0 What success can<\/em> we aspire to win?<\/p>\n Egyptian military officer cheered on by demonstrators in Cairo.<\/p><\/div>\n Marx attempted to capture this problem in his demand that the revolution \u201ctake its poetry from the future\u201d rather than the past.\u00a0 But if this is more than the banal statement it appears at first glance, then it raises a rather obscure difficulty: In what way can present revolution draw upon the emancipatory energy of the future<\/em>? And Marx\u2019s dedicated follower Walter Benjamin\u2019s caveat echoes closely behind, that faith in the future sapped the strength of the revolution, which, Benjamin wrote, needed to be \u201cnourished with the image of enslaved ancestors rather than liberated grandchildren.\u201d[6]<\/a> But we may need both<\/em> imaginations \u2014 of emancipation and redemption \u2014 today.\u00a0 The question is, how so?<\/p>\n Marx and the history of Marxism still speak, even if their voices are drowned out in the clamoring din of the present.\u00a0 In history after 1848, Marx understood a world \u2014 the present \u2014 caught between past and future.\u00a0 Marx\u2019s term for this historical<\/em> world, \u201ccapital,\u201d refers to the radical ambivalence of the present: its being already past, accumulating all of history and annexing the future, continually crowding the moment off stage; and its constant liquidation of that history, the incessant consumption of the moment in light of a future that never arrives.\u00a0 Past and future seem to recede infinitely beyond the horizons of a present that is as perpetual as it is empty and futile, trapped, static but constantly in motion.\u00a0 So we resign ourselves to the present\u2019s eternal passing and recurrence, in which \u201ceverything changes\u201d and yet \u201cremains the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Hosni Mubarak and son Gamal cast votes in the last election.<\/p><\/div>\n Egyptians may be driven today by the specter of enslaved ancestry, provoked by the force of what Benjamin described as the \u201chatred\u201d and spirit of \u201cself-sacrifice\u201d necessary to make a bid for history.\u00a0 But they are also certainly prompted, as Benjamin put it, to \u201cactivate the emergence brake\u201d on the \u201clocomotive\u201d of history that would otherwise condemn posterity.[7]<\/a> They may be motivated not only to redeem past sacrifice but to prevent future loss that could yet be rendered unnecessary.\u00a0 It is not that Mubarak\u2019s rule became too long or old, but that it threatened to become indefinite \u2014 the leering face of the son \u2014 that provoked the demand for its end, precisely at the risk of the present.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t care if I die,\u201d the sentiment widely expressed around Tahrir Square, is the signal moment to which Benjamin\u2019s philosophy of history attends: to bring time to a halt.\u00a0 But such resolve expresses the will to live<\/em>, although not<\/em> merely to continue life unchanged.<\/p>\n Not only are we history, but the future will be.<\/p><\/div>\n The problem we must face is that the imagination of emancipation \u2014 which defines the \u201cLeft\u201d as such[8]<\/a> \u2014 is today divided, between the desperation of wishing for the unprecedented new, and desiring for return to the missed moments of opportunity, the potential embodied in past attempts, however failed \u2014 attempts at both the escape from<\/em> and the redemption of<\/em> history.\u00a0 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1979, 1989: they will not return \u2014 thank God!\u00a0 But we mourn them nonetheless.\u00a0 What was lost with them?\u00a0 Perhaps nothing.\u00a0 An emancipated future beckons; however, it eludes our grasp, outrunning us in the onrush of time.\u00a0 \u201cTime waits for no one.\u201d\u00a0 The future grants no refuge.\u00a0 There is no peace, not even of the graveyard.\u00a0 As Benjamin put it, \u201cEven the dead are not safe.\u201d\u00a0 But history remains.\u00a0 It may be unavoidable \u2014 as much as the future is.\u00a0 So, the question is, what are we going to do with it?\u00a0 If we are trapped between past and future, perhaps we will not be crushed but can bring them together and galvanize their force even more powerfully in the present: we are pulverized all the more surely for trying to slip the vise.\u00a0 Past failures may dispirit, and bewildering, dystopic futures may threaten.\u00a0 Or: History and utopia can both be enlisted to the aid of the present.\u00a0 If only.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat now?,\u201d Egypt asks us. We do not ask it.\u00a0 This question should be posed, not as it is wont, as a hope or a fear, but as a task, however exclaimed or whispered.\u00a0 It is not to be answered with exuberance or resignation, but determination.\u00a0 The resolution that not only are we, inevitably, history, but the future will be.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #33 (March 2011).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 1<\/a>. See Danny Postel, Kaveh Ehsani, Maziar Behrooz and Chris Cutrone, \u201c30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,\u201d Platypus Review<\/em> 20 (February 2010), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/02\/18\/30-years-of-the-islamic-revolution-in-iran\/<\/a>>.\u00a0 See also my \u201cFailure of the Islamic Revolution: The Nature of the Present Crisis in Iran,\u201d Platypus Review<\/em> 14 (August 2009), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/08\/24\/the-failure-of-the-islamic-revolution\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 2<\/a>. See Hamid Dabashi, \u201cThe False Anxiety of Influence,\u201d Al Jazeera<\/em> English, February 12, 2011. Available on-line at: <http:\/\/english.aljazeera.net\/indepth\/opinion\/2011\/02\/201121215216318526.html<\/a>>.\u00a0 Undeniably, as Dabashi writes, \u201cFrom Tehran to Tunis to Cairo and beyond, our innate cosmopolitan cultures are being retrieved, our hidden worlds discovered, above and beyond any anxiety of influence.\u201d<\/p>\n 3<\/a>. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>. Originally published in 1852. Available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1852\/18th-brumaire\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 4<\/a>. See my \u201cMarxist Hypothesis,\u201d Platypus Review<\/em> 29 (November 2010), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/11\/06\/the-marxist-hypothesis-a-response-to-alain-badous-communist-hypothesis\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 5<\/a>. Max Horkheimer, \u201cA Discussion about Revolution,\u201d Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926\u201331 & 1950\u201369 <\/em>(New York: Seabury, 1978), 39.<\/p>\n 6<\/a>. Benjamin, \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History,\u201d Illuminations<\/em> (New York: Schocken, 1969), 260.<\/p>\n 7<\/a>. Benjamin, \u201cParalipomena to \u2018On the Concept of History\u2019,\u201d Selected Writings<\/em> vol. 4 1938\u201340 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402.<\/p>\n 8<\/a>. See Leszek Kolakowski, \u201cThe Concept of the Left<\/a>,\u201d in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader<\/em> (New York: Grove, 1969), 144\u2013158.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1979, 1789, and 1848 Chris Cutrone THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.\u00a0 Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,28,16,6],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-29","tag-benjamin","tag-marxism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3220,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions\/3220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/nasser1956-300x215.jpg\" "\\"nasser1956\\"")
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