Dignity and Social Justice: SIDELINED

While we are still fighting in the trenches of revolution, starting with the referendum the parties and candidates have slowly been placing the building blocks of our future political sphere. Those players are currently determining the position of dignity and social justice in Egypt’s future political sphere. Dreaming of social justice and human dignity is not idealistic, but is the very premise of what #Jan25 stands for, we cannot allow it to become side-lined or remain as words we chant in our protests. While the bourgeoisie will never understand how the absence of dignity and social justice affect people who are constantly undergoing daily social and economic humiliation, the reality is that there are many people that cannot live another day under these conditions. These values must materialize in every action of building and instead of allowing these values to be limited to reverberations in the squares, we must limit the actions and policies of these political players that will only exacerbate humiliation and social injustice.

A list of the economic policies of some of the main parties was compiled by @hussein_allam. The parties included in the list are: The Free Egyptians Party Al Masriyeen El Ahrar (المصريين الأحرار), The Egyptian Democratic and Social Party Al Masry Al Democrati Al Igtmaay (المصرى الديمقراطى الإجتماعى), The Justice Party Hizb El Adl (حزب العدل) , The Egypt Freedom Party Masr El Hurreya (مصر الحرية), The Light Party Hizb El Nour (حزب النور) , The Middle Party Hizb El Wast (حزب الوسط), Freedom and Justice Party El Hurreya wa El Aadala (الحرية و العدالة) . I will be outlining how these economic policies will further increase disproportionate wealth accumulation and will inevitably fail at achieving social justice. I would definitely encourage a close reading of the afore-mentioned list of economic policies prior to reading this post. While I would have liked to include tourism and large mega-projects in this critique of the parties' economic policies I will leave these as subjects for other posts, since the three main points that I will raise in this post suffice to show how these economic policies are destined to fail in creating the foundations of social justice.

First of all, I would like to briefly speak about human dignity, I've written a previous post about human dignity and what the parliamentary elections mean in terms of human dignity. Prior to the November uprising in #Tahrir I could consider the parliamentary elections and candidates at the very best naive and optimistic to have accepted participation in these elections while we are still under #SCAF's dictatorship, but following November uprising I consider their participation a betrayal and complete disregard to the basic human right to dignity. I will not blame voters for their participation in these farcical elections, but I blame the parties and the candidates for granting legitimacy to an authority that was shooting to kill and eradicate dissidents. The short-sightedness and blatant weakness of these parties in their ability to organize as a political front and reject #SCAF's legitimacy and violence leaves me frustrated that the political arena is occupied by self-interested individuals and parties that lack any true vision that will allow Egyptians to finally break free from the throes of oppression and humiliation. Many parties and candidates continued to run for elections despite the atrocities that were being committed by #SCAF and the #CSF out of fear of losing power and ground in the elections to the Islamist parties instead of organizing and boycotting these elections. The parties and candidates were either too stupid or too self-serving and having them in any sort of power will hold a bleak future for the revolution.

What is social justice? Its a term that has been used since #Jan25, chanted, hung on banners and included in every dialogue on revolutionary reform. Part of why it’s so easy to forget about it is because it is not defined. It can be easily appropriated by anyone to mean a range of things including creating a larger vocational labor force who will ultimately be working in factories to make others richer. But for the purpose of this post I will define it as equal access to the means of production and the ability of people to subsist without having their labor exploited by someone. In other words, it means that no individual is able to monopolize say for instance a factory, and then through the labor of others derive a profit that is significantly larger than what the labor is acquiring through this exploitative relationship. In the current scheme of things, what we've seen is that those who own the means of production are able to generate immense wealth that allows them to further monopolize more means of production. That way this ruling class of owners is constantly becoming richer while those whose labor is the very essence of their wealth become more and more impoverished. There is a finite amount of wealth circulating in human societies when someone owns the means of production what ends up happening is that this wealth and resources become more concentrated around those epicenters of production leaving less available to be circulated among those who do not own these means of production. A capitalist economic system is constantly creating and replicating this relationship between capital and labor and social justice cannot be ever achieved under these conditions, even if it may seem so temporarily. Even if we intervene, mitigate and use taxation systems and protectionist economic models to prevent this, ultimately this is a system that is self-destructive and the only way for it to survive is through a process of constant expansion. Eventually this system will run out of more resources to utilize and spaces (both physical and conceptual) to expand into and will collapse. The question here is will we wait for a system that is devastating both the planet and its people to self-implode making it extremely hard for people to recover from its devastating effects or will we work to bring this system down before more losses are incurred?

An often overlooked element to why capitalism has not caused the devastation that those who oppose it have prophesied is that not everyone is completely integrated within the market economy, in fact there are many places within Egypt that people are still able to subsist through what economists have termed informal economies. Informal economies are ways that different groups of people are able survive external to these market economies through both monetized and non-monetized exchanges usually extremely location specific and heavily reliant on social and kinship ties. A close look at the parties' economic policies shows that The Free Egyptians Party, The Egyptian Democratic Social Party, The Justice Party, The Free Egypt Party and The Light Party all in one form or the other encourage the start-up and maintenance of small to medium enterprises (SMEs). While this may initially appear as a step in the right direction, I urge you take a minute to reflect about what that really means in context of what I explained earlier. By encouraging the creation of SMEs, on the one hand new epicenters of requiring smaller capital are being created that for them to function require even smaller wages and naturally more exploitation of the labor force. On the other hand, an increase of SMEs will only further integrate many informal economies into the market economy. While theoretically this may at first appear as increased distribution of wealth, but reality is that access to markets and market information can be very limited. Many of these informal economies once integrated into a market economy will lose the very non-measurable methods for subsistence that allowed people to subsist and will most likely lead to a disruption to these economies that rely on social and kinship ties leaving many people impoverished.

The Freedom and Justice Party, The Middle Party, The Light Party, The Free Egypt Party, The Justice Party, The Egyptian Democratic and Social Party and the Free Egyptians Party all employ different schemes and policies to mitigate the destructive effects of what is thought of as a free market, ranging from tax subsidies and minimum wages to anti-inflation policies. What these policies are doing in essence is working in the complete opposite direction of a free market economy, yet while these policies work in opposition to the free market economy, all they are doing is allowing this market economy to further flourish. Without these policies what would eventually happen is that people would no longer be able to subsist and inevitably lead to a complete collapse of the market economy. So by employing these different protectionist schemes these parties are creating conditions in which a collapse of the market economy is slowed down, keeping people’s heads barely over the water and supporting their continued exploitation. Economic justice can never be achieved through protectionist economic policies only the continued exploitation of people is achieved.

By encouraging expansion and development (whether agriculture or tourism) into what are considered “marginalized” or “empty” landscapes a two-fold process is occurring here. The first, it is implicit within this process that a very state and legislatively recognized form of private property will be taking place. Private property at its very essence is the right of certain individuals or institutions to exclude others from access to the decision-making process of how this property will be utilized. In the context of capital accumulation this means that individuals and institutions with capital and power are able to deny access of others to this property. Capital generates more capital and private property especially that integrated into a market economy will only lead to more capital and further alienate a vast majority of people from their ability access this property whether it is land or resource, transforming the majority of people’s relationship to land and resource to those of tenants and not owners. The second process that is occurring is what I consider an inherently conceptually violent process of erasure of people and their livelihood practices. These targeted lands, whether the North Coast, “deserts” or Sinai as outlined by The Freedom and Justice Party, The Middle Party, The Light Party, The Egyptian Democratic and Social Party and The Free Egyptians Party, are imagined empty and devoid of people. I will leave my readers to draw their own conclusions about this process, but I urge you to ask yourself what does it mean to the people living in these locations to become erased and considered non-existent in how our economic policies are developed? What does it mean impose projects on people while we sit in our offices developing these policies with little or no regard to how others wish to live their lives? What does it mean to not recognize thousand-year old processes of ownership unless they conform to our current state definition of private property? How can social justice be achieved when over 500,000 individuals’ existence is being erased as we choose to consider these locations “marginal”, “uninhabited” and “unused”?

For many of us integrated into the market economy, it is very difficult to imagine a world outside of capitalism. But this is a revolution and we must challenge our imaginations. Capitalism derives its power largely in how we think of it as a natural, inevitable and unchangeable system. But capitalism is hardly natural, it is not governed by the laws of nature and has come into existence through violent and coercive forms of rule and governance, it emergence is not separate from colonial and neo-colonial projects and this is something we must not overlook. Additionally, capitalism was not inevitable, it has resulted through the choices, decisions and theories of a ruling class that have had the physical means to super-impose this system, again often violently on different groups of people. Finally, capitalism is not unchangeable, it is hard to imagine alternatives while it is dominating our every interaction and interpretation of the world around us. If capitalism collapses it doesn’t mean our means of production will also collapse, it doesn’t mean that agricultural lands and factories will cease to exist, it will only mean that they will no longer belong to a small ruling elite class and their benefits will be distributed more equitably. If we allow ourselves to dare and dream of a different world; one where our economic policies are not alienating or excluding, where social justice and human dignity are at its forefront, maybe then we will not rush to ballots supporting parties based on fears of islamists or liberals and finally address the core essence of a socio-economic system that not just within Egypt, but has globally enslaved to different degrees an extremely large majority of people who inhabit this planet.


This post is inspired by conversations with @bassemk, @atlemk, @sumayaholdijk,@yasminb and @fazerofzanight. This post is theoretically influenced by Karl Marx's Das Capital, Karl Polyani's Great Transformation, Nancy Peluso’s interpretation Bundles of Power, David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope, Timothy Mitchell on the Performativity of Markets and James Scott's Seeing Like a State.

You Can't Have Your #Jan25 Revolution Cake and Eat it Too -Part 2- On Food #Sovereignty as a Revolutionary Tool

There's been wide spread panic over the last three weeks that Egypt's food supply has started to dwindle, the continued state of instability and unrest caused by the ongoing protests have been blamed. While the continuation of #Jan25 is conveniently transformed into a scapegoat for upcoming food shortages, the truth is that Egypt's system of food production has been, since the construction of the Aswan Dam and the modernization of agriculture in the early 1900s, on a trajectory towards decreased food production. While most of the world experienced the onset of the Green Revolution much later on in 20th century, Egypt's green revolution started with an intricate scientific restructuring of Egypt's old flood irrigation system to a modern irrigation system of canals and drains, as part of the British colonial project. The new irrigation system would support intensive crop production that would be then appropriated by the British colonizer. The agricultural production system became extractive and unsustainable. The development of high-yield agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticide, coupled with the irrigation changes that resulted in the loss of the rich clay deposits especially after the advent of the High Dam ultimately stripped away the fertility of Egyptian soil to cater to cash-cropping. The modernization of Egypt's agriculture has eroded the nutrients from the top-soil inevitably leading to the current state of low yields and is the real culprit behind the dwindling food supplies and not the people that are still protesting.

The trend in agricultural yields has been gradually declining, necessitating the increased use of agricultural inputs. With the series of uprising in North Africa, there's been a sharper and sudden surprising predicted decline of 30% in Egypt's agricultural productivity related to a long and complex commodity chain that links Libya's oil production with Egypt's fertilizer industry. Many of the factories in Egypt have currently stopped production altogether (Despommier 2011). The decrease in fertilizer production, considering Egypt's agricultural production's heavy dependency on high-inputs may prove disastrous in this upcoming harvest. To be absolutely clear, I am not blaming Libya's uprising on Egypt's upcoming food shortages. The lack of Libyan oil is merely the straw that broke the camel's back in an already crashing agricultural system. The more complex the commodity chain for agricultural inputs the more vulnerable agricultural production becomes to extraneous political and economic fluctuations.

Egypt's long history of the exploitation of farmers remains unchanged. Whether it was the age-old feudalism family exploitation of labor, or Nasser's land reforms of state exploitation of labor, or the current exploitation by agricultural conglomerates. The means of production whether it is the actual land or machinery is owned by a select few, and with production geared towards profit in a global market, labor remains the only element where surplus value can be extracted. In a system where production is for profit, the difference between breaking even and profiting is really about how much wage the farmer eventually gets. So, by virtue of having the start-up capital the land owner reserves the right to monopolize a means of production, where all the profit comes from uncompensated work that the farmer is putting into the production process.

Whether it is the state, or whether it is the select few that own land, the reality is that the majority of people do not own the means to feed themselves. The state and the large agribusinesses own the majority of the means of food production and are able to derive revenue with every transaction through taxation or services, such as sales taxes, farming taxes and the rental or sale of agricultural machinery. We cannot overthrow such a deeply embedded system of exploitation, while the very way we are able to acquire our own food in and of itself, leaves us vulnerable to the whims of those who's only interest has been profit or control.

Food sovereignty per se, is one way to emancipate ourselves from those who control the means to produce food and also reshape not just the relationship between those in power (who we do not want to be in power) to our food, but also the relationship between the land, sustainability and our methods of food production. When we think of the prospect of producing our own food, the harsh reality of the difficultly to acquire land comes to haunt us, but what if we did not need land to produce our food and we could each grow a few crops to subsist or at least to partially subsist, in a way that could possibly marginalize those who have monopolized our food production, exploited our labor and are constantly degrading the land? Low-cost, sustainable and organic urban farming whether as community farms, roof-top gardens or vertical farms that take into consideration land and water shortages may be a necessary solution to not only address food shortage, but the badly needed socioeconomic restructuring of #Egypt. If #Jan25 is a revolution that strives for #democracy truth be told, we cannot have #democracy without social justice and we cannot have social justice when the very basis of our needs is owned and controlled by a dictatorship, those who have supported that dictatorship or those who are looking for profit.

Reference: Despommier, Dickson. "Ripple Effect or Tsunami". The Vertical Farm Project.

This commentary draws theoretically from Mitchell and Marx, Factually from Mitchell's Rule of Experts, Despommier's blog and lectures by Soraya El Torki, and has been inspired by conversations either in real life or via social media with @sumayaholdijk, @atlemk, Dalia AbulFotuh, @bassemk and @KartikeyaSingh

How to Tell the Difference between a #Counter-Revolution and a Butt-Hole (or how to go from being a reformist to a revolutionary)

The first mentions of the #counter-revolution shortly followed #Mubarak's "I will die on Egypt's soil, but I had no intention of running for another term" speech, that marked the point in my life where I got to see probably what could be historically considered one of the world's largest displays of collective anger (though not comparable to the "I won't step down speech"_. Around that time I remember starting to read tweets and FB posts that claimed that the pernicious #counter-revolution has started. Since then there's been a rapid onslaught of counter-revolutionary accusations hurled by people standing at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, as well as those lying around within the spectrum. Those who want to continue the strikes and demonstrations have been accused by those who fear and love #Egypt and cannot wait to start rebuilding it as elements of a hidden hand that wants to crush the #Jan25 revolution, and vice-versa. Nothing was free from the #counter-revolution whether it was the #workers, the #copts, the women, Ahmed Shafiq's supporters, Ahmed Shafiq's pullover, those who went back to work, those who had decided to stay in #Tahrir, those who trusted the army, those who urged caution in putting faith in the army, those who were scared about safety, security and economy, those who wanted to tear down the current economic structure and prosecute the state security structure, and the list is extensive and veers on infinite. While the different elements of the spectrum couldn't agree on where was and who is the #counter-revolution, they all agreed to one thing: There was a hidden hand that with deliberation and careful strategic planning was behind a malevolent orchestrating of events, ideas and plans to pull the plug on #Jan25. Yet, I would argue that the events and the ideas that have been deemed a #counter-revolution only gain direction, connection and purpose through a retrospective analysis of these events and ideas. In other words, there are many events and ideas that in and of themselves are counter-revolutionary, but the aggregation of all these events and ideas in singular purpose or direction is only through our analysis and conceptual grouping of these events and ideas.

The #counter-revolution has no hidden hand, it is not made up of a group of strategists sitting round a table scheming how to topple #Jan25. I am not saying that many of the events have not been orchestrated or that they aren't counter-revolutionary, I am saying that these acts are random, even those that are planned may not be planned by the same groups or for the same purposes, but they may serve the same effect or outcome. Even if they serve the same effect or outcome that is purely by chance, because these groups may be in direct opposition to each other and their interests may be contradictory and their actions for the most-part may be more directed towards maintaining their interests and an upper-hand in power struggles than have anything to do with #Jan25 per se. In fact, the #counter-revolution in certain instances may not only be a product of groups or institutions, but rather of ideas or boxes that constrain our ideas and imaginations.

The conceptual boxes that literally and figuratively box our ideas are just there, they frame our ideas, but no one put them there, they existed before #Jan25, even before a #Jan25 was conceptualized. These boxes are really just there,they emerged from a long history of historical and political processes. I will not go into an extensive example or analysis of some of these ideas. This will be subject of sub-sequent posts. These boxes are intangible, they cannot be pinpointed but we can clearly see their effects. Their effects are first seen when we automatically have a reaction to something, when we say this is logical. On the one-hand we think something is logical, but on the other-hand we cannot draw a clear line between why it is logical. We also find a strong emotional reaction to anything that may not fit into this box, or you might notice that some people don't even hear it or are able to see it if it doesn't fit their mental framework. The groups or institutions that I previously referred to are also not free from conceptualizing the world from within these boxes.

So, to cut this abstract description short and give a some-what but not entirely tangible example would be to look at the idea of the economy as it relates to #Jan25. The economy is really any group of exchanges between people or institutions that revolves around the appropriation of goods or services. These exchanges can take any form and follow any rules. It is really completely up to us what we all agree on, and we can always change what we agree on. There has been much fear about the collapse of the economy, in our minds the economy is an entity that floats around, but is able to somehow control every aspect of our life. We think the economy will collapse and there will be no food or industry for instance, something many people over the course of the last month have voiced as one of their biggest concerns. But the economy does not control the material reality as directly as we imagine it to. The economy collapsing does not mean that land will collapse or suddenly the factories or the labor that we have will suddenly cease to exist. I understand that these processes are tied to a large global market, but again that doesn't mean that alternative structures cannot emerge, because the land will not suddenly disappear, the earth won't suddenly split open and swallow every #worker, #farmer, factory and piece of land. These boxes I spoke about earlier, or in some circles called discourses, make us create this curious relationship between the economy and our material reality and it seems very natural and logical to us, that we no longer question the relationship between them.

Before I conclude and end this somewhat tedious post, I want to discuss how one can spot the #counter-revolution through a few very simple questions and arguments that one can pose to themselves every time they hear the accusation of #counter-revolution and feel overwhelmed, confused or frustrated. Many people over the last few weeks have reached some sort of paralysis because they feel they do not know who or what to trust anymore, the following section is written with those people in mind. We all know the demands and goals of #Jan25 very well. They were hung in #Tahrir and a simple #Google search could fill you in if you've forgotten, these will not be reiterated here. So instead of searching for a hidden hand to the #counter-revolution, that will only serve to fuel your paranoia, I urge you to take the time to ask yourself a few of these questions to really figure out the difference between the #counter-revolution and #Jan25.

1. When we wait how does that ensure the meeting of the #Jan25 demands? Here you quickly remind yourself of all the times that people asked for waiting and if others had complied what would have changed?
2. Is this idea, action or event in essence really going to undermine #Jan25's demands? Such as #workers and #copts, remember true political representation is important for the true democracy that everyone is aspiring to.
3. The relationship between stability and love of Egypt, and revolution and destroying Egypt needs some specific questions to be posed to it: a) What do you mean by stability, b) what exactly is loving Egypt, who or what exactly are you loving when you say you love Egypt? c) how do you expect stability when you are exterminating 30+ years of corruption, oppression and violence? d) What is the price you are willing to pay when you call for stability? Who's neck are you putting under the guillotine when you are calling for stability? Will you be paying the price or will someone else?

The ideas of this post were theoretically influenced by Mitchell, Latour and Foucault and inspired by conversations with @bassemk, @sumayaholdijk, Dalia Abulfotuh and @3arabawy, and biased towards revolutionary ideologies and #anarchy