Totalitarian Democracy

The cover of the current issue of Time Magazine labels Egyptians as ‘the world’s best protestors’ and ‘the world’s worst democrats’. The startling ignorance of this cover highlights a fundamental question that is not – in the current climate of frenzied analyses of Egypt – being asked:

Is it more democratic to elect a fascist ruler or to topple one?

‘Democracy’ alone was never a fundamental demand of the Egyptian Revolution. Bread, freedom and social justice: these are the demands of the revolution. Freedom. Not representative democracy. Freedom. People were killed in their hundreds for freedom, not for a ballot slip. Morsi was elected because he was the lesser of two evils. He stood in Tahrir and promised he could deliver the goals of the revolution. And he imprisoned and raped and tortured and killed his citizens like every government before him. And now he has fallen.

Democracy – which at the very least would mean an independent judiciary, citizen rights, freedom of the press and transparent elections - will not be won in Egypt through elections because there is a historical and geographical context that determines what is and isn’t possible through the ballot box alone.

The current state structure within which Egypt operates is based on layers of colonial and military history, each layer building on the last to obscure the state and place it above – and separate from - the people. Mehmed Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1841, introducing private land ownership, dividing up agricultural territory into private estates. He created Egypt’s bureaucracy and the first modern army in the region. This became the cornerstone of Egyptian nationalism[1], the expression of which reached its visual apex last week when army helicopters showered Tahrir with Egyptian flags. The French destroyed, redesigned and rebuilt villages to create, codify and entrench class strata[2]. The British centralized gubernatorial and mayoral appointments under the Ministry of the Interior[3]. Nasser and the Free Officers created a massive security apparatus to watch over their “revolution from above” and placed generals in key state positions. Sadat’s rapid and unregulated infitah opened up the country to outside investment, creating a new class of business elites who matured comfortably into the crony capitalists of the Mubarak years. Mubarak massively expanded the police state, removing direct power from the Army but pacified ranking generals with a system of “loyalty allowances”, offering them retirement possibilities in lucrative state positions – such as gubernatorial appointments - in return for their allegiance[4]. And so the circle closes. By 2011, 200 years of successive policies designed to centralize and concentrate power and suppress political possibility had evolved into an impenetrable, unaccountable and unchallengeable cycle of money and influence that circulated between a handful of key institutions, soldiers and businessmen closest to the ruling family.

How could democracy – when proposed by this ancient totalitarian machine of the deep state - arrive neatly with the ballot boxes nine months later?

Beyond the deep state stands the international regime. Just as Egypt’s economic, military and social structures were forged by colonial schema of oppression, so its position within the “international community” of wealthy countries and corporations is confined to one of neo-colonial subjugation and collusion.

Three brief examples:

One: as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt became the second largest beneficiary of US military aid in the world. Vast sums poured into the Egyptian military’s budget in exchange for peace with Israel, the repression of the Palestinians and keeping the Suez Canal open for business. In 2005, the Mubarak government began selling natural gas to Israel, supplying it with 30% of its total fuel needs at below market rates. This continued until last year, when the deal was suspended under intense popular pressure. Also in 2012, Egypt began importing natural gas for the first time to meet a domestic demand that is rising. That demand is so heavily subsidized that it consumes 25% of the national budget. But 93% of it is consumed by the richest fifth of the population. So the state is currently spending more than it does on health and education combined on subsidizing the rich’s fuel. And has racked up $5bn of debt to at least 42 different oil and gas companies and up to $15bn to banks and other ministries in the process. So Egypt is now out of cash for imports and domestic alternatives are needed. Enter Dana Gas, a UAE company now fracking in the Nile Valley, a possible side-effect of which could be the poisoning of the river. 98% of Egyptians live alongside the Nile and depend on its water, which is already so polluted that the rich now drink bottled water produced by Coca Cola (Dasani) or Pepsi (Aquafina) or the Army (Safi), allowing the government to ignore the issue. Meanwhile Ethiopia presses ahead with its Renaissance Dam project whose as yet unknown effects on her upstream neighbours have been the source of such a hysterical public outcry that Ethiopia became Egypt’s main security concern in Morsi’s final, US-approved months in office. Instead of Israel.

Two: Sinai. A mountainous peninsula that lies between the two key US-Egyptian ‘security concerns’: the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip. Its coastline was developed for tourism by the Israelis when they occupied it in 1967. In 1982 the military occupation was handed over to the Egyptians, who opened the door to international investment but marginalized the indigenous Bedouins; denying them land rights even as they watched foreign companies build towns and luxury hotel complexes for European tourists. The southern coastline and historical sites are now key drivers of tourism, but only a fraction of the money they bring in goes back into either the community or the state, with everything up to and including airport licenses dominated by foreign companies. Industrial development plans fail because they gloss over the Bedouin’s grievances and continue to pursue the state’s preferred military-capitalist model.[5] ‘Security’ will never be achievable as long as the siege of Gaza continues, the tunnel economy flourishes and the gas pipeline to Israel exists. But to address any of these issues would mean the end of American military aid. And from this Catch-22 a new idea has emerged, whose idiocy is only matched by its $4bn price tag: to build a bridge to Saudi Arabia. To make an environmentally disastrous land-crossing between the most volatile region of the most populous country in the Arab world and the petroleum-fuelled evangelical heartland of extremist Wahhabi ideology.

Three: wheat. Egypt is blessed with fertile land, regular irrigation water and limitless sun. Until the end of the Ottoman era Egypt was a net exporter of food and textiles. Mehmed Ali divided the territory into private landholdings before the British colonists shifted crop production towards cotton to feed the Manchester mills driving their industrial revolution. By 1914 cotton accounted for 92% of the total value of Egyptian exports. Nasser’s attempts at land reform were curtailed by Sadat, and with the capitalist boom of the 1970s the wealthier classes began eating more meat, domestic crops were diverted to feed livestock and an import-dependency on USAID began to “feed the poor” whose bread was now being eaten by the rich’s cows.[6] And so, today, Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat and lives permanently on the edge of a food crisis. To try and stave off a repeat of the 1977 Bread Riots the state underwrites a vast, inefficient and corrupt subsidy system while continuing to divert domestic production away from staple foods towards export crops to produce hard currency to service interest payments on international loans taken out to buy grain in the first place. And if Egypt’s $38.8bn debt wasn’t burdensome enough, successive post-revolution governments continue to hold talks with the IMF in the hope of securing a $4.8bn loan, whose approval would require further “structural adjustments” towards export crops, such as cut flowers, for European markets. And so the circle closes.

The elite domestic and international regimes have created a matrix of corruption, control and inequality that cuts through every aspect of Egyptian life. The ballot box would not have given any new president the authority or the power to seriously tackle any one of these issues. 

Egypt had elections, but nothing else. Elections can be a tool - one of the tools through which social change can be attempted. They can also be a very strong sedative. The decrease in voter turnout in Egypt from 53% for the parliamentary elections in November 2011 to 33% for the constitutional referendum in November 2012 shows that the form of democracy required is much more radical than what’s on offer.

The spreading of democracy by the USA and her allies has always been inextricably bound up with the liberalization of markets. Democracy, for recipients of US attention in the global south, means free market capitalism. The concepts are interchangeable, as they were when the British were blessing the world with ‘civilization’. Egyptians have spent the last ten years watching democracy gloriously spreading over the mountains of Afghanistan and into the oil wells of Iraq. And when the Obama administration had ensured that the Muslim Brotherhood would keep the country open for business and not make any moves against Israel, the ballot box acquired its sanctimonious glow here too.

So, Time Magazine, and all you other fading giants of yesterday’s media, being a “democrat” was never a choice for Egyptians. You don’t just wake up and choose whether or not you live in a democracy.

Morsi’s winning of the presidential elections gave him a degree of legitimacy. But legitimacy without consent is meaningless and the Muslim Brotherhood did such a disastrous job of governing that consent was lost within a year. Morsi made specific electoral promises - not just to the electorate but to most formal revolutionary and secular groups - to build a coalition government led by a non-partisan figure, to write a consensus-based constitution and to make legislative reforms of the state. Then his cabinet of choice (mostly made up of weak, Mubarak-era bureaucrats and Brotherhood members) refused to cooperate with civil society on labour issues, police reform, anti-torture work, the economy or energy – all issues on which human rights groups, activists and development NGOs offered their services and expertise - and were shunned. So when, after a year, people felt that their lives were continuing to worsen, Egyptians took to the streets in their millions – a revolutionary act that also, since it keeps coming up, happened to be profoundly democratic. The Tamarrod movement was, in essence, a recall vote – something that might have been worked into the new constitution if Egyptians had been truly involved in the writing of it.

As the great Howard Zinn wrote: “protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” The whole world is lecturing Egypt about democracy; but commentators should realise that by narrowing the idea to fit their preferred analysis they are undermining their own future freedoms.

Bread, freedom, social justice. It is possible. The solution, though, is not simply representative democracy. Egypt requires, at the very least, a radical overhaul of the state, the dismantling of the military’s supra-state, the democratization and decentralization of local politics, extensive land reforms, cooperative partnerships with neighboring countries, a progressive policy on Israel and a completely new set of international political and business relationships that begins with cancelling the debt accrued dishonestly by dictators. These goals will never be achieved by any of the corrupt and compromised elite currently playing politics at the national level. These goals cannot be achieved in isolation – the domestic and international regime are so intertwined that everything has to be fought at once. The Egyptian revolution will must couple with the revolutions that began across the world in 2011 and are still kicking and fighting today. The road ahead is long and hard. The revolution continues.

An edited, shorter, version of this piece first appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday July 17^th

^{This version appeared on Mada Masr on Thursday July 18th}

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[1] Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men (AUC Press, 2002)

[2] Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (University of California Press, 1991)

[3] Aaron Jakes, The Severed Branches of Local Government (Cairobserver, 2012)

[4] Yazid Sayegh, Above the State (Carnegie Middle East Centre, 2012)

[5] Ministry of Planning & International Cooperation, The Prospects and Challenges of Sinai’s Development, January 2013

[6] See Timothy Mitchell, America’s Egypt (MERIP 169, 1991)

Beyond Tahrir

This piece was written for the magazine, The Middle East in London, about two weeks before the government erased the graffiti on Muhammad Mahmoud st. 

Muhammad Mahmoud Street is one of the ten roads that feed into Tahrir Square.  It is home to the beautiful old campus of the American University in Cairo and, therefore, to the all the most expensive cafes in Downtown Cairo.  It was also the theatre for the biggest street battle in Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.  Over five freezing nights in November the police killed more than 70 people and Tahrir transformed itself into an enormous field hospital.  Now, Egypt’s newly emerged graffiti artists have converged to make the long unbroken walls of the street sing with beautiful, heartbreaking, ever-changing murals.  Pharaonic figures spelling out timeless lessons for good governance make way for a fallen sheikh’s guiding hands and Christian angel’s wings, while huge Islamic calligraphy curls up and around the faces of the overwhelmingly young, smiling martyrs and down again to angrily sprayed stencils calling for freedom for the imprisoned and justice for the dead.

This is where I come when I need reminding that our strength comes from the combination of countless small, individual contributions to the collective cause.  Here is where I know that the revolution is more than street protests, more than battles with the police, more than the presidency, more than American foreign policy.  Here I know that the revolution is, in the end, about the pent-up beauty that’s been released into this country.

It is both an obvious and a very difficult lesson to learn.  But, to be successful, the revolution has to constantly remember it, has to be both mass street protests and smaller, personal acts of protest.  The unionizing nurse, the striking worker. The two nourish each other, push each other forward.

We forced the removal of Mubarak by taking and holding Tahrir for 18 days.  But Tahrir then was a mortally contested space.  The entire police force was defeated in the winning of it.  Now it has become a space ‘allowed’ to the revolution.  Much like a protest march in London has its route and territory marked out by the police, Tahrir has – to a lesser extent – become an accepted area for congregation.  It is when venturing outside it that the inevitable confrontations with the police and the military flare up; it is outside that the boundaries that need testing now lie.  The Ministry of the Interior, the State Radio and Television Building, the Ministry of Defence. These are the black sites of recent and future bloodshed.  These are the houses of power, the new challenges that the young unarmed men and women of the revolution are drawn towards now.

Can you take the State TV building without a hundred thousand people pushing at the barbed wire that surrounds it?  Will the machine-gunners on the first floor open fire on women and children chanting selmeyya (peaceful)?  Maybe we won’t have to find out.  Maybe, with our elected civilian president, words will no longer be met with bullets.  We have entered the third stage of our Revolution.  And it is true that we have won many victories.  We still can’t believe this history that we’re living through, that we’re making.  But we’re also still living in a police state whose land and major assets are controlled by the military and a neo-liberal business elite who are subservient to American and Israeli interests.  The police just shot and paralyzed a seventeen-year old boy in a train station for singing an Ultras song.  We have a long way to go.  At times it feels impossible.  And at those times I go down to Muhammad Mahmoud Street.

Say 'No' to Infantilization!

Whenever possible I will try and balance the broader posts with small, practical steps that individuals or communities can take.

So, your domestic cinema is being subsumed by Harry Potter and Saw films. What can we do?

Be discerning. Choose where you spend your money carefully.

In Egypt we should boycott films that want to infantalize you. What would be left to watch, I hear you cry. Fair point. So we need to change what's on offer. So next time there's some incredible Brazilian film that's got amazing reviews and is clearly never going to be screened, talk to the cinema, question their decision. Write an email, make a phone call. From newspapers to governments to primary schools - a handful of letters can be incredibly persuasive. We don't have to be passive consumers that chew through whatever is dumped in front of us.

Start a Facebook group insisting X film is distributed in your country. Name the people that can make the decisions, publish their email addresses. Old-guard capitalists are terrified of Facebook - they still don't really know what it is. Say you're going to launch a vicious Twitter campaign you could probably get them to play an extended run of Waterworld. Do it quickly, before the world finally realises that it wasn't actually the Gods of Social Media that we have to thank for our revolutions.

The cinema exhibitor, generally, has no ideological agenda - they exist to sell popcorn. That's where they make their money (American audiences enjoy a 600% mark-up). So they are malleable.

If you're in Europe / America etc - don't just go and see the Hangover 5 and stew in self-loathing. You are actively participating in the destruction of your own cultural fabric. Your vote basically counts for shit if you're not in Ohio so at least make your money count. If you think cinema is in a fine state, then ignore me. But take note that 2011 will see Hollywood release 27 sequels - that's one fifth of the films getting a wide release this year. Merde, surely?

If you really really need to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland just download it. You need this application and then you can get the film. That film looked like a bland nightmare in 3D but it grossed over $1bn - roughly the GDP of Djibouti.

These actions are all small and relatively obvious. But that's the point. The real action is a mental shift. For too long we have thought that we don't have a choice about what is on our screens. But through small, concentrated actions and the building of a community consciousness we can change the way the cinemas work. We have to re-imagine ourselves as constructive partners in a cultural process rather than mindless consumers of unhealthy spectacle.

Now, if you're thinking this is all elitist crap written by someone who does his writing in English then it is, in fact, you that's the elitist. If you think that modern mass culture is what the masses really want then you weren't paying attention from January 25th to February 11th. Yes, entertainment has a role to play - but if we don't have the freedom of choice it is a cultural slavery.

Anything less than firm resistance to the prolonged attack on our sensibilities we have endured for so long would be counter-revolutionary.

Regulators, Mount Up

This piece was published in Arabic in al Shorouk newspaper.

As the Egyptian Revolution rolls into the challenging months of reconstructing a society, everyone is working on their areas of expertise, trying to do their bit.

I’m currently in Palestine, preparing to shoot a short fiction film. But my thoughts are always on Egypt, and the work we can be doing to strengthen the film industry there. So I thought maybe it would be useful if I started writing some of them out.

I'm thinking about Egypt specifically, but the challenges that the mass culture that has dominated the last century poses to film-makers are the same across the world. Basically: how do you make new and relevant cinema when the means of production are tied up in a globalized industry that is almost entirely bent to Hollywood’s will?

I'm going to try and keep these blog posts short and focussed - it's a massive question.

Think of a film as having four phases: conception, production, distribution and consumption. They are all part of an interconnected cycle - you make better films, you sell more tickets, you spend more on the next one, your films get better, even more people buy tickets etc.

But we need to start somewhere, so let's start with consumption.

Assuming we're not going to break the global capitalist model this year, there are numbers to be crunched.

General wisdom among Hollywood studios is that an American film that gets a broad international release can expect 50% of its total gross to be earned domestically. The entire ‘Middle East’ usually pulls in 2%. For a region with 380 million people in it, that equates to a write-off. And that’s for a Hollywood film, with a distribution company with a significant marketing and advertising budget.

Official Egyptian numbers are hard to get hold of. There are around 200 cinemas in Egypt, domestic production hit 25 films last year. 103 foreign films were released, grossing a combined total of around $13m. For a country that likes to claim it has the third largest industry behind America and India (it isn't) these are pitiful figures. And that's before we look at the quality of the films.

In recent years, the Egyptian film industry has become little more than a production line of sentimental comedies and overwrought dramas. Symptomatic of Egypt's rapid embrace of neoliberal policies, production and distribution were controlled by a handful of major players who made a comfortable profit churning out crap. And though Egypt was apparently 'open for business' the administrative quagmire (closely linked to corruption) of doing anything in the country drove away foreign productions (only 36% of films with scenes set in Egypt actually shot them there). The result is a film industry that wholly embraced the idiocy of mass entertainment, while driving away it's two traditional temptations: technical skills and employment. A piece of mass entertainment stripped of even any technical value really is a sorry product. When Hollywood is selling you crap, they at least pay for it to look good. Not so in Egypt.

And so to rebuilding. We need to rebuild the infrastructure of exhibition and consumption. We need more cinemas, we need cheaper tickets, we need some independent cinemas. There are clear ways in which businesspeople and artists can work together on this. But the government also has a key part to play (as long as we're on course for a glorious new one).

The French film industry is probably the strongest in the world. There are several reasons, but a key one is government protectionism and redistribution of a percentage of ticket sales to production. The government regulates what percentage of screens have to be reserved for French films. It also doesn't allow for any films to be advertized on television - which levels the playing field tremendously. The result – 31 of the top grossing films in France of 2010 were French productions and brought in over $300m to the national economy.

The UK has no such regulation and in 2010 only six fully domestic productions squeezed in to the year’s top 100, grossing a miserable $38m from a total public outlay of $1.68b on cinema tickets. A truly lousy situation for British film.

So the good news, for Egypt, for the Arab world, is that Hollywood just isn't interested in us. At 2% of potential gross we are not worth the hassle and distribution of most major American films is run through one Lebanese company. So, unlike in so many other spheres of economic life in Egypt, we are relatively autonomous when it comes to cinema. As a start point, this is a great advantage.

There are various things we can be doing, but let's start with the government.

Regulation and redistribution are one aspect of what's needed to give the industry the window it needs to start producing relevant, accomplished and technically sophisticated films. It was starting before the revolution, with a new independent film scene on the rise. If it was decreed that 50% of films shown must to be Egyptian productions, and 10% of those films must be independent, that would be a good start. And if 10% of the ticket price was recycled back into the national infrastructure, then you could start rehabilitating the rotting national archive, rejuvenating the cinema school, setting up a film commission, getting people trained with the necessary technical skills.

Similarly, we should consider how advertising can be controlled. A tiered structure, with foreign films with large budgets either paying more of having their airtime limited should be considered.

And so with a few very simple pieces of regulation the government can take concrete steps to ensuring there is a protected space in which a new industry can be built. A new industry that not only makes films that sell well, but is given the time and space to develop the confidence to produce films that are really Egyptian, films that find new forms and speak to a national aesthetic.

Japan, for example, doesn’t have such government regulation, but still produces and consumes a lot of it’s own cinema. 55 of 2010’s top films in Japan were Japanese, contributing over $1.1b to the economy. While the American share of the market is still enormous, the rise of anime has been at the forefront of a cinematic resurgence that is is new and exciting and attuned to cultural aesthetics and, therefore, finds strong domestic audiences.

A healthy film industry obviously doesn't hinge entirely on government regulation. But, as we push forward into our new future, regulation is necessary. The artistic and the economic challenges go hand in hand, and if we're to stand a chance of developing cinematic forms that are truly the product of the aesthetics, forms and philosophies of the country then we need to take on both at the same time.

Otherwise this will continue to be the best thing on television: