What the Secretary-General Said…

…about “political clocks” not running backwards applies in spades when the times are revolutionary. In fact, in such times, this is a necessary law of historical dialectics. The law applies precisely to the counter-revolutionary moments (in the sense of turnings, as of a pendulum) that follow moments of revolutionary synthesis.

The Brotherhood’s revolution represented such a synthesis. It stood as an endpoint of the actions of all the revolutionary parties of the Arab Spring in Egypt when it achieved fundamental, thus revolutionary, change in the state. But the Brotherhood’s grasp of the state apparatus never grew strong, and at the same time, its basis as a revolution of the whole people grew narrower. The resulting contradictions – on the one side between the Brotherhood and the pre- or counter-revolutionary state apparatus, and on the other side between them and the secular/liberal revolutionists – created a new synthesis, and this was the lever El Sissi pulled.

The lever the Brotherhood pulled in the first place, the lever that came into existence in Tahrir Square, doesn’t exist anymore. Perforce it can’t be pulled again. That is, as the Secretary-General says, in politics you can’t go backwards.

The Brotherhood did not pause at disbelief before going over to anger, and they would do well to move on to acceptance equally quickly. Staying with anger will not restore the former situation. They need a new synthesis, and they can’t do it by holding onto old contradictions with elements that will only become more opposed the longer opposition is kept up. They’re already in danger of being outlawed again.  

Frankly, the longer the Brotherhood stays in the past and fails to seek a new revolutionary synthesis, the surer the success of the counter-revolution.

The Counter-Revolution Puts Forth Its Strength

One of the things you can say about counter-revolutions is that they are often bloodier than revolutions. A spike in the effusion of human blood is almost always a sign that the counter-revolution is putting forth its strength. And that’s just because the strength of the reaction normally consists in control over armed elements of the former, pre-revolutionary state.

When this sort of thing starts happening, any revolutionary elements the counter-revolution happens to be aligned with for the time being start to look like a front, a puppet, a dupe, a tool, or an accomplice. What they as individuals actually are depends on their own subjective relations with the forces of reaction, and on the kinds and degree of objective control the latter exercises over them. All this can play out in many ways, but for now, in Egypt, the police, the military, and the courts are the players, not the interim executive, nor the disbanded legislature.

Did I say they were dupes? The reaction didn’t dupe El Baradei for long. And now that they’ve entered on the path for freeing Mubarak altogether, nobody can be fooled any longer. Only the tools and accomplices are left.

Look for the counter-revolution to assume a face. It’s a little early yet, but if it does, it will already be too late for the revolution, because that will be the face of the next strongman.