Although I have resisted writing about the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt on this blog, despite following them closely, I finally feel like I need to post something. Like many of my fellow bloggers and readers, I have been excitedly following these popular insurgencies. My misgivings about writing an analysis are generally a product of my contradictory feelings about these spontaneous and mass rebellions; I want to address these misgivings here.



On the one hand I cannot help but feel impressed and excited by the spectre of popular power. When the masses take the streets, after all, the limits of the state are exposed: we are shown that it is not the government apparatus and its special armed bodies, nor the market and its reified forces, that allow society to function; we are forced to admit that society is determined by the masses, and these masses greatly outnumber the ruling classes and their security forces.



On the other hand, I also cannot help but feel the pessimism that results from a proper historical and scientific analysis of spontaneity. No spontaneous uprising has succeeded without an organizational structure, however broadly understood, to give the authentic revolutionary sentiment of the masses an ideological focus and unity. I get annoyed with myself for feeling this pessimism, because in most cases I try to resist the knee-jerk reaction to think according to the logic of capitalism/imperialism. These are the limits of the end of history, socialized into us from birth, and we are taught to accept that there can be no rebellion, no rejection of the current state of affairs. Thus, I want to believe that these spontaneous explosions of mass revolutionary sentiment will possibly lead to revolution. I want to see spontaneity topple the state, to result in socialism.



The problem is that I often conflate revolutionary possibility with spontaneity. This is a common mistake, one that so many of us make in the imperial centres of world capitalism. When we see hundreds of thousands of people take the street in a short period of time we get over-excited, even in contexts when we should know better. We prefer the spectacle over the structured mass-line politics: we focus on these supposed insurrections rather than the Peoples Wars of places like Nepal that have led to larger mass movements and have gone farther, ideologically and practically, in revolution than large-scale street demonstrations.



And then there are those of us who desperately want to believe that spontaneity is revolution, regardless of the historical evidence. Why do we pretend that each spontaneous uprising will succeed against all evidence to the contrary? No unorganized and unplanned uprising has ever transformed into a revolutionary movement, let alone revolutionary overthrow, and yet so many of us in North America and Europe (yes, this is a very eurocentric phenomenon) desperately want to believe that a revolution can emerge from spectacular spontaneity, that people will self-organize and build radical organizations after the fact, and that revolution will emerge from people suddenly figuring out the correct ideology as they go. That they will remain in the streets, invent the focus and unity required to transform society, and resist all attempts by other sectors of the ruling classes to co-opt their revolutionary sentiment.



Even the Intifadas failed, and their spontaneous revolutionism was more organized and radical than the spontaneity in Egypt and Tunisia. And the first Intifada, which was more successful than the second, did have a level of organization missing in its successor––organization betrayed by Fatah and the Oslo Accords. Because Fatah possessed the structure to control the nascent Intifada organizations, after all, it could take control of them, focus them through its ideology, and use them for its petty bourgeois nationalist aims.



But Egypt and Tunisia are not the Palestinian Intifadas. At the beginning they possessed the embryonic potential of the Intifadas but they never reached the same level of organization. And now they are being claimed by other sectors of the ruling classes, and the mainstream international press can actually call ElBaradei, a liberal bourgeois aparatchik, a grass roots activist. But since when was a Nobel Peace Prize winner––who joins the ranks of notables such as Golda Meir and Henry Kissinger––automatically a grass roots activist? Since when is a man who shares the same class as Mubarak, separated only by his more liberal sentiments, a revolutionary? The masses possess revolutionary sentiment but, lacking organization, are open to being organized by other sectors of the ruling class who still possess the resources and structure to take advantage of the unleashed popular power.



This is not to say that these spontaneous explosions of popular power cannot accomplish anything worthwhile. Although there is always a danger that they can be co-opted by reactionary sectors of the ruling class, they can also be used to liberalize conservative states. If anything the mass rebellion in Tunisia and Egypt can prove that every reform, everything that humanizes capitalism/imperialism, emerges not because of philanthropic governments or free market forces but because of popular power. That is, all progressive changes come from some sort of revolutionary movement, however unfocused, on behalf of the people, not handed down from above. We must always remember, and these explosions help us remember, that everything that ameliorates the standard of living of the masses comes from the actions of the masses and not their exploiters. For the exploiters, if left unimpeded, would prefer to be Ben Alis and Mubaraks.



But those who argue that spontaneity is the automatic origin of revolution, and that organization will come after the fact, are utopic. They imagine that the messiness of human social relations will magically cohere into revolutionary order despite the fact that there is no precedent for this belief! And when you point this out, they argue that just because there is no precedent does not mean it won’t happen. Fair enough: maybe it will happen, and I always hope that it will––it would certainly be great if capitalism could fall because of mass demonstrations and socialism emerge, mystically, because people are essentially perfect. But this is a logical fallacy: it’s a bit like arguing that just because we haven’t discovered the sasquatch then we should believe that this is proof of the sasquatch’s existence. The onus of proof is not on the people who have good reason to not believe in the fable Big Foot, but in the people trying to argue for the Big Foot’s existence. So maybe spontaneity will work, and I would be super happy if it does, but you cannot argue that it is the basis of revolution when the onus of proof is on you to explain why it will work when judged against historical evidence.



Here in the centres of imperialism we tend to fetishize spontaneity, seeing it as synonymous with grass roots democracy. We like to imagine that there is no dialectic between spontaneity and discipline and that we do not have to work hard to create deep-seeded structures that will either build towards mass movements or be respected enough to swim amongst the spontaneous upsurges as, to crib from Mao, fish in the sea. There is a strength to spontaneous uprising, true, but as Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth, it also has its limits: it is good because it reveals the power of the masses but, by itself, can never be revolutionary and can easily be betrayed. And though there will be times when it leaves certain sectors of the ruling class behind, other sectors can step into the void and neutralize its revolutionary potential. As James Yaki Sayles points out in his gloss of Fanon's analysis of spontaneity:

"The spontaneous action sparks a widespread feeling of solidarity and accomplishment, as the people 'wills itself to sovereignty.' […] However, the enemy launches an all-out offensive (military, political and social), which calls the people's euphoria into question. […] Soon, the 'spontaneous impetuosity' is condemned to self-repudiation… Fanon now points again to the enemy's [infiltration] of spontaneity by taking advantage of the people's ideological and social weaknesses, and asserts that 'the political education of the masses is seen to be a social necessity.'" (Yaki Sayles, 236-237)

So I want to ask why we place all our hopes in those spectacles that, as courageous and important as they are, will at best only lead to reform rather than revolution. We must support the spontaneous rebellion––I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t––but I am just curious as to why we support these struggles at the expense of those struggles that have actually, with much struggle and hard work, cohered around a revolutionary ideology. Why does the left in North America and Europe, traditionally naval gazing and exceptionalist, embrace the spontaneism of the Tunisias and Egypts rather than the protracted revolutions––that also do have their spontaneist and chaotic elements––of Nepal or India? (Even the long involvement of the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy in the latter has not, for all her prestige, succeeded in making the radical struggles in India as popular as Tunisia and Egypt became within a couple weeks.)



Is it because we hope that spontaneity will succeed so that we, comfortable in the centres of capitalism, can finally reject every shred of previous historical evidence to properly believe that we do not have to do any serious organizational work? Or is it because the Egypts and Tunisias fit our eurocentric understanding of proper rebellion: they look like more violent versions of the May 68-ish uprisings always fashionable in Europe, after all. They fit today’s radical chic vocabulary far better than those scary long marches towards revolutions we would prefer to ignore. And though in some ways the spontaneous spectacles feed our desire to witness large-scale uprisings––and though we should still celebrate these uprisings––they ultimately reconfirm that capitalism is the end of history, something maybe we're socialized to accept, by failing to go beyond reform.