The Egyptian Counterrevolution

Despite the best efforts of Egypt’s elite, the struggle for democracy has not been extinguished.

"It’s important when discussing counterrevolution to understand what exactly we are talking about. The role played by the Muslim Brotherhood towards the Egyptian Revolution was one of betrayal, was a classical betrayal by a reformist, non-revolutionary movement. It attempted to broker a deal with the old regime to get a place at the table and to share power with the old regime. Yet it failed to do so.

The Muslim Brotherhood was not a central part of the counterrevolution. You could say that it was understandably the first beneficiary of the revolution, in the sense that it was the first freely elected political force that came to power — in formal terms, at least — in the wake of the revolution.

But it was also the first victim of the counterrevolution. It’s important to understand this because some people blithely talk about “two wings” of the counterrevolution — the Muslim Brotherhood being the religious wing and the army being the military wing — as if this was a fight between two sides of a counterrevolution.

This is an extremely reductionist view of the process of revolution and counterrevolution. People did not go out and vote in the millions for the Muslim Brotherhood because they were voting for a counterrevolution. No, they voted for the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out the demands of the revolution. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood betrayed the revolution that we begin to see a movement against them.

The Brotherhood lost support because first, it generally continued the policies of the Mubarak regime, particularly neoliberalism; second, it refused to carry out any serious investigations into the military’s role in the violence during the revolutionary upsurge; third, it refused to try the police brass for their role in the deaths of Egyptian revolutionaries; and fourth, it refused to change Egyptian foreign policy with respect to the US and Israel."