I wouldn’t use the word ‘mistake’ in the title; as the writer elaborates in the article, it was rather a weakness that stems of the absence of a well-organised revolutionary organisation. In fact, insurrection stopped short of taking the levers of powers. There was not an open general strike to pose the question of power.
“Despite the revolutionaries’ battlefield triumph, little was achieved at the structural level in the centuries-long popular fight against the police state.
Unlike what happened with the Stasi in East Germany after the 1989 revolution, Egyptians still know very little about the SSI [the State Security Investigation Service].
The problem for those rebelling against Egypt’s police state was primarily their limited capacity—as well as lack of a strategy and the necessary political imagination.
The liberal human rights discourse also reduced the police state to a problem of its repression and illegality, preventing a deeper understanding of its constructive role, its social foundations and its social functions as the main player in the daily governance of Egypt and the constitution of Egyptian society—the governmentalization of the police state.”
Does that mean that the police state has replaced exploitation and class oppression as ‘the main player in the daily governance of Egypt’? I would say no because the police state represents a class and it is not the opposite.
Furthermore, unlike East Germany, Egypt has a middle class that its support, passivity or opposition to the police state plays a very important role in change or maintaining the status quo of class oppression.
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