Counterrevolution and Counterrevolutionary Rehearsals Today

As this review goes to print, leftist activist and popular intellectual Alaa Abd el-Fattah is in a critical state as his hunger strike of over one hundred days continues against the conditions of his detention within the walls of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s prisons. “Have we seen treason uglier than that committed in hope’s name?” wrote Alaa (as he is known) and prison- mate Ahmad Douma from Torah Prison’s Ward A.¹Alaa Abd el-Fattah, and Ahmad Douma, “Graffiti for Two,” in You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, Selected Works 2011–2021, trans. Collective (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022), 169. Published in 2014, this haunting question and many of Alaa’s wider writings contain attempts to theorize counterrevolution from the standpoint of its victims and from within its prison cells.

Alaa and Douma probe the most disconcerting, if not surprising, characteristic of counterrevolutions: their popularity—and the corresponding “hopes” they compel in false exits, treacherous leaders, and chimerical rehabilitations of the past. Popular memories of the Egyptian developmentalist state and the officer core at its helm were certainly reactivated—and distorted—when then-General Sisi deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s democratically elected government and its president, Mohamed Morsi.

The regime’s repressive efforts are less camouflaged today in Sudan, where the country’s armed apparatus led by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan stands against the street and is openly backed by the US-sponsored Egyptian state and Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council. Despite their recent dominance, the popular and international components of counter-revolution most dramatically underline the phenomenon’s built and contingent character.

It’s here that the invaluable new book, The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East by Jamie Allinson, intervenes. For Allinson, cofounder of Salvage magazine, revolutions do not fail passively. They are defeated by counterrevolutions. And the consequences of defeat are catastrophic: the deaths of over three hundred and seventy thousand people in Yemen, the displacement of millions in Syria as well as almost half a million deaths, the fracturing of Libya, the mass imprisonment of activists and protestors across the region. In the study of counter-revolutionary projects, there is a wager that grasping their architectures can help bring about their reversal.

Allinson examines the revolutionary uprisings of late 2010 that swept Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya in a matter of months. Each of these countries, he explains, experienced a revolutionary situation resulting from a mass uprising which split state authority between two competing blocs. At one end, this contest witnessed popular, collective experimentation in recomposing social relations at the grassroots. At the other, ruling classes had to find new ways of ruling when neither they nor the masses could go on with the old.

Ending this competition and those grassroots experiments in favor of ancien regimes of one stripe or another was the task of counter-revolution. For the latter to prevail, its leaders had to organize and execute projects from above, from below, and internationally, from without—their concrete configurations and developments contributing to three different trajectories explored in the book. Between unsteady, varied permutations of political revolution and counterrevolution in Tunisia and Egypt, militarized counterrevolution in Syria and Bahrain, or the state collapse of Libya and Yemen, maneuvers from embattled rulers, popular support, and external intervention all interacted to produce counterrevolution across the region.

Allinson’s book intervenes in debates about these revolutions which began just as the revolutions did. He argues that many assumptions about revolution and counterrevolution are too rooted in the twentieth century to make sense of the present. This made it easy for some to underestimate what democratic victories would require from popular movements and others to mistake where reaction against such a threat would be organized.

Allinson argues that the success of the late-twentieth century “liberal revolutions,” which isolated political revolution from its deeper social counterpart, demanded “a historically peculiar habitable zone: one in which powerful working class movements and their allies faced post-agrarian ruling classes.”²Jamie Allinson, The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 20. The latter’s landed predecessors, who could not rely on impersonal power and viciously resisted democratic transitions of any kind, were neutralized with the bourgeois revolutions of the twentieth century (Bahrain’s Khalifa monarchy being an exception). The political retreat of this class, however, did not mean the same for counterrevolution, which merely found different class fractions to play the part.

When the next revolutionary upsurge arrived—with more embattled industrial components—in late 2010, counterrevolution found its social and ideological base in the legacy of developmentalist regimes. Allinson draws here extensively on Sara Salem’s concept of their “afterlives,” finding its purchase in Egypt’s Nasserist state, Muammar Gaddafi’s jamahiriya, Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, Yemen’s Northern predecessor, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), as well as Tunisia’s Bourguibist legacy. When these afterlives were of insufficient weight, as in Syria, or largely absent, as in the case of Bahrain, counter-revolution demanded the more direct role of external intervention.

Therefore, embattled ruling classes carried with them foreign rearguards (for example, the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the Gulf Cooperation Council), which took over some extreme functions of bygone landed classes. As a result, social and political revolution in the region today cannot be separated from one another; attempts to do so produce, as seen in the period in question, not revolution but counterrevolution.

Allinson reminds readers that the dense map of civil war, which emerged particularly in Syria but elsewhere too, in Libya and Yemen, is historically consistent with revolutionary situations, rather than an exception of recent times. In building a theory of foreign counterrevolutionary interference, Allinson leans on arguments developed in International Relations. These claim that revolutions threaten sovereignties both within and beyond their borders, the developments of which have implications for interstate competition as well as, of course, for the existence of states themselves.

But because these are not just any states but capitalist states, their counterrevolutionary projects could perhaps be elaborated further with more explicit help from Marx. Foreign counterrevolutionary intervention is a dramatic confirmation of two important ideas about the social relations and processes that “capital” denotes. The first is that the continuity of capitalist social relations demands continuous reserves of “force” and “means of violence,” for the simple reason that private property does not defend itself.³Colin Barker, “Value, Force, Many States and Other Problems: Part 1” rs21, May 10, 2019.

The second is the relatively recent thesis that capital is a social relation dependent upon the existence of not just one capitalist state, but many.⁴Colin Barker, “A Note on the Theory of Capitalist States,” Capital & Class 2 (1978): 118–26. Capitals are co-constitutive of one another via competition, as they are with the competitive state forms to which they give rise. This more fully captures the calamitous and reified contest of foreign intervention named in the book as well as the similarly competitive (and lucrative) nature of repression between domestic state apparatuses, which Allinson insightfully observes elsewhere.⁵Jamie Allinson, “US Empire and Autocracy in the Middle East,” Haymarket Books, May 24, 2022, video, 1:27:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf30lzByj9c.