Eight years after the Egyptian 25 January uprising it is hard to fathom that a mass movement from below defied the seemingly all-powerful security apparatus, leading to a crisis of the historical bloc. The popular committees, the ‘Republic of Tahrir’, and the budding trade unions, which emerged and grew ‘spontaneously’ throughout the revolutionary process, developed from instruments of emancipation from state power to prefigurations of alternative, more egalitarian and inclusive forms of society. Against the revolutionary tide counter-revolutionary forces used different tactics and strategies to undermine, deflect, and eventually destroy their grassroots democratic and self-organizing aspirations and structures. In this paper, Brecht De Smet deploys Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution as a criterion to interpret the process of counter-revolution. He pays attention to the counter-revolutionary repertoire - the minotauresque combination of force and consent, the use of formal democratic procedures, the shifts in state alliances, etc. – and the organizational and theoretical weakness of revolutionary groups to explain the success of regime restoration since 2013. 

Brecht De Smet is a senior postdoctoral assistant at the department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, where he teaches Politics of Development and Contemporary Politics of the Middle East. As a fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Research Group De Smet has been investigating protest movements and class struggle dynamics in Egypt and beyond. His key publications are A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt (Brill 2015; Haymarket 2016) and Gramsci on Tahrir (Pluto 2016).

John Chalcraft is Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government at LSE and leads the Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Netwrok. 

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