Moreover, the coup of 2013, and the subsequent overt dominance of the military over the state apparatus and its direct control over the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, has not only allowed it to dramatically expand its economic activities, but most importantly, to dictate the process of capital accumulation. Hence, any attempts to reduce the power of the state over society, will necessarily entail a drastic change in the process of capital accumulation. Thus, the question of democratizing the Egyptian state does not only refer to political liberalization, but also involve a structural economic change, where the power of the state to appropriate public funds would be curtailed and alternative centre of economic power would emerge.
Hence, besides questions of political freedom, the question of the role of the state in Egypt, in its essence, revolves around wealth distribution and access to economic resources, from which the majority of Egyptians are excluded.
The state is able to preserve its position as the dominant social force, and manage class conflict, through a twin process of ideological domination, and outright repression. The Egyptian state, very similar to other modern states, serves to mystify social relations in a manner that submerges class-consciousness in favour of individual and national consciousness. In other words, the state serves to strip the exploited classes of their class identity, replacing it with an idea of “Egyptianess”, which is deeply connected to patriotism, as embodied in the state.
However, this has a local twist, deeply entrenched in the state’s ideology through Nasserism. Simply put, Nasserism saw the nation as an military-led organic whole, without classes, united in a patriotic struggle against an “other”. The nation, as embodied in the state, had become a mystical fetish, which needs to be served at the expense of the citizenry. Under president Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, this narrative has been pushed to an extreme, with the propagation of conspiracy theories, as well as propaganda films and TV series produced by the military, and by the general political climate.
Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, and members of the secular opposition are seen as outside the nation, hence the only way to deal with them is through repression. This pattern already started with the massacre of Muslim Brotherhood protesters at Raba’a, and has continued unabated, ever since.
Does this mean that the state is an impregnable fortress immune to the broader social struggle? On the contrary, one can argue that millions from the exploited classes are operating the state apparatus, either in administrative functions or even as members of its repressive arm. Hence, in cases of heightened social conflict, and greater level of class-consciousness, there is an increased possibility of carrying class conflict into the heart of the state itself. This would hamper the ability of the state to repress possible uprising.
This, however, does not mean that the state can be transformed from the inside, rather that in cases of revolutionary upheaval, the state apparatus can be dismantled to be replaced by other institutions that emerged from society, rather than superimposed on it. Hence, the key to achieve this, is breaking the ideological hold that the state has over the mass of the citizenry, and drastically changing the view of the state, as a source of social good, to a source of economic exploitation and political repression.