Mural depicting ousted President Mubarak, right, and President Morsi, left, that reads "before the revolution, let them be amused, after the revolution, let them be paralyzed."Nasser Nasser/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The mass protests that erupted in Egypt in 2011, and their aftermath, were dubbed 'a revolution' by both opponents and proponents.
The label, on the one hand, has been used to discredit the protests; described as a destructive force that is the reason for the abysmal state of the Egyptian economy. On the other hand, the same label has also been used to romanticize the struggle against the Mubarak regime and its successors.
A more sober examination of the nature of these events renders a different picture. It places the upheaval within a reformist rather than revolutionary realm that had aimed to pave the way for the development of Egyptian capitalism beyond the cronyism that had plagued it for several decades. However, a distinction needs to be made between social and political revolutions in order to identify the position of Egyptian mass protests either within this continuum or outside it altogether.
