Mubarak’s Folly: The Rising of Egypt’s Workers
By David McNally
Rarely do our rulers look more absurd than when faced with a popular
upheaval. As fear and apathy are broken, ordinary people – housewives,
students, sanitation workers, the unemployed –remake themselves. Having
been objects of history, they become its agents. Marching in their
millions, reclaiming public space, attending meetings and debating their
society’s future, they discover in themselves capacities for
organization and action they had never imagined. They arrest secret
police, defend their communities and their rallies, organize the
distribution of food, water and medical supplies. Exhilarated by new
solidarities and empowered by the understanding that they are making
history, they shed old habits of deference and passivity.
It is this – the self-transformation of oppressed people – that
elites can never grasp. That is what explains the truly delusional
character of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s speech on Thursday,
February 10, where he prattled on in surreal disconnection from events.
But while the aging dictator may be uniquely out of touch, he merely
reflects the biases of his class. For it is a general characteristic of
our rulers that they imagine those below them to be inherently stupid
and deferential. They treat the downtrodden as laboring drones and
cannon fodder for military adventures. They feed them lies and empty
promises and send in the riot police when the subjugated get unruly. And
most of the time they get away with it.
That is why popular revolutions are inexplicable to them. As ordinary
people cast off resignation and obedience, as they take control of
their communities and reclaim the streets, they become unrecognizable to
their rulers. This is the real “intelligence failure” of the ruling
class. Contrary to the terms of debate in security circles, it is not
that they missed some indicators of institutional change; it is rather
that all their models are based on the presumption of popular passivity.
“Ordinary Egyptians have a reputation as fatalists,” pronounced a
former Canadian diplomat to Egypt in the early days of the revolution,
explaining that Egypt would not go the way of Tunisia, where dictator
Ben Ali was toppled only weeks earlier.[1]
In so doing, the diplomat revealed not only his own foolishness, but
also the tone deaf incapacity of elites to comprehend people’s power.
After all, revolutions are not just about changing institutions. Most
profoundly, they are about the dramatic remaking of the downtrodden.
Revolutions are schools of profound self-education. They destroy
submission and resignation, and they release long-repressed creative
energies – intelligence, solidarity, invention, self-activity. In so
doing, they reweave the fabric of everyday life. The horizons of
possibility expand. The unthinkable – that ordinary people might control
their lives – becomes both thinkable and practical.
All of this eludes bosses, bureaucrats, generals, politicians, and
the vast majority of journalists because they do not understand the
inner heart of a genuinely revolutionary process – that having taken to
the stage of history, oppressed people are never again the same.
It is this error that explains the frantic tacking and turning of
rulers confronted with mass insurgency. One moment they make
concessions, the next moment they send in the goons – all in the belief
that ordinary people can be beaten back into submission, or bribed with
crumbs from the tables of the rich. But the longer they do this, the
more they force the mass movement to broaden its base and deepen its
struggles. President Ben Ali made this mistake in Tunisia; Mubarak keeps
making it in Egypt. And by clinging to power in the face of mass
opposition, they give the lowest layers of society the time and space to
enter the political sphere. The result is that popular revolutions open
the doors to great upsurges of working class struggle.
That has been Mubarak’s greatest folly. It is why Egyptian
capitalists, parts of the Egyptian regime and the U.S. state have
concluded that he has to go. But the genie of the Egyptian workers
having now been awakened, it will be very hard to put it back in the
bottle.
THE BIRTH OF POPULAR POWER
Philosopher Peter Hallward is among those few commentators who have
grasped the inner workings of the Egyptian Revolution. Writing in the Guardian
of London, he observes:
Every step of the way, the basic fact of the uprising has
become more obvious and more explicit: with each new confrontation, the
protestors have realised, and demonstrated, that they are more powerful
than their oppressors. When they are prepared to act in sufficient
numbers with sufficient determination, the people have proved that
there’s no stopping them.
Again and again, elated protestors have marvelled at the sudden discovery of
their own power.[2]
Participants repeatedly describe how their fear has lifted. “When we
stopped being afraid we knew we would win,” Ahmad Mahmoud told a
reporter. “What we have achieved,” proclaimed another, “is the
revolution in our minds.” The significance of such a revolution in
attitudes is inestimable. But such shifts do not happen at the level of
consciousness alone; they are inextricably connected to a revolution in
the relations of everyday life – by way of the birth of popular power.
And these new forms of people’s power and radical democracy from below
have emerged as steps necessary to preserve the Revolution and keep it
moving it forward.
So, when violently attacked, as they were on February 2, 2011, by
undercover police and goons of the ruling party wielding guns, knives,
Molotov cocktails and more, the insurgents held their ground and fought
back, holding Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. In the process, they
extended their grassroots self-organization. As reporters for the Washington
Post
noted, the rebels of Tahrir Square created popular prisons to hold
undercover security forces, and people’s clinics to care for the
wounded:
Refusing to end their 10-day old demonstration,
protesters set up makeshift hospitals in alleyways off the square to
treat their wounded, and fashioned a holding cell in a nearby travel
office to detain those they suspected of inciting the violence.
Organizers said they had captured more than 350 ‘thugs of the
government’ among the pro-government demonstrators, some carrying police
identification cards, and turned them over to the Egyptian army.[3]
In the same spirit, the movement has formed Peoples Protection
forces, staffed by both women and men, to provide safety and security in
neighbourhoods and in the mass marches and assemblies. In some towns,
like El Arish, the biggest city in the northern Sinai, official police
and security forces have melted away only to be replaced by armed
Popular Committees, which have maintained the peace.[4]
Developing alongside these forms of popular self-organization are new
practices of radical democracy. In Tahrir Square, the nerve center of
the Revolution, the crowd engages in direct decision-making, sometimes
in its hundreds of thousands. Organized into smaller groups, people
discuss and debate, and then send elected delegates to consultations
about the movement’s demands. As one journalist explains, “delegates
from these mini-gatherings then come together to discuss the prevailing
mood, before potential demands are read out over the square’s makeshift
speaker system. The adoption of each proposal is based on the proportion
of boos or cheers it receives from the crowd at large.”[5]
Tahrir Square and public spaces in Alexandria, Suez and dozens of
smaller cities, are now sites of ongoing festivals of the oppressed.
Describing the popular security services and people’s “food supply
chains,” demonstrator Karim Medhat Ennarah proclaims, “We have already
created a liberated republic within the heart of Egypt.”[6]
ENTER THE WORKERS
Years of courageous struggle by Egypt’s workers were decisive in
creating the conditions for the popular uprising. And now, mere weeks
into the upsurge, tens of thousands of workers are mobilizing, raising
both economic and political demands as part of a rising wave of strikes.
The consequences could be momentous.
Social movements generally have been on the move recently in Egypt.
The years 2002-3 saw important stirrings of political protest in
solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada and in opposition to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. Shortly after this, the Kefaya (Enough) movement
organized for democratic reform and the feminist group, We Are Watching
You (Shayfenkom) came out in defence of women’s rights.
But by 2004 it was strike action, sit-ins and demonstrations by
workers that comprised the most determined and persistent oppositional
activity – most of it illegal under the emergency edicts and laws that
deny workers the right to form independent unions. Over the past six
years or so, more than two million workers engaged in thousands of
direct actions. Most importantly, they regularly won significant
concessions on wages and working conditions. The result was a growing
confidence among workers – so much so that genuinely independent unions
began to emerge in a society where the official unions are effectively
extensions of the state.
In 2006-7 mass working class protest erupted in the Nile Delta,
spearheaded by the militant action of 50,000 workers in textiles and the
cement and poultry industries. This was followed by strikes of train
drivers, journalists, truckers, miners and engineers. Then 2007-8 saw
another labor explosion, with riots at the state-owned weaving factory
in Al-Mahla Al-Kobra. The youth-based April 6th Movement
emerged at this point in support of workers’ strikes. Meanwhile, workers
began to address the general interests of all working people,
particularly the poorest, by pressing the demand for a substantial
increase in the minimum wage.
Now, workers are again throwing their collective power onto the
scales of the political struggle in Egypt. And Mubarak and his cronies
will live to regret it.
In the course of a few days during the week of February 7, tens of
thousands of them stormed into action. Thousands of railworkers took
strike action, blockading railway lines in the process. Six thousand
workers at the Suez Canal Authority walked off the job, staging sit-ins
at Suez and two other cities. In Mahalla, 1,500 workers at Abul Sebae
Textiles struck and blockaded the highway. At the Kafr al-Zayyat
hospital hundreds of nurses staged a sit-in and were joined by hundreds
of other hospital employees.
Across Egypt, thousands of others – bus workers in Cairo, employees
at Telecom Egypt, journalists at a number of newspapers, workers at
pharmaceutical plants and steel mills – joined the strike wave. They
demands improved wages, the firing of ruthless managers, back pay,
better working conditions and independent unions. In many cases they
also called for the resignation of President Mubarak. And in some cases,
like that of the 2,000 workers at Helwan Silk Factory, they demanded
the removal of their company’s Board of Directors. Then there were the
thousands of faculty members at Cairo University who joined the
protests, confronted security forces, and prevented Prime Minister Ahmed
Shariq from getting to his government office.[7]
What we are seeing, in other words, is the rising of the Egyptian
working class. Having been at the heart of the popular upsurge in the
streets, tens of thousands of workers are now taking the revolutionary
struggle back to their workplaces, extending and deepening the movement
in the process. In so doing, they are proving the continuing relevance
of the analysis developed by the great Polish-German socialist, Rosa
Luxemburg. In her book, The Mass Strike, based on the
experience of mass strikes of 1905 against the Tsarist dictatorship in
Russia, Luxemburg argued that truly revolutionary movements develop by
way of interacting waves of political and economic struggle, each
enriching the other. In a passage that could have been inspired by the
upheaval in Egypt, she explains,
Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political
struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic
struggle. . . After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying
deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic
struggle burst forth. And conversely. The workers condition of ceaseless
economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting spirit
alive in every political interval . . .
And so it is in the Egyptian Revolution. Tens of millions of workers –
in transportation, healthcare, textiles, education, heavy industry, the
service sector – are being awakened and mobilized. They are fusing
demands for economic justice to those for democracy, and they are among
the hundreds of thousands building popular power and self-organization.
Moreover, should the rising of the workers move toward mass strikes that
paralyze the economy, the Egyptian Revolution would move to a new and
more powerful level.
What the coming weeks will bring is still uncertain. But Mubarak’s
folly has triggered an upsurge of workers’ struggle whose effects will
endure. “The most precious, because lasting, thing in this ebb and flow
of the [revolutionary] wave is . . . the intellectual, cultural growth
of the working class,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg.
In Tahrir Square and elsewhere thousands of signs depict Mubarak
accompanied by the words “Game Over.” For the workers of Egypt it is
now, “Game On.”
David McNally teaches political science at York University, Toronto and is the
author of the recently published, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of
Crisis and Resistance (PM Press), available here
[1] Michael Bell, “Will Egypt go Tunisia’s way?” Globe and Mail, January 27,
2011.
[2] Peter Hallward, “Egypt’s popular revolution will change the world,”
Guardian, February 9, 2011. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/egypt-north-africa-revolution.
[3] Leila Fadel, Will Englund and Debbi Wilgoren, “5 shot in 2nd day of bloody
clashes; amid outcry Egyptian PM apologizes,” Washington Post, February 3, 2011.
[4] Tobias Buck, “Palestinians hope for change and resumption of border trade,”
Financial Times, February 8, 2011.
[5] Jack Shenker, “Cairo’s biggest protest yet demands Mubarak’s immediate
departure,” Guardian, February 5, 2011.
[6] Quoted in Hallward.
[7] My sources
on workers’ protests include Aljazeera, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Center for
Trade Union and Workers Services, newsocialist.org, and
socialistworker.org. Special thanks to Jack Hicks for documents and
reports.
http://davidmcnally.org/?p=354
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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