Who is Leading the Egyptian
Uprising Now?
February 17, 2011 by peterrfay
“This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and
Facebook. This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People
are not able to feed their families.” - Richard Engel
As anticipated in these pages,
there has been ever mounting evidence that the engine behind the
Egyptian uprising has been less the educated tweeters, bloggers and
middle-class youth than the ‘unschooled’ working class – particularly
factory workers, many unionized, and the impoverished.
This has become even more undeniable as tweeters went home and back
to work after Mubarak resigned, while the workers instead went out on
strike. As Weal Ghonim, the feted techno-leader, tweeter and Google
marketing executive proclaimed after Mubarak resigned,
“It shows how civilized the Egyptian people are… Now our nightmare is over. Now
it is time to dream.”
Apparently the nightmare was not over for the Egyptian workers,
however. Nor was dreaming part of the plan. Rather, pushing forward
the real revolution was the plan. Economic and political strikes were
the plan. While the tweeters go home, the Egyptian military remains
untouched. The Egyptian rulers, military and even many “democrats” are
menacingly warning the workers to stop striking – for the “benefit of
the nation”.
To anyone who has looked at Egypt prior to January 2011, the emerging
split between the “democratic technocrats” and the working class behind
the uprising should come as no surprise. There has been a growing surge
of strikes across the country – ever more widespread over the past two
years, ever more desperately seeking survival from relentless increases in food
prices and cost of living.
Especially recently, it has been noted,
“Strikers have different priorities but have coalesced
around a central demand that the government raise the minimum wage to
1,200 pounds a month. The rate has remained fixed at only 35 pounds per
month since 1984.”
For some reason American literati have been declaring the Egyptian
Revolution (which isn’t yet a revolution, and isn’t in any way over) to
be a “Facebook” or “Twitter Revolution”. Said the New York Times,
“Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the
discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young
people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered,
organized opposition… Social media tools…provided a new means for
ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass
support”
However, the Wall Street Journal
discovered the tweeters were largely left out of the initial uprising,
as they were outmaneuvered by the police, and had never before been able
to mobilize any large numbers:
“The plotters say they knew that the demonstrations’
success would depend on the participation of ordinary Egyptians in
working-class districts like this one[Bulaq al-Dakrour], where the
Internet and Facebook aren’t as widely used. They distributed fliers
around the city in the days leading up to the demonstration,
concentrating efforts on Bulaq al-Dakrour. [...] The Bulaq al-Dakrour
marchers, the only group to reach their objective, occupied Tahrir
Square for several hours until after midnight, when police attacked
demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.
“It was the first time Egyptians had seen such a demonstration in
their streets, and it provided a spark credited with emboldening tens of
thousands of people to come out to protest the following Friday.”
The initial uprising, though coordinated to a point with social
media, had as its center of gravity poor youth with no twitter, blogs or
computers. Perhaps more representative of attitudes of Egypt’s
tweeters and bloggers was Tarek Amr, an NGO blogger and software programmer:
“I didn’t participate in the first day of the revolution.
I was a bit scared, a bit not convinced that it will change anything,
and also I prefer to follow such events on twitter and facebook instead
of participating in them.”
After weeks of stalemated protests, the trigger that finally tipped
the military into ousting Mubarak, not surprisingly, was not
techno-savvy democracy activists. Instead it was the surge of strikes
that swept the nation, according to Hossam el-Hamalawy:
All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. In Tahrir
Square you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together
with the workers, middle class citizens, and the urban poor. Mubarak has
managed to alienate all social classes in society including wide
section of the bourgeoisie. But remember that it’s only when the mass
strikes started three days ago that’s when the regime started crumbling
and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about
to collapse.
Why would this final ‘tipping point’ be reached, after three painful
weeks, only by a surge of factory strikes, rather than by the huge
crowds peacefully gathered in Tahrir Square? This question would need
to be asked to those who actually run the country: the
generals-cum-enterprise-managers who own and insinuate themselves into
every pore of Egyptian business and corrupt dealing. The guarding of
wealth in Egyptian enterprises is the sina-qua-non of Egyptian rule and
rulers. El-Hamalawy continues:
Some have been surprised that the workers started
striking. I really don’t know what to say. The workers have been staging
the longest and most sustained strike wave in Egypt’s history since
1946, triggered by the Mahalla strike in December 2006. It’s not the
workers’ fault that you were not paying attention to their news. Every
single day over the past three years there was a strike in some factory whether
it’s in Cairo or the provinces. These strikes were not just economic, they were
also political in nature.
And after Mubarak was pushed out, and Ghonim went home to “dream”, the uprising
split decisively in two, according to the Wall Street Journal (“Splits Emerge
Among Egypt’s Young Activists”):
“Three Facebook pages devoted to trashing Mr. Ghonim have
gone online in the past few days. They have titles such as ‘Ghonim
Traitor,’ and already have over 40,000 members.
“Labor activists accused the Revolutionary Youth of selling out the
workers after they endorsed the military’s call for striking workers to
return to their jobs…’They’re not real revolutionaries,’ said Gigi
Ibrahim, a youth activist with the Revolutionary Socialists.”
And so the crisis in Egypt continues to spread – strikes, both economic and
political, spread against the ruling class in Suez, Port Said and Ismailiya
(where the American USS Enterprise
aircraft carrier and a guided missile cruiser patrolled today, as if to
remind Egyptians whose interests are at stake in Egypt), to Mahalla el-Kobra
in the textile heartland – the very same location which sparked
nation-wide strikes in 2006, and to Alexandria and Damietta. And in Cairo,
where state banks are under siege from their employees who relentlessly
hound the corrupt managers, the Charmain of the Egyptian National Bank
resigned.
“Outside the headquarters of Banque Misr, another
state-owned institution, a 10-minute walk from Tahrir Square, chants of
“Leave, leave, leave” echoed into the night”
The workers are assuredly not dreaming now – they have woken up.
http://theclearview.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/leaders-of-egyptian-uprising/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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