While the downfall of Mubarak in February 2011 marked a momentous victory for the Egyptian people and the culmination of a decade-long struggle by disparate groups against the regime, the immediate aftermath has clearly shown that the main elements of the old regime are still well entrenched. However, finding themselves confronted with an undiminished revolutionary process, which still involves large sectors of the masses, those in power, the Supreme Council of the Military Forces (SCAF), the interim governments, the business elite, and the Islamist-dominated parliamentary majority and presidency, despite being engaged in a complex process of contestation over power amongst themselves, have all been making attempts to undermine and derail this process. As part of this campaign, they have increasingly been employing the tactic of driving a wedge and accentuating supposed differences between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ activisms. Through their control of legal and media institutions, they have set out to deepen this split in the minds of the people by portraying protests for ‘economic’ demands not only as extraneous to the course of the revolution but also as a threat to its success.
This article argues that an understanding of economic struggles as separate from, and even in contradistinction to, political struggle is falsely conceived. Assuming a hierarchy of demands where the ‘economic’ is portrayed as narrowly defined and less inclusionary on the one hand and reformist and less revolutionary than the ‘political’ on the other is historically and theoretically without base and only stands to serve the interests of the capitalist state and its agents. This understanding is born out of a narrow conception of the political and overlooks a theoretical tradition which demonstrates the interconnectedness of the two spheres, where from Marx to Polanyi the economic had always been theorised as embedded in the social and political in capitalist societies.
The article traces the history of this political/economic binary relationship through the decade leading up to January 2011 in order to illustrate how the different protests, directly and indirectly, were inextricably connected. The article further situates this historical episode within a framework which draws on Rosa Luxemburg whose work on the mass strike has recently found new currency in the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ (Alexander 2012, Zemni et al. 2012). Most relevant to this article is her analysis of mass strikes during the Russian Revolution, where she challenges the compartmentalisation of different wings of the same struggle by demonstrating how ‘political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes … peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all … run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another’ (1906, p. 46). Similarly, under the authoritarian regime of Mubarak, no struggle for any set of demands could remain confined within itself, but gave birth to and fuelled other struggles.
The article further investigates the significance of this political/economic dichotomy, amongst other factors, in explaining the inability of activists and groups of protestors to create a broadly-based coalition – a failing that continues to weaken their position as a collective force. While an intensification of networking, coordination and interchangeable membership between various activist groups was a feature of those working towards ‘political’ goals, these groups remained firmly separate from others fighting for ‘economic’ demands. This separation, the article argues, is not a contingent event, but, in the words of Laclau and Mouffe, is a ‘structural effect of the capitalist state’ (1985, p. 9) and, indeed, a mechanism for its survival.
A tumultuous decade
Activist groups, with a touch of irony, selected 25 January 2011, the officially designated Police Day, as a ‘day of anger’ to demonstrate against police brutality and the regime's endorsement of police violence and torture of civilians. While the marches on that day ended in a most unexpected turn of events when millions occupied Tahrir Square and millions more demonstrated across the country for the next 18 days until the downfall of Mubarak, the event itself was only one of an endless series of protests, marches, occupations, sit-ins, rallies and other forms of contentious action which had dominated opposition politics for a whole decade. Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, which ignited street protests and demonstrations in support of the Palestinians in 2000, extra-parliamentary opposition politics have been transformed into a vibrant multifaceted activism that has marked a new era in Egyptian politics. The intensification of protests and flourishing of activist groups mobilised large swathes of Egyptians across different socio-economic groups, crossing rural–urban divides, creating cross-ideological coalitions and using new forms of loose organisational structures outside decayed traditional political organisations. The loose structure of protests, the interchangeable membership of different groups and movements, and the fluid and metamorphosing nature of the demands promoted by various groups make any attempt to classify these protests a difficult task. While some authors have classified the protests according to protestors' claims (Joya 2011) or mobilisation structures (El-Ghobashy 2011), this article adopts a three-pronged taxonomy of protests which favours emphasising the content of demands as well as their mobilisation structures. The pro-democracy movement, labour struggles and ‘market-relations-based protests’ mark the three spheres in which the battle against the regime was waged. The purpose of this typology is twofold; it shows that protests were multilayered, cutting across different social groups in society, while also exposing the basis of a falsely conceived dichotomy between groups organised around ‘political’ demands on one hand and those struggling to achieve supposedly ‘non-political’, economic demands on the other.
What has become known in academic literature as the pro-democracy movement refers to a loose network of activist groups, organised outside formal political institutions such as parties and official syndicates. The demands of these groups, especially those under the banner of Kefaya,1 ranged from lifting the emergency law, freedom of elections and limiting presidential terms to achieving a complete, peaceful regime change. The pro-democracy movement brought together disparate groups of professionals, students, veteran political activists, youth wings of political parties and individuals from different backgrounds who exercised a high level of interchangeable membership between different organisations. Activists within the multiple groups forming the pro-democracy movement avoided hierarchical structures and rejected formal leadership, preferring temporary, flexible managing committees.
While the political system and its institutions were the main target of these groups' protest action, many professional groups such as Democratic Engineers, the March 9th Group for Academic Freedom, and Doctors without Rights to name but a few, were challenging the state within specific sectors by demanding freedom of civil association and the restructuring of the state–society relationship. For example, Democratic Engineers started from the assumption that ‘unionisation is a major arm of achieving democracy’ in the country as a whole and organised a campaign towards achieving the independence of the Engineers Syndicate after over a decade of legal guardianship by the state. Similarly, the March 9th Group for Academic Freedom fought a battle against the regime to bring an end to the flagrant role played by state security in academic affairs which ranged from manipulating student union elections to vetting guest lecturers and controlling all academic appointments (Hamdy 2011). In an even more surprising confrontation, in the aftermath of the 2005 parliamentary elections, the judiciary played an unprecedented role in Egypt's larger political opposition which was regarded by many as instrumental in re-energising the political scene in Egypt after a seeming lull in the fortunes of the pro-democracy movement (Browers 2009) and even as a potential spark for bringing down the Mubarak regime (Said 2006). The issue of torture and police brutality also mobilised large numbers of activists and sympathisers against regime repression. The Facebook group, ‘We Are All Khaled Said’, for example, was launched to protest the death of a young man in Alexandria at the hands of the police in 2010, an incident which became the symbol of police brutality and systematic torture. The group raised a campaign under the slogan ‘No to Torture, No to the Emergency Law’. Thanks to its unique approach to protest and the completely non-political character of the victim, within a few weeks the group's webpage attracted almost 22,000 members (El-Hennawy 2010).
Post-1952 Egyptian regimes have suppressed workers through a policy mix of corporatism and violent repression, often aided by the highly co-opted Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), established in 1957.2 Despite systematic state oppression, workers have continued to fight for their rights. The fight intensified in the wake of the infamous Unified Labour Law of 2003 and the appointment of the pro-business Nazif government. The spark which mobilised over two million workers, including factory workers as well as white-collar workers, and their families, to participate in various forms of industrial action, came from the textile industry. Strikes, occupations and other protest activities quickly spread into various sectors including food processing, the oil industry, and transportation to name a few. The landmark strike of 24,000 workers of El-Mahalla al-Kubra Spinning and Weaving Company in 2006 opened the door for an avalanche of labour mobilisation. Only weeks after the outbreak of the El-Mahalla strike, workers in the Helwan Cement factory started an occupation followed by a hunger strike. They were followed in January 2007 by drivers of railway engines, the Shibin al-Kom Spinning and Weaving Company, and, in February by the massive 11,000 worker strike in the Kafr al-Dawwar Fine Spinning and Weaving Company. These confrontations have been occasionally successful in yielding some concrete results such as a threefold increase in salaries in some severely underpaid sectors (Clement 2009). Moreover, the threat of further labour protests forced the government to pre-empt them by granting better pay to workers in certain sectors or companies even without the workers asking for them (ibid., p. 113). While most of these protests raised demands for job security, salary increases and improved working conditions, some protests broached policy issues by demanding government re-acquisition of recently privatised factories and companies, investigating corrupt management staff and even questioning the World Bank privatisation programmes in general (Beinin 2009, p. 84). The intensification of labour strikes during the 18-day uprising was a final factor in tipping the balance against Mubarak.
While workers and the pro-democracy movement were confronting the state in a relatively organised, albeit loosely structured, fashion, more spontaneous, dispersed protests were sweeping the Egyptian streets by marginalised citizens who had lost any power to access or restructure market relations in their favour. These market-relations-based protests broke out in reaction to the state's failure to provide minimal services and goods such as health care, electricity, running water and affordable basic foodstuffs. Blocking roads, burning tyres, jamming entrances to government buildings and marching around in the streets became a daily practice by village and urban neighbourhood residents, housewives, small farmers, street vendors and shop owners. Market-relations-based protests have been prevalent in rural populations, especially among impoverished small peasants who wage struggles against state-backed policies of dispossession (Ayeb 2012, Bush 2012). None of these protestors regarded themselves as activists or as involved in a political struggle to challenge the state. In fact, most protestors shouted their demands and signed petitions in which they called on the government to ease their daily suffering and humiliation. In some cases, however, the protestors used a different language to portray the government. In 2007, 300 families from the Basatin neighbourhood in Cairo organised a march to contest a proposed forced eviction from their homes before a court case for demolition of their properties had been concluded (Gabr 2007). During the march, the protestors distributed pamphlets with the title ‘A declaration of war’ which portrayed local government institutions as the enemy and their struggle as a matter of life and death.
The protests continued to swell despite routine police harassment. Labour strikes, political rallies, professional sit-ins and road blockades erupted alongside each other mobilising increasingly growing numbers and broadening the repertoire of contentious action. The pro-democracy movement, with Kefaya at the helm for a while, offered an example to other groups showing that it was possible to take the struggle against the regime into the streets and public spaces. Groups of activists and ordinary citizens who were not in any way directly linked to groups with ‘political’ demands were inspired and emboldened to publicly and collectively express their grievances. Furthermore, as activist groups and protest networks were characterised by interchangeable membership, the same individuals could participate in various forums and events to challenge Mubarak's succession plans, which for years involved grooming his son Gamal to inherit the presidency, protest against the war in Iraq, demand minimum wages and negotiate for freedom of professional and civil associations. Similarly, industrial labour strikes intensified concurrently with public servants' newly found confidence to oppose the regime's breaking of a long-held social pact between the state and sections of the professional middle classes. The almost two million workers involved in industrial action in recent years, and their families, lived in the same neighbourhoods and shared the same spaces where disparate groups of ordinary citizens took to the streets to protest their deteriorating living conditions. ‘Political’ and ‘economic’ struggles with their ebbs and flows developed and organised alongside each other without impeding or overwhelming the other. So even when the ‘political’ struggle was momentarily in the ascendancy while labour receded or vice versa, they both extended and organised ‘in equal measure. Between the two there is the most complete reciprocal action’ (Luxemburg 1906, p. 50).
A fragmented struggle?
Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 10) argue that Luxemburg's work on the mass strike invites us to ‘concentrate not only on the plurality of forms of struggle but also on the relations which they establish among themselves and on the unifying effects which follow from them’. While a separation of the realms of the struggle is not inherent, the capitalist state provides structural conditions which encourage and deepen such a binary relationship. Consequently, despite intersecting paths, cross-fertilisation, demonstrable effects and interchangeable membership, the different struggles by all these groups were insufficiently connected. This was evidenced by the absence of initiatives to build broadly based coalitions which could bring together and coordinate the efforts of all protestors. The pro-democracy movement and its constituent groups showed a high level of cross-ideological cooperation between Islamists, nationalists, and liberals, as well as an intense level of horizontal networking. The movement, however, remained firmly middle class in its membership and was unable to reach out to other social groups. In the midst of searing popular discontent, Kefaya failed to address the concerns of the classes and social groups most affected by neoliberal policies. While Kefaya core members and the leadership consistently stressed, in public statements and personal interviews, the need to reach out to these protest movements, the only actual links the movement had with them was limited to the symbolic issuing of support statements and to organising under-attended rallies.
This inability to create more solidarity between the different types of protests could be understood as a consequence of a number of greatly restraining factors. The first factor was the embryonic nature of the different groups of protestors whether pro-democracy, labour, or market-relations based. None of the three spheres of protests developed a solid base; they had neither a sustainable organisational structure nor a leadership. The loose organisational structure and the absence of leadership were the trademarks of these protest networks and were, indeed, among their major rallying points in mobilisation against the regime and set them apart from stale, traditional political organisations. However, these characteristics meant that the different groups lacked a robust base from which to reach out and attempt coordination let alone create a broad coalition. With regard to labour protests, they were localised, lacking sectorial or national coordination. Each strike, occupation or sit-in erupted spontaneously and only some developed committees to represent striking workers in the negotiating process with the management.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, both labour and pro-democracy groups were realising the importance of creating alternative, yet sustainable, forms of organisation. Some groups were grappling with new options while others actually achieved major victories. One landmark of the latter was the formation of the first independent trade union since the 1950s by tax collectors in 2009. The dispersed, market-relations-based protests, by definition, had no core and did not possess potential to develop beyond specific geographic localities. These protests did not develop out of an orderly plan with a grand design. In most cases, they developed spontaneously and as such originated, according to Luxemburg (1906, p. 48), ‘from specific local accidental causes … and grew with elemental power … and then they did not begin an “orderly retreat”, but turned now into economic struggle, now into street fighting and now collapsed on themselves’. On the eve of the 25 January uprising, the streets of Egypt were teeming with an impressive array of activist networks and protest groups. They were, however, no more than that; nascent groups and loose networks still exploring their potential as ‘movements’.
The second factor in limiting coalition-building and the expression of more concrete forms of solidarity was the level of repression by the state which made it very difficult for protestors to reach out to other groups. The heavy presence of state security in public spaces, work places, universities and other institutional buildings, along with the draconian dictates of the emergency law against public meetings and gatherings, contributed hugely to the fragmentation of the struggle against the regime. ‘Political’ rallies which brought together a few hundred activists would be surrounded by thousands of riot police who stopped more people from joining in. The police never hesitated to use violence against protests thus intimidating others from swelling the ranks of the protestors. The chances of activists managing to enter factories or government offices and associate with striking workers or public-sector employees were even less likely. It was only when workers took their protests onto the streets that any real chance of joining them was possible. State repression ensured a physical separation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ struggle.
While these two factors are structural, the third, which contributed to inhibiting the development of a coalition, was born out of a conceptual impasse. This was a prioritisation of struggles in which protests for social and economic rights were presented by some activists and political analysts alike as peripheral to the more serious business of changing the regime. Activists within the pro-democracy movement, especially with Kefaya at the forefront, perceived their own protests as the leading force for change around which all other groups should, and would naturally, rally. Labour protest and protests for other economic demands were regarded by political activists as important forms of agitation but not as central to the struggle against the regime. One of the critical members within Kefaya expressed this attitude by saying that:
Political activists do not realise that change is currently taking place at different levels through the efforts of several other actors such as workers, farmers, employees and students who have become capable of organizing and bringing about tangible results by confronting the regime in much more meaningful ways than simply protests for political demands. These groups are putting the regime under pressure and posing a real threat to its hegemony. (Wael Kalil, Author interview, Cairo, 14 August 2009)
The economic is political
Elaborating a sphere of the ‘political’ which is in contradistinction to the ‘economic’ cannot be theoretically maintained. Wood (1981, p. 2) argues that political Marxism illustrates how the economic sphere rests firmly on the political where the ‘disposition of power between the individual capitalist and workers has as its condition the political configuration of society as a whole’. She elaborates how in this analysis the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ cannot be viewed as compartments or ‘regionally’ separated spheres ‘but rather a continuous structure of social relations and forms’ (ibid., p. 6). A compartmentalisation of different forms of resistance based on the content of their demands ignores this embeddedness and envisages an impossibly neat separation between the two worlds.
One of the reasons labour protests are often regarded as separate from larger struggles for political change is rooted in the nature of the capitalist production system. As Wood (1981, p. 14) puts it: ‘Class conflict in capitalism is … encapsulated within the individual unit of production…. Each individual plant, a highly organised and integrated unity with its own hierarchy and structure of authority, contains within it the main source of class conflict.’ This tends to make class struggle in capitalism ‘local and particularistic’. In the same vein, Eckstein (1989, p. 13) elaborates how ‘labour's anger typically is directed at their bosses, whom they believe to be oppressing them, not at broad invisible forces like capitalism or distant agents of capitalism, like banks, which may ultimately be responsible for their plight.’ Expressing their anger at the immediate level against their direct superiors does not, however, make workers' struggles non-political. The so-called ‘economism’ of working class attitudes does not so much reflect a lack of political consciousness as an objective shift in the location of ‘politics’ (Wood, p. 14). Under authoritarian regimes in particular, the smallest of workers' protests is indeed political. While El Mahdi (2011) goes on to speak of the rise of class-consciousness within the labour movement, Beinin (2011, p. 184) argues that ‘in an authoritarian state the capacity to organise anything is a political challenge to the regime’.
Examining the nature of the demands of workers and unorganised groups of citizens, one can easily see their overtly political character. By demanding potable water and effective garbage collection, disempowered and marginalised groups have been bringing the state and its agents to account and putting pressure on its institutions to be responsive and accountable in the only way that was left open to them. Similarly, labour protest to demand better pay and secure jobs is necessarily a political act. In the absence of any legal channel of political representation where different groups in society can delegate democratically elected representatives to negotiate their demands, people have been directly representing their own interests and forcing state institutions to react.
While the failure to see labour strikes and market-relations-based protests for economic benefit as truly political is a huge analytical oversight, the unwillingness to see the growing ‘political’ demands of Egyptian labour during the last decade is tantamount to blindness. Labour protests during the first decade of the twenty-first century took place outside formal labour unions and were clearly opposed to the long-held monopoly of the co-opted ETUF, which workers regard as an extension of the state. By organising outside, and in spite of, formal unions, and by daring to create independent bodies, as the tax collectors did in 2009, Egyptian workers were demanding and effectively enforcing a renegotiation of the relationship between workers and the state. Along the same lines, the elected committee of the momentous strike at Mahalla in 2006 was successful in collecting almost 13,000 signatures by workers for a petition to impeach the head of the official General Union of Textile Workers and to demand free elections for a new union committee. Another major event at Mahalla took place in 2008 when the strike committee called for a national strike to demand raising the national minimum monthly wage to EGP1200.3 This demand went beyond an attempt to improve the wage of the Mahalla workers; it was a demand representing the interests of millions of Egyptians and their families across different social groups. Historically, Petras (1978) argues:
The greater the scope and intensity of working-class struggle soon led to an incorporation of economic with political demands … the more closely immediate and historic … demands become merged: wages and re-distribution, working conditions and control, repressive laws and state power.
Conversely, it is also naive to perceive political struggles as having no roots in economic demands. The pro-democracy movement Kefaya and its associates relied heavily on the increasing mobilisation of economic vocational groups. While professional groups such as doctors, engineers, lawyers and journalists contested the state's oppressive measures preventing them from organising collectively through independent and democratically elected bodies, in many cases these professionals were also squarely placing demands on the regime to reverse their deteriorating living conditions. Like other groups in society, middle-class professionals were suffering the effects of neoliberal policies which markedly affected their living standards and deprived them of their long-held privileges including job security and social welfare. The March 9th Group for example was created to defend academic freedom. While the group radicalised wider sections of staff and students and revitalised a culture of political protest, one of the most successful activities of the group was a march held in March 2008 to push for better pay, adequate health care and a resolution to pension issues. Despite heavy intimidation by state forces, the march mobilised thousands of faculty members nationwide (Hamdy 2011). Similarly, Doctors without Rights, a group established in 2009 to contest the deteriorating work conditions of most doctors in the country mobilised to demand improvements in doctors' incomes and living conditions. The group's manifesto stated that improving doctors' living standards was a central step towards improving the virtually collapsed public health-care system (Mina 2010). One of the group's efforts was against the government's ban on doctors' right to strike but the core demands of the group remained focused on issues of overtime, basic pay and partial support for postgraduate studies (ibid.).
In no way is this exposition meant to support an argument that the economic is necessarily the cause of all struggles. Rather, this is to say that the economic and the political are inseparable without necessarily being fixed in a static, causal relationship. In Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, the economic struggle can at moments be the factor that advances events from one political focal point to another. At the same time, ‘the political struggle periodically fertilises the ground for the economic struggle. Cause and effect interchange every second’ (Luxemburg 1906, p. 201). What is political and what is economic is not fixed; neither is the nature of the link which brings them together.
A young generation of activists within the pro-democracy movement and leftist groups were growing disenchanted with the mainstream trend within the movement to prioritise political over economic demands and the failure to reach out and express solidarity with workers and other groups protesting for social and economic rights. Small groups of activists formed offshoots of the pro-democracy movement to articulate a new agenda which aimed to cross the boundaries between economic and political struggles. Small initiatives such as Tadamon (Solidarity), April 6, Youth for Justice and Freedom, and Hashd (Mobilisation) were the leading groups of this effort. Tadamon's declaration of principles, for example, states that its objective is to ‘change the state of separation between the movement for democratic change and movements on the street’ and to demonstrate that ‘democratic struggle can never be separate from economically and socially based struggles.’4 Activists who launched Youth for Justice and Freedom consciously chose its name to reflect the group's core message: while the struggle for justice and democracy need to go hand in hand, justice, signifying equal access to social and economic rights, takes priority. While the group consisted of members of diverse political convictions, they were all agreed that ‘justice was more important than simply democracy’ (Ola Shohba, Author interview, Cairo, 22 June 2011). The April 6 Group took its name from the major Mahalla strike in 2008 when the group was launched to promote a call for a general, national strike in solidarity with the Mahalla workers.
These nascent groups organised campaigns to support individual acts of protest by workers and other diverse groups by providing them with legal advice and media coverage. They also worked on connecting labour activists and other protestors with a network of human rights and labour lawyers. To encourage the creation of links between different protests, groups like Tadamon and Hashd organised meetings to which ad hoc leaders of different labour strikes from different sectors were invited to share experiences and discuss potential coordination. Moreover, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and human rights groups targeted direct support to labour protestors. A small, yet highly visible and active, number of human rights NGOs and civil society groups such as the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services, the Center for Socialist Studies, the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, the Land Center for Human Rights, the Coordinating Committee for Trade Union and Workers Rights and Freedom, and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center were at the forefront of this support and solidarity campaign.
While these initiatives were crucial in laying the foundation for challenging the dichotomy between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ and offering both a vision as well as a concrete effort to create a broadly based coalition, they remained very small and embryonic in the short period in which they operated.
And the revolution continues
Egypt's ruling elite seems determined to maintain the economic system and the political order which impoverished millions of Egyptians and created the impetus for ousting Mubarak. The SCAF, the Muslim Brothers (MB), remnants of the Mubarak business elite and the ancien régime have been flagrantly manipulating the political process in order to protect their political and corporate interests. In June 2012, the SCAF issued a constitutional declaration which granted it almost total control over military matters and a de facto veto on the drafting of the new constitution. This manoeuvre is intended to protect the military's huge corporate interests which estimates put at over 30% of the economy (Abu El-Magd 2012). The MB Freedom and Justice Party promotes an economic programme which is not at all dissimilar to the neoliberal project of the former ruling National Democratic Party. In an expression of the vested interest of the MBs in maintaining the same economic policies as Mubarak, the MB business tycoon Hasan Malek was quoted in March 2012 as saying that ‘Mubarak's economic policies were on the right track but were marred with corruption and cronyism’ (Al-Masry Alyoum 2012). The Islamist-dominated parliament, therefore, had no problem approving the 2012/2013 budget which paid only lip service to issues of redistribution and social justice.
Confronted with the same impoverishing economic policies and a political process persistently sabotaged by the elite, which is disregarding the demands of millions of Egyptians for freedom, dignity and decent living standards, a fresh wave of protests has intensified. The repertoire of contentious action continues to see road blockades by angry citizens protesting against water shortage and failing health services, factory occupations, protests by the unemployed and forcibly retired, and marches against the increasing powers granted to the military by the SCAF which has so far appointed the first two interim governments and granted itself extraordinary powers during the ‘transitional’ period.
The protests have in some cases brought whole sectors to a halt and even created complete gridlock in cities and towns. Despite the overwhelming power of the old/new ruling elite, the diversified nature of the protests has presented it with a major problem. Because of their disparate nature, protests are hard to co-opt or to crush. As Eckstein shows in the case of Latin America:
The more diversified the base of resistance, the more difficult it is for a state to address the varied grievances of groups concomitantly through force or reform…. The diverse socioeconomic groups that rebelled in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua had different reasons for defying the government in power, but the net effect of their combined defection was a breakdown of the existing political and economic order. (1989, p. 49)
Faced with this same challenge, Egypt's ruling elite has resorted to isolating different struggles and institutionalising and strengthening a set of binaries in order to pit different groups against each other, such as Islamist versus secular, ballot box versus street protests and any form of protest which can be classified as ‘political’ or ‘economic’. Fashioning the legal system to this end, one of the early actions by SCAF was to decree the unprecedented Law 34/2011 which criminalises strikes and protests that curtail production and applies heavy fines and prison sentences for workers who participate in, call for or publicise strike activity (Human Rights Watch 2012). The riot police and so-called ‘unknown’ thugs, have since not hesitated to resort to violence against those who have dared to break this ban. While there are numerous, well-documented incidents in which the police have used brutal force to suppress ‘political’ protestors,5 striking workers have also been the target of violence. Examples are numerous and include the suspended sentence of one year in prison for five workers in the Egyptian oil company Petrojet in July 2011, the arrest and torture of striking workers at the Somid Company Port in March 2012, and indiscriminate shooting by riot police which caused serious injuries among the striking Mahalla El-Kubra Samoli Company workers (Socialist Worker 2012). Despite the legal ban, hundreds of thousands of workers have been involved in numerous forms of industrial action in what could only be seen as a political act of defiance.
Not only does the law criminalise labour strikes, it also strongly curtails opportunities for workers to organise. Egyptian labour and political party law, fortified by the military junta's constitutional declarations, continues to ban the formation of labour or any class-based political party which is, according to labour activists, a huge impediment to workers' ability to muster political strength. They argue that political parties, both before and after January 2011, continue to ignore workers' issues. One labour activist complains that these parties ‘provide us with no assistance or support during our struggles. Other than lip service, they offer us nothing’ (Charbel 2012). Moreover, the military junta has restricted efforts to create independent unions. Only a few days into the 18-day uprising, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions was launched to provide an alternative to the state-controlled ETUF. In the months that followed, workers in different sectors established literally hundreds of independent unions. In August 2011, the former minister of labour took the radical step of submitting a more progressive draft law for trade union liberties to SCAF for approval. The move encouraged the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to remove Egypt from its blacklist of countries that do not respect trade union freedoms. However, the shelving of the draft law for months on end despite pressure by workers and labour activists, led the ILO to return Egypt firmly to the same blacklist once more in May 2012. Revolutionary moments, one has to remember, can see the adoption of some of the most repressive legislation. The Le Chapelier Law, for example, passed by the French Constituent Assembly in 1791, prohibited any form of association based on occupation. Violators of the law were punished by hefty fines and the ‘suspension of citizenship rights’ for one year (Sewell 1980). While the Le Chapelier Law was justified on the grounds that under the regime of liberty, no intermediary bodies were necessary between the state and the individual (Rimlinger 1977, p. 212), Law 34/2011 defended banning labour strikes on the grounds of their threat to the production process and the national economy. In both cases, however, workers were left completely vulnerable vis-à-vis their employers.
While legal measures have been crucial to efforts of marginalising workers' protests, the use of the media to shape hostile public opinion has been the most powerful weapon. The manipulation of the official media as well as sections of the private media owned by the business elite, has allowed the ruling elite to intensify their campaigns of vilification against workers and other groups protesting for their ‘economic’ rights. The media have been promoting a discourse in which protests for economic demands are portrayed as a direct cause of the deteriorating economic conditions in the months that followed Mubarak's downfall. By labelling them as matalebfa'awyea (group or partisan demands), these acts of protest are immediately reduced to the status of narrowly focused, selfish demands that would benefit only members of specific groups regardless of their damaging effect to the economy as whole. Another term which has become a mantra in the official media is a'agalet el-intag (the wheel of production) which protests and strikes are allegedly bringing to a halt. In this portrayal, protest by labour and groups of citizens is responsible for reducing national production as well as putting off foreign investors, whose capital the country desperately needs. In October 2011, the minister of labour was quoted as blaming striking workers as irresponsible and unreasonable as they had to ‘take into consideration the financial crisis and the huge responsibilities which the government has to shoulder. Making exaggerated demands will not have positive consequences’ (Albassel and Khalifa 2011). Similarly, ‘increasing workers’ … strikes, constant protests and unrealistic demands' were blamed by the head of the Investors Association in the industrial zone of Bourg El-Arab for the closures of over 100 factories in the zone in the months following the ousting of Mubarak (Abdelsalam and Ismail 2012). The dominant Islamist parties in Egypt's first democratically elected post-Mubarak parliament have also been on the same page as the government and the business elite. During a mobilisation campaign for a general strike in February 2012, representatives of the Freedom and Justice and the Salafi Nour parties condemned the campaign as a ‘call to destroy the state and to ruin the economy’. According to the political and business elite, protests should be confined to Tahrir Square and to political activists who represent the true demands of the revolution. An official of the Nour party was quoted saying ‘Protest is enough as a form of popular pressure without hampering the economy…. [In place of strikes] I hope to see 300 or 400 thousand protestors every day in Tahrir to demonstrate the power of the revolution’ (Al Shourouq newspaper, 9 December 2012). In the weeks following the election of President Mursi, protests intensified in front of the presidential palace only to be dismissed by Hasan El-Prince, a high-ranking official in the Freedom and Justice Party, as being organised by hired agents working in a state security conspiracy to destabilise the president (Aswat Masrya 2012). Using the media, the SCAF and interim governments have managed to manipulate public opinion not only to refuse to recognise these forms of struggle as an integral part of a revolutionary process but also to condemn them as impeding a swifter transition to democracy and stability. From the ruling elite's perspective, the fragmentation of protests and demands is an essential strategy to weaken the forces of the revolution. For the business elite, separating the economic from the political sphere and disparaging the struggles articulated within the first, has always been one of the most effective defence mechanisms against labour. Fighting for economic demands, however, remains an obvious political statement whose strength is that it defies not only the oppressive tactics of the forces in power but also exposes the liberal forces whose members hope to convince the people to suspend their fight and accept a promise of symbolic representation through elections (Alexander 2012).
While human rights groups continue to provide legal and other forms of support to workers and other protesting groups, political parties and groups remain firmly disengaged from struggles which cannot be labelled directly ‘political’. Only some leftist groups and trade-union activists genuinely regard these struggles as an integral part of the process of changing the political order. However, leftist forces are themselves small and fragmented, despite the visible role they have played in the last decade, and remain unable to find a coherent strategy for working with labour. According to one labour activist, the left still has a problematic relationship with labour in which engaging with the labour movement is seen as optional; it is not regarded as integral to an overall revolutionary strategy (Gabr 2012). Because the left is not organically linked with labour struggles, its reaction to labour fluctuates between soaring elation when workers' strikes peak and total disillusionment when workers go dormant or, even worse, when they fail to rise in response to political activists' calls for a general strike as was the case in February 2012 (ibid.). It is clear that the left is confronted with a massive task of building organic links with workers. The process, even if successful, is long and will take decades. Leftist activists in the meantime are not always realistic about their ability to play a leadership role for workers or to get them to respond on cue. Against any delusion to that effect, Rosa Luxemburg reminds us that:
It is clear that the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest social democratic party … even the greatest enthusiasm and impatience of the social democratic troops will not suffice to call into being a real period of mass strike as a living, powerful movement of the people. (1906, p. 53)
Conclusion
While Egypt's current ruling elite is a fluid compound of old and new elements, its reaction to the unfolding revolutionary process is unsurprisingly familiar. In response to the demands of millions for ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ it has responded with the usual predictable mix of repression, occasional symbolic concessions and violence – in short, ‘more of the same’. Moreover, underpinning these historically effective tactics, those in power have been attempting to assert an ideological hegemony over the very essence of what constitutes the revolution. Using all the means at their disposal, they are creating in the public mind a pared down notion of revolution to include only the basics of liberal democracy while conducting a comprehensive campaign to demonise ‘economic’ struggles for justice which are then portrayed as separate, secondary and even deleterious to the struggle for ‘freedom’. This tactic of accentuating a schism between political and economic elements of what is in fact an integral struggle is central to the elite's tactic of reducing Egypt's revolutionary process to an ‘orderly transition to democracy’. Thus, the free market will be protected and neoliberal policies can flourish in return for occasional, limited political representation through elections.
This ploy, if successful, would guarantee the interests of the capitalist state and its agents who have historically fiercely resisted any demands for a radical transformation of the system especially during revolutionary situations. For the military, the effective ruler of the country, the battle to suppress revolutionary demands is not only about maintaining its control of a substantial part of the economy, as well as its long-earned privileges, but ensuring the current process of wealth accumulation of the economy as a whole that guarantee such privileges. Furthermore, the MB have firm roots within the business elite which has benefited from Mubarak's neoliberal policies. The group's ideological commitment remains in favour of a free-market economy. Similarly, international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as Western governments do not want Egypt, a cornerstone and an exemplar of their policies in the region, to stray from the path which Mubarak's regime followed.
The question which now looms large over Egypt's future is whether elements of the old regime, which are still well entrenched, particularly in the state apparatus, together with Egypt's new ruling elite can succeed in their efforts to reduce the revolutionary process, unleashed a decade ago, to a limited process of liberal democracy with the minimal concession of occasional and symbolic electoral participation.
Despite the enormous power of these forces, the process of radicalisation, which different groups and their struggles have undergone, indicate that the battle for the future is not going to be easily settled. After all, the millions of Egyptians who have taken to the streets for over a decade, during the mass uprising of January 2011 and in its continuing aftermath have not been protesting, taking huge risks, and sacrificing their lives so that one variety of crony capitalism is replaced by an untrammelled neoliberal capitalism which is determined by a national elite in consort with Western governments and international financial institutions. With no measures to redress their lived injustices, long-ignored demands and ever-deteriorating living conditions, it is hard to imagine how those millions could be convinced to go back to their homes and give up their fight for both political and economic justice.
The logical conclusion of Luxemburg's analysis of the mass strike is the development of a revolutionary situation which engenders unity of the political and the economic – a situation that would necessarily be resolved in a socialist direction. Laclau and Mouffe, on the other hand, wonder if this outlook is not somewhat deterministic. In examining more recent changes in the capitalist system they ask whether we might experience a situation where the fragmentation of the economic and the political struggle ceases to be an ‘artificial product’ of the capitalist state and instead becomes a permanent reality (1985, p. 10). The unfolding events in Egypt reveal that the tension between the two possibilities is still at play. Any prediction at this stage of the direction and outcome of the different struggles runs the risk of being overtaken by fast changing realities not only in Egypt but also at the level of the global order.
Note on contributor
Dr Maha Abdelrahman's research interests cover a wide range of aspects of the sociology and politics of development including state–civil society relations, opposition politics and social movements, political Islam, human rights, Islamic and cultural commodification, the history of development studies, and labour relations and NGOs – both at the global level and within the context of the Middle East. Her current research focuses on the politics of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the history of social and political struggles in the Arab Middle East and the meaning of revolution in the twenty-first century.