Half A Revolution is Better Than None
Many people get a bit depressed when thinking about the 2011 series of uprisings that came to be known as The Arab Spring. Only Tunisia came out of it with obvious continuing gains, mainly in the area of liberal electoral democracy and significantly improved freedom of association and speech. Most other countries saw immediate murderous crackdowns. Syria and Yemen and Libya were pushed into very high casualty civil wars.
The Arab Spring Uprisings were Genuine Popular Revolutions. There is Cause for Optimism Despite the Brutal Repression.
Egypt arrested, tortured and killed many thousands of activists in a series of waves over the next several years, while quickly changing the constitution and electing a Muslim Brotherhood government, that was then overthrown in mid 2013. The Egyptian military installed former Military Intelligence chief General Sisi as strongman president. Sisi won considerable mass support (including ‘lesser evil’ support from most liberals and not a few leftists) for his pretence of restoring Nasser 2.0 welfare-state-plus-military-rule nationalism, and ‘saving the revolution’ from Islamists (who were then massacred in large numbers, as left activists were hunted down, tortured and disappeared over several years). The counter-revolution won. Was it worth it? Could the uprisings have been more successful with a different ideology or strategy or tactics?
This post is the first of two back to back articles based on two excellent books, Jack Shenker’s The Egyptians: A Radical Story (Penguin, 2017 [2016]) and Asef Bayat’s Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017). Shenker is the former Guardian Middle Eastern correspondent resident in Egypt. When covering Tahrir, he was grabbed by police and beaten along with others in a temporary holding area, and only escaped a notorious torture prison when luck freed him and others from the back of a police van on the way there. He kept covering the story over the next months and years. His book is very well grounded in sources, as would be expected from a top journalist.
Shenker’s book Gets Up Close and Personal in Telling the Stories of Egypt’s Revolution.
The Egyptians is also a beautiful set of stories, optimistically told despite the sacrifices and defeats mixed in with the victories. It is about what happened to individuals and to groups who were battling for survival needs and against autocracy before, during and after the 2011 eighteen-day Tahrir downtown Cairo square occupation that we all saw on TV. You get the same sense of ordinary people making History as one gets from Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed’s account of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. I cannot come up to Shenker’s level here, but I quote him extensively enough to give you a picture of what happened in Egypt in and around the Tahrir square occupation of January-February 2011. I think that you will see that it was a genuinely revolutionary mobilization by many thousands of very brave ordinary people seeking their freedom from a dictatorship.
Both books provide analyses as well as facts, but Bayat’s is more focused on analysis of what went wrong as well as what went right, not surprising since it is the work of a an Iranian-born former youthful revolutionary (in the 1979 revolution) and sociologist. Bayat taught for some years in Egypt before taking another position in the USA. He has written multiple well-received books and articles on the contemporary Middle East. His work is especially noted for his detailed research into the lives and struggles of the urban and rural poor, as befits someone who himself was born into a relatively poor rural family that moved into the city and, by his account, had its sense of entitlement and rights raised by both material modernization and political events.
Bayat’s book says that Political Revolutionaries Succeeded in Making Half a Revolution. They Stimulated a Revolutionary Mobilization but Failed to Propose Post-Capitalist (Or Even Non Neoliberal) Alternatives.
There is far too much material in these two books that warrant your attention for me to cover here. It will be worth your while to get both books and read them. My goal is not to do a thorough summation of the main points advanced by the authors. Per usual, it is to isolate one or several points that can stimulate an argument of my own about what the left can learn from its struggles, in order to do even better in future. I will do three things in this post. In part one (this post), I will quote extensively from Shenker’s book on Egypt to give you a framing of the Arab Spring in that country as seen by someone whose politics are very similar to those of the activists in Tahrir square, or rather to the most left-wing of those activists who are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. He, and they, see revolution as a set of decentralized social and political struggles for generous social provision, radical democratization, autonomy and self-rule, struggles that do not necessarily involve a classic ‘taking [of] state power’.
In the post that will follow this one, I will present Bayat’s critique of the Arab Spring radicals for making Half A Revolution, for courageously initiating and sustaining a revolutionary mobilization, but failing to have a set of goals or a strategy and tactics to even try to achieve revolutionary changes. His basic point seems at first to be very counter-intuitive. He argues that all of the players on all sides are what might be called neoliberal subjects, who still accept the common sense that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to a capitalist economy. He argues concisely but persuasively that this is true of all of the different types of Islamist, as well as of liberal and left-wing activists who oppose neoliberal policies (and of course it is true of the ruling regimes).
Both Books Highlight the Role of Workplace, Community-Based and Pro-Democracy Political Movements.
The next post will also summarize Bayat’s description of the urban poor who have mostly moved from rural areas to the city, but the capitalist economy is unable to integrate them into the legal wage labour economy. They are living in illegal shelters or squats and working in what Bayat terms the Outdoor Informal Economy, in Cairo and many other Middle Eastern cities. Bayat does not see these urban illegals as either a desperate and criminalized reactionary lumpen-proletariat, or as a superexploited wing of the working class ready to lead a popular revolution. He calls the daily survival struggles that they wage a Non-Movement, by which he means that they are not a movement of a social group that shares a common consciousness or collective identity, except contingently, when things happen to put them on the same side in a conflict with authorities. In 2011, they mostly responded positively to the left-led political uprisings when appealed to by activists. My interest here is to build on the argument raised by Srnicek and Williams in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2016 [2015]), as discussed in How to Use Left Populism to Win a Post-Work Economy , that the left should consider uniting a highly atomized and diverse working class around an agenda for a Post-Work Economy.
SHENKER ON THE THREE KEY MOVEMENTS THAT LED TO THE 2011 UPRISING
Jack Shenker presents both long lists of social struggles in Egyptian workplaces and rural and urban poor communities, and detailed accounts of particular ones, to show beyond a doubt that the 2011 Tahrir square political protest (and the heightened and radicalized community, campus and workplace conflicts that it incited) was a high watermark in a long history of popular resistance. He does the same for the period after 2011 to demonstrate that active resistance continues, despite heavy repression.
“Three major strands of unrest shaped Mubarak’s reign, each developing independently but also gradually supplying collective confidence to the others – especially in the dictator’s final decade – and eventually coalescing in revolution”. First, “the struggles of local communities over economic privations and the increasing absence of government services”. Second “the explicitly pro-democracy movement that mounted small but game-changing street protests in Egypt’s largest cities”. Third, “and arguably the most critical, was the fight-back by workers” against the economic consequences of IMF Structural Adjustment Programs (pp146-7) that began as early as 1977 with the Anwar Sadat regime.
The 1952 Free Officers Movement coup against King Farouk brought Nasser to power and pushed Britain out of its overt colonial role. Economic modernization involved many state-owned monopolies. The new regime was met with a series of labour riots. Two union leaders were hanged, and worker groups were integrated from above into a state-controlled labour federation, to send a message. The revolution was nationalist, not socialist. Economic growth led by Egyptian companies would result in higher incomes and health, education and other social services for workers, in exchange for acceptance of rule by the military (p150, p5). This more or less happened until Sadat’s neoliberal turn in the late 1970s.
Egypt’s Modern History is Yet Another Example of How a Reactionary Change (in this case, Neoliberalism) is First Imposed in the (Neo)Colonies and Then Comes Home.
Neoliberalism in Egypt, as elsewhere, did not actually mean that the state withdrew from any role in the private ownership economy. Rather it went from Keynesian managing of fiscal and monetary policies, and a welfare state that somewhat counterbalanced the effects of markets, to a state that slashed social provision, subsidized private profit by reducing corporate taxes and weakening regulation, and created public-private partnerships. In Egypt, the twenty year selloff of state monopolies was at bargain basement prices, estimated to be ten percent of their actual market value (p67). The radical decline in government revenues led to an ever-increasing government debt, and even more pressure to adopt IMF policies. Instead of a private sector that was more detached from the state, the new domestic owners were mostly cronies of the regime, and especially the military, both individual generals and the army as an organization (p64).
The actual effect of neoliberalism in Egypt as elsewhere is “privileged accumulation and mass dispossession” (p4). The most evident dispossession is the forcing of farmers and others off the land and into the cities where very few find stable work. As financial capital increases its dominance of both industry and governments, the biggest general effect, argues Shenker, is “a diminishment of the autonomy afforded to citizens as individuals and as collectives – be they living under military dictatorships or long-established formal democracies. The attempt to break this relationship and democratize our societies beyond their electoral systems is the principal battle of our generation, and revolutionary Egyptians are on the frontline” (pp4-5).
The Different Social Struggles Shared the Broad Goal of Winning More Social Provision, Autonomy and Democracy.
Shenker applies the autonomy-democratization-social provision frame to his description of the many struggles by workers, farmers, slum communities and others. He does so non-dogmatically, and admits to the fact that many of the localized battles win only a temporary autonomy from the dictates of employer and/or state. Shenker is the kind of journalist who gets his story through a combination of research into documentary sources and by actually talking to the rank and file participants (after the fact) to the extent possible. And what he has experienced in the years that he has mixed with and talked to non-elite Egyptians is a permanent change in their sense of entitlement and rights. For him, the glass is always half full. Revolution is still happening because “[t]hat newfound sense of agency, of an ability to shape things around you in ways you never knew existed – that gave me my definition of revolution: not a time-bound occurrence, nor a shuffle of rules and faces up top, but rather a state of mind. It felt as nothing could be the same again” (p12).
Shenker acknowledges that Sisi has won ‘lesser evil’ support from a large part of the population. The shtick that Sisi is saving the revolution by purging and persecuting the Islamists, and preventing the violence of social disorder threatened by the atheistic and pro-Western culture educated middle class left, works for a majority still. But now that Sisi is posing as the second coming of Nasser, he has to live up to the hype and deliver more social provision and more jobs and income, and he is not and cannot. What is the way forward when the bubble bursts, and (to mix metaphors) people see that the emperor has no clothes? “Egyptian revolutionaries’ own visions of change have not, for the most part, involved the capturing or replication [sic] of state power” and “the revolution’s targets have been more diffuse and its organization more horizontal; rather than working off ideological blueprints, revolutionaries have attempted to make space for the autonomy of many different individuals and communities” (p15).
(1) WORKPLACE STRUGGLES
Shenker provides plenty of case studies of struggles for self-rule in workplaces, communities and pro-democracy protests. The Mahala Cotton, Spinning and Textile factory complex is the largest in Egypt. Built in 1927, it had its first strike in 1938. Tanks entered the plant for the first time in 1947 to suppress a strike. In 1988, strikers carried a coffin with Mubarak’s picture on it through the city centre. By 2004, strikes across Egypt were tripling year on year. In late 2006, female workers occupied Mahala’s garment factory over non-payment of a bonus, shaming 10,000 male workers to eventually join them. Central security forces swiftly deployed around the edges of the factory site and throughout the city. Three days later, a panicked government caved, and paid both the bonuses and wages lost during the strike. Perhaps the most enduring victory though was not that, but the fact that the negotiation was no longer through the state-controlled labour federation (who sat on the same side of the table as the employer), but directly with twenty-five plant workers who had been elected democratically by striking workers themselves.
The April 6 2008 Mahalla Textile plant Strike and Community Street Battle Changed the Way that Workers Elsewhere Fought From Then On.
In 2007, a new strike call from Mahalla workers raised a more political claim and directed it to the regime on behalf of all Egyptian workers. They demanded that the State-mandated minimum wage, which had not been changed since 1984, be raised for everyone (pp156-9). On April 6 2008, Malhalla workers walked out to protest the failure of the Mubarak regime to raise the minimum wage. Political activists elsewhere called for a general strike to support them. Riot troops deployed to every major city in the country. The display of force appeared to work.
In Mahalla, the police had arrested strike leaders and occupied the factory. Workers gathered outside, soon joined by tens of thousands of local residents. By the afternoon “an urban insurrection greater than anything seen in Egypt since the anti-Sadat bread riots in 1977 was decisively underway. Central security forces fought cat and mouse battles with youths in the back streets, the city’s railway lines were cut” and a huge photo of Mubarak was stamped on and burned. “Troops arrested hundreds and fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition into the crowds, killing three people… After several days of fighting, security forces reasserted control of the town and set about rounding up perpetrators. The uprising generated almost no coverage in the international media, and no major Western political leader spoke out on the matter” (pp165-7).
The Mid-2000s Strike Wave Was Revived at Ever Higher Levels Every Year from 2011 to 2014.
“In the final years of Mubarak’s rule, Egypt shuddered with a strike wave so vast that academics labelled it the largest social movement seen in the Middle East for half a century. In 2007, not a single day went by without a labour protest occurring somewhere”. Most of the workers involved in the strike wave listed by Shenker are [semi]professionals in the public sector, but the full list likely includes a much wider range (p160). Note that prior to the window of February 2011 to the July 3 2013 coup, when despite new repressive laws and plenty of repression, the work stoppages were sometimes long and sometimes shut down production for at least a little while, worker strikes tended to be closer to work-to-rule actions. “In the past, most labour actions had taken the form of the I’tisam (‘sit-in’), whereby employees would occupy the workplace and keep working in an effort to remind bosses and ministers of their role in upholding the social contract… After [the example of April 6 2008] Malhalla though, workers began using the idrab (‘strike’) as their primary tactic instead”. Whereas even idrabs “used to be brief – most lasted less than twenty-four hours… now, as in Mahalla, strikes which lasted several days or more became the norm” (p161)
Many Strikes Had an Explicitly Political Dimension, as Workers Demanded that (often Military) Bosses Tied to the Regime Be Removed.
After Mubarak was forced to resign another trend developed whereby workers demanded more than improved local wages and conditions. Over years, the IMF style privatizations involved more and more transfer of ownership to the military, often in partnership with foreign corporations. “[N]umerous labour mobilizations erupted” that explicitly objected to “the command exercized by the armed forces over the economy”. Shenker cites Suez Canal employees who blocked train lines and workers at twelve plants where workers “had created Facebook pages criticizing their military administrators”. Workers at Petrotrade struck the day after Mubarak quit and sparked thousands of others in the oil industry to follow suit. “[T]he army’s response was to infiltrate the strikes, abduct the strike leaders, send them for military trial and lock them up in prison” (p286).
Despite the repression, the number of strikes and labour stoppages increased every year from 2011 through 2014 (the year after the July 3 2013 coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood president Morsi) – from 1,400 in 2011 to 3,800 in 2012, to 800 a month in the months prior to the July 2013 coup and still 2,200 in 2014 despite a brutal Sisi clampdown on both labour actions and protests. In February 2014, just before the anticipated announcement that Sisi would run for the presidency, “over 250,000 workers joined a national strike and brought down the military junta’s interim cabinet” (p321). “The biggest single cause of labour unrest … has been some form of tatheer [purification]”, where workers include demands that military or non-military bosses connected to the regime be purged (p310). Shenker sees this pattern as evidence of not only politicization of worker consciousness after 2011 (with regime-linked bosses as targets), but also of increasing desire for autonomy (and maybe some day worker control?) in the workplace.
Cleopatra Ceramics plant Workers Were Especially Political, Militant and Imaginative in their Goals and Tactics.
Shenker describes the change in worker consciousness, tactics and perceived leverage at Cleopatra Ceramics from the period before Mubarak was forced out to after his ouster. In 2006, the workers went on strike for better wages and conditions and won a small increase “but the dispute threw their lack of power inside the factory into focus. The sit-in crawled with state security operatives who threatened strikers openly… The morning after an agreement to end the stoppage was finally signed, security forces kicked down the doors of the strike leaders and dragged them from their homes; each was held in detention for ten days, then either transferred or fired” (p306).
In 2011, the factory owner Aboul Einem was arrested and charged with the killing of protestors because of his role in organizing the attack by machete and cudgel swinging thugs on camels and horses in Tahrir square. He was later acquitted in court. Cleopatra workers occupied the plant on multiple occasions in a tit for tat battle to not just win economic demands but to force Einem out. On the day that Einem returned to the plant after being acquitted, he was met by angry workers. Shenker was there and described the scene: “[I]n every direction, workers are streaming off their production lines and out towards the entrance gate; some are armed with sticks and clubs… Abdoul Enein was still in charge… and still had the neoliberal state and its allies firmly at his back… Yet the man who once felt so unassailable… was now being frog-marched to his own office against his will for negotiations” (pp323-4). “In early 2012, both Abdoul Enein and the national minister of labour were captured and held overnight in detention by hundreds of Cleopatra workers in Cairo, who released their quarry only when the army intervened to broker a deal. On other occasions, Cleopatra workers have blocked streets in the capital and stormed government offices in Suez” (p309).
Some Cleopatra Ceramic Workers Expressed Confidence that They Could Take Over the Factory and Run It Themselves and In Ways that Served the Egyptian People as a Whole. They Were ‘Thinking Like a State’.
Based on his interviews with Cleopatra workers, Shenker asserts that “some Cleopatra employees have stopped seeing themselves as employees at all, but rather as custodians of a shared, productive resource that should be pressed into service for the good of all Egyptians, in other words they have started thinking like a state”. During a work stoppage in early 2012 one worker said that “’We are forming a committee, composed of all the political forces in the governate and some of the departments here [in the factory] … ‘We are planning to proceed on schedule and sell our product, and pay our wages… Workers can take the factory and own it’”. This did not happen, but later Cleopatra workers “had also started taking solidarity actions with strikes at other industrial plants in the Suez region, and building wider alliances”. Also “during their latest stoppage, when workers were running out of food … local Bedouins began organizing to bring them milk and bread” (pp308-310). I will argue, in the post about Bayat’s book to follow this one, that finding ways to combine workplace with community-based organization may prove to be key in organizing the neoliberalized working class of today. We on the left everywhere have lots to learn from the example of the workers in the Middle East.
(2) POLITICAL PROTESTS
Intelligence agency/military/police states like Egypt do not tolerate too many protests, especially if they imply some fault with the domestic regime. But external events in the decade or so prior to 2011 made it more difficult to isolate the protesters from mass public support with insinuations that they were traitors to the nation, or anti religious morality, or both. In 1999, Israel’s bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon led to student-led protests that shed an uncomfortable spotlight on the Mubarak government’s close economic and military alliance with Israel (p195). By the end of 2000, twenty NGOs and many individual activists had pooled their resources to form the Popular Committee to support the [Palestinian] Intifada (p196).
Israel’s Attacks on Palestinians and the US Invasion of Iraq Stimulated the Political Movement to Replace Dictatorship with Democracy Inside Egypt.
On March 19 2003, when US President Bush announced his intention to invade Iraq, activists called a rally for Tahrir square for the next day to criticize the Mubarak regime’s close ties with the US government. Organizers expected a few hundred, but 40,000 showed up instead, and many stayed in the square for 24 hours. The square was cleared with brute force, and there was a crackdown on all street events after that (p197). It wasn’t until the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on June 26 2004 “that the president became an explicit target of a demonstration from the outset ” when “500 protesters broke new ground by gathering outside the general prosecutor’s office in Cairo to denounce police abuse and regime violence within Egypt itself” (p197).
Three months later, “seven veteran activists from different political backgrounds – among them Islamist, Coptic and Nasserite – had dinner together and floated the idea of building an organized front against Mubarak, one that would echo the Popular Committee to Support the Intifada”. Soon known by its main slogan as Kifaya (Enough!), Egypt’s Movement for Change got hundreds of signatories to a statement declaring that the two dangers facing Egypt “were ‘the odious assault on Arab soil’ and a ‘repressive despotism’ in Egypt which could only be addressed by removing the president’s monopoly on power”. Soon there were Doctors for Change and Teachers for Change and other like groups of mainly middle class professionals aligned with Kifaya. Activists also used new tactics to evade repression, including “flash mobs in popular neighbourhoods” and “’guerilla’ activism – where small groups of activists would flood public parks and plazas with flyers and attempt to engage passers-by in political discussion”. It was also the time when the internet was becoming more widely available. Activists published blogs, and a few years later used social media like Facebook and Twitter, to spread their message.
The Kifaya Pro-Democracy Movement United Activists from Islamist, Coptic, Nasserite and Other Political Backgrounds
But Kifaya died out as the major workplace strikes, and community fights against the privatization and reduced availability of basic power and water as well as against the seizing of land for exploitation by the state or private business, took center stage for the rest of the 2000s. Nevertheless, Shenker argues, “Kifaya reordered the topography of political dissent in Egypt. Its relatively non-hierarchical structure and cross-ideological support base reflected global protest trends in the 1990s and 2000s; activists on the left were increasingly moving away from rigid political party models aimed at seizing conventional power, and towards looser social movements within which autonomous movements could flourish”. Kifaya had also served a more specific purpose “by normalizing the sight of opposition protest on Egypt’s streets”. Instead of political opponents simply being rumoured about when they were grabbed by police or intelligence agents, they were being beaten and shot at “in broad daylight [and these protesters were] citizens who looked nothing like the terrorists the regime always claimed to be hunting down”(pp 198-200).
The January 25 2011 Tahrir protest had originally been called as a generic anti police repression and pro-democracy event by the April 6 youth committee, named in celebration of the 2008 Malhalla strike and street battles, on National Police day. They shifted rapidly to an explicitly ‘Mubarak must resign’ focus in response to the uprising in Tunisia. Shenker devotes many pages to bringing alive the individual stories of people involved in events in Tahrir square. They are very much worth reading, but I leave all of it out here because the broad outlines of the square events are known to those who followed the coverage of the handful of quality newspapers like the Guardian that exist in the world.
The Military Regime Used Hired Thugs to Sexually Assault Women and to Generally Terrorize Protesters and Anyone Even Thinking About Joining the Protests.
One thing not covered so much at the time, but presented fully by Shenker, is the hiring by the security police of groups of young men to sexually harass and often rape (sticking sharp objects in the vagina while the other men surrounded the woman and jeered, calling her a whore) women before, after even during protest events. Activists formed groups to prevent or break up such attempts, but eventually assaults and death threats to the rescue groups obliged them to stand down (pp412-420).
Even an occasional perusal of mainstream coverage of oppositional protest events around the world from Hong Kong and Myanmar to Cairo to Moscow to non-Hindu neighbourhoods in India to even rich liberal democracies (e.g. anti Black Lives Matter in US) would let you see examples of the greatly increased use of “thugs”. They are not only deployed to be agent-provocateurs or ‘snatch groups’ (by undercover police who then arrest) but to engage in violent acts against peaceful demonstrators to terrorize the people not demonstrating as well as those demonstrating. In Egypt, it led to the formation of neighbourhood groups to patrol and run the thugs out of the area, especially after the regime recruited thugs in the jails and let thousands out (pp231-2).
(3) COMMUNITY-BASED STRUGGLES
The third type of struggle that Shenker identifies as preparing the ground for the 2011 uprisings across Egypt were community based movements in both rural and urban areas. Large communities of mostly poor farmers or workers started with grievances about land being taken away, or social provision denied, or a local strike being repressed, and ended up fighting state police, security branch agents, and even the armed forces. Consider four examples – Qursaya island in a mostly agricultural part of metropolitan Cairo; the Borg el-Burullus fishing and hunting area near a large lake in the northern Nile; the traditionally Bedouin city of el Dabaa that was taken by the state as a site for a nuclear power plant, 300 kilometers northeast of Cairo on the north coast; and Damietta, a port city 200 kilometers north of Cairo.
In November 2007, the army came to Qursaya island and told the residents that they no longer owned the land and must leave the area. In 1997, enabling legislation placed all so-called ‘undeveloped’ land formally under army control. In 2005, a senior Mubarak era official and member of the legislature for the ruling NDP party bought a villa on Qursaya. He began making bids to nearby farmers for their fields. When most refused, he raised the possibility with them that the government might seize the territory by force. Sure enough, in 2007 residents were pressganged in army buses to a military court where they were told that their ownership certificates were no longer valid. They were forced to sign papers relinquishing their land, and agreeing to never set foot on Qursaya again, under pain of military court prosecution on serious charges.
Qursaya Island Farmers Were Forced to Sign Documents Surrendering Ownership of Their Land To Cronies of the Military Regime.
When farmers eventually snuck back to their homes, they found that their fields had been strewn with bamboo and set alight by soldiers. The islanders tried to get journalists interested in their story by holding pottery-making and musical events , readings and exhibitions. They took shifts guarding the island every fifty metres around the shore, twenty four hours a day. But soon the soldiers arrived to occupy the island and disperse the residents. It was mostly standing fast plus some throwing of rocks on the islander side versus conscripts with guns waiting for orders on the other. Men, women and children frequently moved to a perimeter area and linked hands to provide a human barrier to the shore. The army held their fire. Luckily for Qursaya residents, the General decided to back down and avoid a violent incident.
Borg el-Burullus (called el-Burg by residents) is 120 miles north of Qursaya on the north eastern edge of lake Burullus on one side and next to the Mediterranean at the end of the Nile on the other. The 100,000 people in the area depend upon the fish stocks. The Nile is in advanced stage of environmental collapse due to overpopulation, but also due massive pollution from industrial plants all along it. US advisers recommended that the commons be replaced with private farms given ‘initial use’ of the dwindling supplies of freshwater. Commercial fish farms were licensed. Land reclamation on the lake’s margins destroyed 85 percent of the lake’s marshes, and eroded the breeding and staging ground for several bird species.
When Privatized Companies Cut Off Their Water, It was the Last Straw for El-Borg Residents. In Dabaa Thousands of Bedouin Protested Every Friday Over the Seizing of Their Traditional Land for a Nuclear Reactor.
In late 2007, el-Burg’s entire supply of piped water was suddenly cut off for fifteen days – the water was now distributed at a profit by a private company and they gave preference to their high value customers. It was the last straw for some residents who rolled huge logs onto the tarmac, severing the main motorway. Security forces were coincidentally deployed to the area to clear the way for a presidential convoy. They ordered residents to clear the road. The protesters refused. The water was turned back on, and the protest ended in time for the president to pass through. El-Borg sparked water protests in many other villages. The media called it ‘the revolution of the thirsty’ (pp181-7).
In 1981, the Egyptian state decided they wanted to use a large area in Dabaa city, that had been a gathering place for Bedouin going back a very long time, as a site for a nuclear reactor. The land was legally appropriated but nothing was built. In 2003, the government decided it wanted to build the reactor after all. “At a stroke the area was engulfed by army, police and bulldozers; to force the community into compliance. Soldiers first demolished the Bedouin’s water towers before driving across the land bellowing threats into microphones. No one resisted”. But in the years that followed, Bedouins launched lawsuits to at least get compensation, wrote letters and called for an official inquiry. In November 2011, having observed the tactics of anti-reactor protesters in India, Germany and Switzerland, they began a sit-in. Getting no response, they blocked the entry way for workers to the site. This brought a military detachment to the site.
By early 2012, there were upwards of 5,000 protesters every Friday watched over by 1,200 armed soldiers. On Friday January 13 2012, after prayers, a quarrel led to soldiers firing in the air and a few Bedouins with guns replied in kind. Someone exploded dynamite. The soldiers closed the gates, unarmed Bedouins took turns kicking on the walls and eventually broke in. Forty-two soldiers and ten Bedouins were injured before the soldiers evacuated. The dispute continued. Eventually the courts decided that the Bedouins had the right to the land.
Community Members from Damietta city Came in the Hundreds of Thousands to Support Fertilizer Plant Workers Who Were Being Shot At (and Killed) by Army Live Fire.
In 2006, a large Canadian fertilizer company made a deal with a state-owned chemical company to build a $1.2 billion plant to convert natural gas to ammonia and urea on an island near Damietta, that had been designated a special industrial zone. Protests began in 2008 and were successful in moving the site off the island so that a business group could use it for high end tourism. State-owned MOPCO took a majority stake. But the promise to move the plant 150 miles away out of Damietta was broken. In July 2011, a report declared that the dumping of industrial waste into the Nile was environmentally unacceptable unless a series of measures were taken. Opponents deployed a two-pronged strategy of legal manoeuvres and imaginative displays of community opposition.
By September 2011, a picket of the factory had shut down operations. Twenty central security trucks and three army vehicles surrounded the 150 demonstrators, who threw rocks in self-defence against tear gas. Thousands of community members joined, and began a sit-in. The officers assured the residents that night that a political solution was forthcoming, but they were lying. Soldiers flooded the sit-in the next day, firing live ammunition and killing Islam Abdullah, a 19 year old upholsterer. “[I]n nearby villages and throughout the main city people scrambled through the streets with megaphones, screaming ‘The army is killing the people, come down and defend Damietta’. Hundreds of thousands answered the call. Within hours, Damietta’s railway line, most of its industrial sites and all of its busy trade port were cut off and put under the control of the demonstrators… Soldiers, nervous and uncertain, eventually lowered their guns and backed away. Jubilantly, ordinary citizens seized the streets and formed ligan sha’abeya (popular committees) to run the city”. The occupation lasted eleven days, giving way eventually to a sit-in at the plant that shut it down for ten months. Eventually, MOPCO agreed to implement thirteen measures from the environmental report, build a new desalination plant to compensate for the plant’s use of freshwater and drop all charges against protesters.
State-Controlled TV Appealed to Viewers to Come to the Aid of the (Moslem) Soldiers who Were Said to Be Under Unprovoked Attack by the (Christian) Protesters.
These four examples ended in some kind of victory. A key was the ultimate decision by the armed forces (with the brief exception of Damietta on one day) to not escalate to live fire or mass arrests and torture as was the case in the Tahrir protests and also in some workplace conflicts. The other key was the mobilization of literally thousands of community members over a sustained period to engage in civil disobedience, usually while simultaneously pursuing a legal recourse.
Other communities have not been so lucky. The Coptic church Christians number over 8 million, about ten percent of Egypt’s population. Progressive Copts have played an important role in many social change movements going back over a century. The Coptic pope, on the other hand, gets state recognition in exchange for political support for the regime. On January 7 2010, a passing car sprayed worshippers exiting the church, killing nine. By the end of 2010, there were open street battles between Copts (supporting construction of a new church in another neighbourhood) and security forces, killing two. On New Years Day 2011, a bomb exploded outside a Copt church in Alexandria, killing twenty-three. The Pope called for turning the other cheek. Protests in Cairo ended with rocks thrown at riot troops and police cars burned.
On October 9 2011, the destruction of a church in Aswan led to a march through northern Cairo. Rocks were thrown at protesters from a bridge. When they were almost at the Nile “the army’s massacre truly began. ‘Some people had already been shot dead by the time the APCs arrived,’ said [Shenker’ interviewee] Sabri. ‘They drove through the crowd and crushed us, again, and again and again”. “On state television, news anchors had been showing edited footage of the bloodshed and telling those watching at home that soldiers were under attack by Christians; a call was issued for citizens to ‘come and protect your armed forces’. In central Cairo, groups of Muslims took to the streets with knives; others came down from their homes to protect Coptic protesters” (pp393-9).
The Military Regime Cynically Portrays Itself as the Defender of Egypt Against Both Islamic Terrorists and a Culturally Alien (Westernized) Left.
The Coptic case is but one of many facts that reveal the military regime‘s utterly cynical manipulation of the Islamic faith as part of a reactionary patriotic Egyptian identity. The Sisi regime’s blatant violation of any pretext at civic liberty or democracy (despite the usual poor country holding of elections and play-acting the rest of the liberal democracy script) has won support from Western governments and foreign investors, because the Egyptian military was ‘secular’ and it was the only thing stopping the ‘Islamic terrorists’ from taking over the country. The coup that installed General Sisi used the pretext that the Muslim Brotherhood government was about to impose a theocratic state, something many progressives bought into because the Morsi government was Islamist in rhetoric, had been repressive, and was as neoliberal as Mubarak and Sadat had been.
An estimated 2,500 supporters of the repressed Morsi government that had gathered in two mosques to show support were massacred on August 14 2013, barely seven weeks after the coup. By 2015, over 700 ‘Islamists’ who had opposed Sisi had been condemned to death by military courts. Despite all this, the Sisi regime trumpets that its leaders are pious Muslims in business suits who defend traditional family values (too bad for women and gays) while funding pro-regime liberal feminist groups. The left are ‘atheists who prefer Western culture to Egyptian culture’, says a regime that mostly worships at the shrine of foreign (mostly Western) capital.
The Sisi Dictatorship Relies on the Latest Technology for Surveillance and Killing. Barrack Obama and David Cameron Were Happy to Sell Them As Much of That Technology as They Asked For.
Ten years later, Sisi is still successfully keeping the (minority) left and the (majority) observant Muslim non-reactionaries (who also oppose the regime for many of the same reasons on the level of particular grievances) separated from one another. But mostly he has maintained an absolutely brutal repression. Most of the leading political activists in both groups who had been trying to unite across ideologies and faiths have been jailed and/or disappeared. Survivors are permanently on the run. In 2015, as Barrack Obama and David Cameron announced massive sales of advanced military equipment to Egypt, it was estimated that “citizens are ‘disappeared’ by the security services at the rate of nearly five a day” (p459). In the first six months of 2016, 630 Egyptians were disappeared and “there were more than seven hundred extra-judicial killings” (p457).
But Sisi also understands that repression combined with foreign support will not be enough. In a speech he declared that the regime needed to carry out “the moral reform of the Egyptian people” through systematic indoctrination by state-controlled or regime-allied “media, education, places of worship and the family”. A new compulsory course, Intellectual and Moral Security, has been added to the grade school curriculum. A pro-government think tank “advised school officials to open up a database of any students who appeared resistant to such [moral and intellectual] reform” (pp384-5).
THREE MORE OF SHENKER’S THEORIES
Shenker makes three more theoretical points that warrant restating. First, revolution is many things but above all it is a state of mind. Shenker’s detailed accounting of workplace, community and pro-democracy political struggles before, during and after the eighteen days of Tahrir square occupation in January 2011 are an argument that Tahrir was just one small part of an overall revolution. But he also asserts that “Tahrir was special… because it embodied… an act of creation, one that has coloured Egypt’s politics irrevocably ever since. In Tahrir, Egyptians built something different from Mubarak Country… a different set of social relations, a different narrative about who they were and what they could do… [The transformation in consciousness and spirit that so many experienced in January 2011 in Tahrir and elsewhere] weren’t just elements of a mini-state [that they were prefiguratively acting out in the square]… They were the physical embodiment of… a sense of activation that wrenched the centre of the state down to the streets, down to the people, and recreated Mubarak Country from within” (pp224-5).
For Shenker, a Revolution is Not So Much Taking Power In Order to Rule Differently as it is A State of Mind that New Ways Are Desirable and Can Be Fought For and Won.
Second, the Egyptian state is structured in a way that is the diametric opposite of the ‘acting like a state’ of people trying to self-rule. The Egyptian state is hierarchical. The left seeks to be a community that practices horizontalism, where there are no people in elite positions who rule over others on the grounds that they are the (s)elected ‘leaders’. The Egyptian state oppresses and represses the people in the interests of domestic and foreign capital and of various privileged groups. The left wants freedom, equality and democracy for those that the state and capital oppress.
The Egyptian state acts to both socially and economically marginalize and to politically exclude people. The left seeks a democracy of direct participation and socio-economic policies of inclusion. Shenker makes a C. Wright Mills type analysis of the state as being made up of interlocking and overlapping elites at the top of a hierarchy of levels of elite decision-makers in business, government, and military institutions. “[T]he state [is] made up of vast, overlapping networks of authority and patronage each dominated by different elites… The most powerful individuals within the Egyptian state operate across several of these networks at the same time… The survival of the state in its present form depends on multiple mechanisms of popular exclusion – political, economic, cultural and psychological – that lock most citizens out of these networks” (p246).
For Shenker, the (Egyptian) State is the Overlapping Elites in Business, Government and Military that Operate on the Principles of Hierarchy and Exclusion of People from Participating in Making Decisions for Themselves.
The third theoretical point is about left strategy. In the past, the left sought to change society by taking control of the state apparatus through election or revolution, and then used the (radically changed or not changed) state to transform society. “Egyptian revolutionaries have never pursued this strategy… ‘During the eighteen days you wouldn’t find demands [for a specific political platform – Shenker’s added parentheses]’ said one [activist]… ‘Our demand was “I don’t want this kind of power to be practiced on me. I want my body and soul to be respected. I want to be who I am. I want my dignity.”’ “The organizational aspects of the revolution developed beyond the state rather than in parallel to it, not so much ‘leaderless’ as ‘leaderful’: comprised of many groups and individuals that make contingent alliances with one another but retain their political autonomy as well… Inspired by the horizontalidad social movements of Latin America over the past two decades, this sort of rhizomatic organization – similar to the structure of roots underground, which spread far and wide and have many diverse buds of activity rather than a single centrepoint – was the natural outcome of the oppositional activity that had taken place during the Mubarak era. Under Mubarak, the regime prevented any large organized and radical alternative to the dictatorship from emerging on an institutional level, which meant that for their own survival activists had to remain loose, dispersed and flexible… Without any obvious trunk to chop down and eliminate, or a stable ideology or individual to discredit, the state has often floundered in its attempt to draw mass revolutionary movements to a close” (pp251-3).
Read the Next Post for a Discussion of What the Left Everywhere Can Learn from the Example of the Arab Spring Revolutions.
There is a lot to unpack here. Shenker very accurately articulates what I think is still the predominant way of thinking about how to win radical social and political change in the extra-parliamentary anti-capitalist left, not just in Egypt but more or less everywhere. For that reason, Asef Bayat’s critique of the approach of revolutionaries in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab Spring uprisings is of very wide relevance.
Bayat applauded the revolutionary mobilizations. He argues that the political activists in Tahrir Square who tried to provide a set of goals and tactics (while practicing horizontalism) certainly did oppose specific neoliberal policies (without actually publicly making demands to change any of them), but they did not say capitalism had to be replaced, let alone give any idea of what might eventually replace it. Nor did they propose any way that the people could make fundamental changes to the state so that the people could exercize real democratic power. Bayat says that the Arab Spring revolutionaries were heroic, and they sparked a massive revolutionary mobilization, but they only ever petitioned the dictatorial regime to please reform itself. They did not even try to achieve revolutionary change. They made Half a Revolution. It was worth it, but there are lessons to learn for next time. See the next post for Bayat’s critique and some ideas of my own that follow from both Shenker’s and Bayat’s insights.