Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution
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Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution
408eBook
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Overview
Drawing on the authors' decade-long experience of reporting on and researching the Egyptian labour movement, the book provides the first in-depth account of the emergence of independent trade unions and workers' militancy during Mubarak's last years in power, and and their destabilising impact on the post-revolutionary regimes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780324333 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mostafa Bassiouny has more than a decade's experience as a reporter and editor in the Egyptian and regional press. He was industrial correspondent for Al-Dustour newspaper between 2005 and 2010, reporting on the mass strikes by textile workers in Mahalla al-Kubra in 2006 and 2007, and the uprising which rocked the town in 2008. He reported on the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 before returning to Egypt to participate in the uprising against Mubarak. Between 2011 and 2014 he was Head of News for liberal daily Al-Tahrir and is currently Egypt correspondent for the Lebanese daily Al-Safir.
Read an Excerpt
Bread, freedom, social justice
Workers and the Egyptian Revolution
By Anne Alexander, Mostafa Bassiouny
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Anne Alexander and Mostafa BassiounyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-433-3
CHAPTER 1
From Nasserism to neoliberalism: a new amalgam of state and private capital
On a sunny winter's day, just as 2010 was drawing to a close, a ship called Al-Hurriya 3 (Freedom 3) careered down the slipway into the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Behind the crowds of cheering shipyard workers, anxious engineers and managers, Egypt's most senior army officer, and Minister of Defence, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi watched the 10,000-tonne container vessel settle gently into the waters of the dock. For Tantawi and his colleagues, the launch of Al-Hurriya 3 represented more than a routine official engagement. Rather, it was a chance to see first-hand the fruits of an investment made three years previously in August 2007 when the Ministry of Defence took over the Alexandria Shipyards from the state-owned Holding Company for Shipping.
Just like other investors, Tantawi and his colleagues had benefited from more than a decade of preparatory work before the sale of this prized state asset to new owners. Failed attempts to privatise the shipyard in the 1990s had demonstrated the need for more government investment in the infrastructure surrounding the yard. Naturally the workforce had been 'streamlined' and 'restructured', with 3,600 workers forced into early retirement on terms which benefited the government rather than the workers themselves, who continued to protest that they had been cheated out of their full pensions as the sell-off date approached.
A gushing news report on the private satellite channel Dream congratulated the Armed Forces on Al-Hurriya 3's launch. Accompanied by stirring martial music and panoramic shots of the shipyard, Rear Admiral Ibrahim Gabr al-Dasuqi emphasised the new owners' successes since acquiring the yard:
Since the Alexandria Shipyard was transferred to the Ministry of Defence, we have begun a programme of complete development in every sector. We have rebuilt our client base after a period of falling orders, trained the workforce to the latest technological and technical standards and won ISO accreditation.
The 'privatisation' of the Alexandria Shipyard fits uncomfortably with standard narratives of how neoliberal reforms have restructured the Egyptian economy over the past forty years. Rather than private capital rescuing an ailing state industry, it was another part of the state that stepped in. The 'sell-off prize' touted to international investors in the early 1990s turned out not to be so attractive to private capital after all. Or did Tantawi's acquisition of the shipyard indicate that the military was acting to subtly frustrate neoliberal reforms, protecting not only its own interests but also those of a wider 'national' faction of capital, which saw 'the state, not global capitalism as their meal ticket', as Paul Mason puts it? By intervening to 'support the development of national industries' (in the words of Dream TV's reporter), was the military defending the legacy of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who ordered the building of the current shipyard in 1960 as part of his state capitalist programme to develop a local manufacturing base?
As we explore in this chapter, the fate of the Alexandria Shipyard tells an important story about how the transition from a form of state capitalism under Nasser in the late 1950s and 1960s to the current neoliberal regime has never been simply about the retreat of the state from the economy. Rather, neoliberal reforms have created a new amalgam of state and private capital. A glance at the order books of the Alexandria Shipyard illustrates neatly that this amalgam is increasingly composed of transnational and regional as well as local state and private capitals: one of the yard's biggest clients in recent years has been Nile Cargo (formerly the National River Transportation Company), part of Nile Logistics, a platform company owned by private equity firm Citadel Capital. Citadel brings together some of Egypt's biggest private capitalists with representatives of leading Saudi business groups, a UAE sovereign wealth fund, and the Qatari royal family.
The rise of Nasserism
To understand what neoliberalism means in an Egyptian context, however, we have to go back to the heyday of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's regime in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to explore the nature of the state capitalist policies the neoliberal reformers apparently rejected. The political economy of Nasser's regime was shaped by the interaction of three major sets of factors. As a form of state capitalism, it was made necessary by the crisis of accumulation which the Egyptian ruling class had failed to solve during the final years of the monarchy, despite the development of increasingly interventionist policies designed to facilitate the build-up of sufficient capital to achieve industrial take-off. The particular form that this state capitalist regime took was made possible by a specific conjuncture of geopolitical and domestic circumstances, however. The seizure of power by junior officers in the Egyptian army in July 1952 was on the one hand an expression of a general trend across much of the colonised world, and their success was enabled both by the retreat of the old empires and the rise of a mass, popular anti-colonial movement. The workers' movement played a crucial role in the development of this mass movement from below as independent workers' organisations emerged for the first time from the shadow of the liberal nationalist movement of the previous generation, the Wafd, and shook off the tutelage of ruling-class patrons such as Prince Abbas Halim. The Free Officers took power on the cusp of the 'Long Boom', a period of sustained expansion in the global economy driven by a combination of the adoption of policies which privileged the role of the state as the principal organiser of capital accumulation and the diversion of excess value into military spending by the USA and the USSR. This created an opportunity for the Nasserist regime to balance its political suppression of the independent workers' movement with its social incorporation, by a limited shift in the distributive and redistributive policies of the state in favour of the poor in general and urban workers in particular. The workers' movement which had emerged during the social and political struggles of the 1940s and early 1950s was too independent and well organised to be ignored or easily crushed. On the other hand, neither was it strong enough to impose its own leadership on the wider popular movement, which challenged both continued British occupation and the monarchy itself.
The modern history of workers' organisation in Egypt is generally accepted to have begun with strikes by workers in cigarette factories in 1899, which led to the establishment of embryonic trade unions. The economic restructuring that took place during the First World War, as a result of the interruption of trade and the greater reliance on Egyptian production either by the Egyptians or the British occupation forces, saw the working class grow in number and importance. Even before the end of the war strikes erupted among the cigarette workers and tramway workers of Alexandria. Strikes by workers likewise played an important role in the 1919 Revolution led by the liberal nationalists of the Wafd Party against continued British occupation. The first national federation of unions was established in February 1921 with twenty-one local affiliates representing around 3,000 workers. By the beginning of 1924, the new unions had mushroomed: in Alexandria alone local unions counted between 15,000 and 20,000 members. Compromise between the nationalist leaders of the Wafd and the British authorities paved the way for the repression of the trade-union movement by the Wafdist government which took office in 1924, however. The 1930s saw the slow revival of the workers' movement, although largely under the patronage of leaders from outside the working class, including Prince Abbas Halim, a maverick member of the Egyptian royal family who presided over the establishment of a number of workers' organisations. The Wafd, particularly during its increasingly lengthy spells out of government, also nurtured its own trade unions.
The 1940s saw a qualitative change in the nature of the trade-union movement. As during the First World War, the economic needs of the British military provided the impetus for a further expansion of Egyptian industry. The workers' movement began to take shape across a wide range of economic sectors, from the textile mills of Al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Alexandria and Shubra al-Khaima, to the sugar refineries and cement works in Hawamidiyya near Helwan, and across the expanding modern transport infrastructure. However, this period not only saw the expansion and deepening of trade-union organisation, but also witnessed a dramatic shift in trade unionists' political consciousness. Democratic practice in trade-union organising strengthened the movement in the face of the authorities' attempts to repress it. The trade unions' living interaction with political issues and organisations did not compromise the movement's independence, as is clear from the debates in the trade-union press and literature of the period, which displays a refined awareness of the question. A generation of working-class leaders such as Yusif al-Mudarrik and Taha Sa'ad Uthman emerged to lead the trade unions, which were established in the course of industrial and political struggles. The broad experience of political activities across the workers' movement indicates the expansion of workers' political consciousness. The nascent Egyptian trade-union movement made its first international appearance with the arrival of Egyptian delegations to the 1945 Paris conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions.
The Workers' Committee for National Liberation (WCNL), which was founded in 1945 by leading activists among the textile workers' union in Shubra al-Khaima and other trade unionists, is one example of how worker activists sought to articulate a distinctive contribution by the workers' movement to the struggle against the British. Within a few months of the WCNL's foundation, the rising tide of strikes and protests provided the opportunity for the development of new and broader forms of practical coordination and leadership within the growing movement calling for British evacuation. The National Committee of Workers and Students brought together student and worker delegates to organise massive joint protests and strikes on 21 February and 4 March 1946 in response to attacks on student protesters. Worker activists' consciousness of being part of a wider battle for 'national liberation' from colonialism extended beyond the borders of Egypt. Suez Canal workers organised to resist the passage through the canal in 1947 of the Dutch vessel Volendam, which was en route to suppress the national movement in Indonesia.
The nature of the relationship between the 'economic' goals of the workers' movement and the 'political' aims of the popular anti-colonial struggle was the subject of intense debate. Communist activists, who played an important and very influential role in the leadership of many of the new trade unions, argued that there was an organic connection between the battle to improve workers' pay and conditions, on the one hand, and the struggle for British evacuation and domestic political change, on the other. Moreover, they believed that workers' organisations should play a role in leading the political movement against the British. This perspective was challenged from outside the workers' movement by the liberal nationalists of the Wafd, on the one hand, and the Muslim Brotherhood, on the other, which both sought to subordinate workers' independent political action to their own direction. Within the trade unions there were also non-Communist working-class leaders, such as Anwar Salama of the Eastern Tobacco Workers' Union, who were supportive of the idea that trade unions should concern themselves with supporting workers' demands for improved conditions at work and shun political activism. The British authorities also purposely cultivated a small reformist, anti-Communist trend among leading worker activists, and recruited the leader of the Cairo Chaffeurs' Union, Ibrahim Zayn-al-Din, as a paid agent to promote this view.
Despite the efforts of the British to promote a brand of reformist trade unionism modelled on the practice of the British Trades Union Congress, the perspectives of the Egyptian Communists were in many ways much closer to the experience of the tens of thousands of workers who took part in protests and strikes during this period. The space in which reformist trade unionism could operate was extremely narrow. Not merely state repression of workers' strikes and the periodic suppression of the trade unions, but the very intimate relationship between the repressive apparatus of the Egyptian monarchy and the British occupation reinforced the Communists' messages. Moreover, the trade unions were growing in a context where waves of political and economic struggles were inextricably interlaced, culminating in the great wave of protests and strikes in the winter of 1951–52, which saw demonstrations of around 500,000 in Cairo and 250,000 in Alexandria and the explosion of guerrilla warfare against the British in the Canal Zone.
The Free Officers' coup was initially welcomed by large sections of the workers' movement because of the officers' declarations of support for the anti-colonial movement and their hostility to the monarchy. The first direct encounter between the officers and striking workers was an exercise in brutal repression, however. The army suppressed a strike by textile workers in Kafr al-Dawwar in August 1952 and transferred workers to a military tribunal, which hastily issued sentences of hard labour and executed two of the strike leaders, Mustafa Khamis and Mohamed al-Baqari. The response to the strike split the trade-union movement, with most of the unions supporting the position of the Free Officers and denounced the strikers as 'terrorists'. The Founding Committee for a General Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions issued a statement denouncing the Kafr al-Dawwar strike as motivated by pro-imperialist interests, while Communist activists toured workplaces in the company of army officers, appealing for calm. Despite these expressions of support, the Free Officers launched a campaign of repression against the trade unions and banned the planned founding conference of the Federation.
The events of March 1954 were another turning point in the relationship between the workers' movement and the military regime. Conflict within the ruling Revolutionary Command Council spilled out into the streets and workplaces. A minority faction, led by President Muhammed Naguib and supported by left-wing cavalry officer Khaled Mohi-el-Din, argued for the return of the army to its barracks and the restoration of some form of parliamentary democracy, while Gamal Abdel-Nasser led the majority of his colleagues in support of the continuation of military rule in order to ensure the evacuation of British troops. Both factions attempted to win the backing of the trade unions, and the workers' movement was split between support for Abdel-Nasser and Naguib. Despite the opposition of trade unionists in Alexandria and Kafr al-Dawwar, Nasser's control of the Interior Ministry, however, gave a decisive advantage to the minority of trade unionists who were working with the Revolutionary Command Council. He mobilised the police and the state's newly created mass organisations such as the Liberation Rally and the paramilitary National Guard to create an impression of widespread popular support for a strike by Cairo transport workers demanding the continuation of military rule.
Although Nasser owed an important part of his victory over Naguib to this alliance with sections of the trade-union leadership, it was not until 1957 that the regime felt secure enough to permit the formation of a national federation of trade unions. The founding congress of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) took place on 30 January 1957, attended by 101 members representing seventeen unions and professional associations with 242,485 members, under the presidency of Anwar Salama, whose candidacy for the post of Federation president had been approved by Nasser. The congress represented a decisive break with the past and the consummation of a new relationship between the trade unions and the state. Although the unions represented at the founding congress had their roots in the independent unions of the 1940s, the Federation created a new, centralised structure for the trade-union movement which was shaped fundamentally by the needs of the state, rather than responding to pressure from below for greater coordination across the workers' movement (see Chapter 4 for more details on the ETUF structure).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bread, freedom, social justice by Anne Alexander, Mostafa Bassiouny. Copyright © 2014 Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: From the Republic of Tahrir to the Republic of Fear? Theorising Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt1. From Nasserism to Neoliberalism: A New Amalgam of State and Private Capital
2. The Changing Structure of the Egyptian Working Class in the Neoliberal Era
3. Strikes, Protests and the Development of a Revolutionary Crisis
4. Organisation in the Workplace Before the Revolution: The Nasserist Model in Crisis
5. From Strike Committee to Independent Union
6. The Revolution's Social Soul: Workers and the January Revolution
7. Workers' Organisations Since the Revolution
8. The Crisis of Representation: Workers and Elections
9. Tathir: The Struggle to Cleanse the State
Conclusion: Beyond the Republic of Dreams: Revolutionary Organisation, Democracy and the Question of the State