Abstract
The article draws on precarious workers’ engagement with the Egyptian revolution between 2011 and 2013. Despite their radical moves—reclaiming land previously appropriated by the state and staging various neighbourhood protests—the workers in this ethnography refused to associate with the revolution. Their curious position between radicality and dismissal of the revolution lays the groundwork to explore neoliberal securitisation. Although securitisation evolved globally alongside neoliberalism in order to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, the particular securitisation strategies used with disparate groups of workers, and their implication on the different ways workers make claims for a good life, still need further research. The article thus explores the class project of neoliberal securitisation. It argues that securitisation has generally been marginalised in studies of labour precarity, which have tended to point to the retrenchments of welfare benefits and insecurity under market conditions. By instead positing neoliberal securitisation as a class project, I show how the evolution of property relations is drawing new actors into the class struggle. The article thus re-centre class within the literature on labour precarity and the politics of security. Based on an ethnographic study in al-Tibbin, a town built around the largest and oldest steel factory in the south of Cairo, the article explores how the differential tactics used to securitise workers’ communities deeply impacted their repertoires of political action, becoming a catalyst for class struggle between various groups of workers. Securitisation thus co-constituted precarity by continuously drawing new subjects to the class struggle. Despite this, scholars and revolutionary actors have accorded more attention to the ‘spectacular’ resistance of organised workers in contrast to precarious workers’ ephemeral but influential engagements—a tendency that has been detrimental to the revolution’s trajectory.
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22 November 2019
This article should have appeared in the March 2019 special issue of Dialectical Anthropology titled “Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity” but was unintentionally not included in the issue.
18 May 2019
This article should have appeared in the March 2019 special issue of Dialectical Anthropology titled “Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity” but was unintentionally not included in the issue.
Notes
Police day is a public holiday that commemorates the role of the police in the resistance against the British occupation in Egypt. The organisers of the protests chose that day, however, to subvert this celebration and use it as an opportunity to indict the institution in charge of policing by highlighting its transgressions (Ismail 2012).
I adopt the language of my informants, who use “revolution” to describe the events between 2011 and 2013. This, in turn, is a reflection of the language widely used in popular accounts in Egypt. But, to destabilise its meaning as a revolution, I use revolt, uprising and revolution interchangeably in the article to describe these events.
Independent trade unions have emerged in 2008 and proliferated since 2011 as an alternative to the corporatist and statist union system instated under Nasser in the 1950s, thus highlighting the right to unionise independently from the state.
We could thus read precarious workers’ disassociation from the revolution as the outcome of the recent security conditions and failure of the revolution at the time of my recent research. While this is partly true, my longer term fieldwork indicates that their critique of the revolution emerged early on, including when they were making some modest gains. Since the revolution had not really deepened, many people, including workers, did not associate with it. Of course, the time of the interviews I relay here which were after 2013, meant that people played down their participation. But as the article is arguing my interlocutors throughout opted for doing revolutionary actions without necessarily wanting to be labelled revolutionaries and making very clear they were categorically not ones.
Steel workers have also experienced precarity with the cut of their annual bonus pay—which amounted to 16 months’ worth of fixed wages paid yearly–—the retrenchment of their general benefits, as well as the fear of company shut-down given the perpetual losses generated over the last years.
Some active civilian public sector workers in other industries have been tried under military tribunals following protests. However, the majority remain relatively able to fend off police interference in their everyday lives in comparison to daily workers in the more unorganised industries.
All names have been anonymised in this article to protect the privacy of my informants.
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood also contributed to events of the Friday of rage. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood is now an illegal organisation in Egypt, whose members have are mostly imprisoned, access to research with them was rather risky and difficult to undertake.
“To disappear behind the sun” is an idiom that is popularly used in Egypt to talk about one’s life being totally jeopardised if one’s is arrested by state agents.
The understanding of wazīfa as a form of property resonates with historical debates in Islamic jurisprudence on property relations in the Arab world, wherein property was delineated as both milkiya (“ownership”) and wazīfa (“office”), respectively emphasising different claims to “things/objects” and “persons/individuals” as two ways of thinking of property relations (Mundy 2004)
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Sharryn Kasmir’s comments on an earlier draft of this article presented at the Labour at the Age of Precarity workshop at Cambridge University organised by Sian Lazar. I am also grateful to the two blind reviewers of this article for their helpful feedback. The research for this article has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
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Makram-Ebeid, D. Precarious revolution: labour and neoliberal securitisation in Egypt. Dialect Anthropol 43, 139–154 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-9540-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-9540-2