Analysing Activist Cultures in the Egyptian Workers’ Movement

Abstract

The eruption of revolution in Egypt in January 2011 followed more than ten years of political ferment. Despite the intense interest in the Western media over the emblematic use of new social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by Egyptian activists, this chapter argues that engagement in the pre-revolutionary ‘culture of protest’ which developed between 2000 and 2011 involved much broader layers of society than the middle-class youth activists who emerged in leading roles during the 18-day uprising against Mubarak in January and February 2011. Over the ten years preceding the revolution, Egypt witnessed the richest period of sustained non-governmental public action for many decades. Students, industrial workers, state employees, the urban and rural poor, disabled people and even senior judges have experimented with a wide variety of collective action tactics to make claims, contest the authority of the state and its agents, and express dissent. The resurgence of collective action organised by industrial and clerical workers since 2006 was particularly noteworthy, as several features of this wave of strikes and industrial protests had rarely been seen, if at all, since the 1940s. Specifically, the large number of sustained strikes and the beginnings of a revival of independent unions capable of organising collective action on a national scale in defiance of both the government and the officially recognised Egyptian Trade Union Federation strongly echoed the experience of the period 1945–1952. Another crucial similarity lay in the explosion of workers’ protests in the context of heightened levels of dissent across society, helping to generalise a ‘culture of protest’ in the years before the revolution (El-Mahdi, 2009), again mirroring the rise of a broad movement in the 1940s opposed to the British military presence in Egypt and the British-backed monarchy.

This chapter was largely completed in December 2010, and revised in June 2011. It includes unpublished material completed during a post-doctoral fellowship attached to the Non-Governmental Public Action research programme which I held at the University of Exeter and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2007–2009, and draws on personal observations and interviews carried out in Egypt during three research visits between February and May 2011 (5–7 February, 17–21 March and 28 April–2 May). It also develops arguments made in my article ‘Leadership and Collective Action in the Egyptian Trade Unions’ (Alexander, 2010). The chapter was completed during my post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge (2010–2011).