Middle East Studies Association 2011 Conference Presentation Paper (Rough Draft) Back to Class?

Activist-Intellectuals and the Egyptian Workers Movement Do not cite without the authors explicit permission Brecht De Smet Ghent University

Whereas most international and domestic observers emphasized the role of urban youth in instigating the Egyptian revolution of January 25 that ousted president Mubarak, researchers of the Egyptian workers movement have stressed the importance of labor actions in the fall of Mubarak. Especially from 8 February on, workers organized strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations demanding social justice and often explicitly siding with the masses of Tahrir. These mass strikes, just as the mass mobilizations on Tahrir, did not come into existence out of thin air; they are not isolated events, but they constituted a new phase in a longer process of emancipatory struggle. Since the last two decades Egypts limited civil society saw the rise of three important social movements: the farmers movement in the countryside, the workers movement, and the civil-democratic movement. In my presentation I focus on the last two of these movements: the workers and civildemocratic movement. I argue that, even though these two movements have developed separately, advancing different demands and creating their own organizations and networks, there have been important moments when these systems of emancipatory activity were entwined. The strike movement of the textile workers in the Delta city of Mahalla al-Kubra initiated a shared activity system between actors from the workers and civil-democratic movement. I analyze the different ways in which civil-democratic actors participated in this shared activity system through Andy Blundens post-Hegelian notion of modes of

subjectivity which differentiates between relations of non-recognition, colonization, commodification and solidarity. Solidarity is established as a key subjectivity which advances the development of both movements. In order to further understand the notion of solidarity I turn to Gramscis concept of dialectical pedagogy, which entails a reciprocal process of learning. A key element in this learning process is prolepsis, a term from the Vygotskyan school of cultural psychology. Civil-democratic actors played an important proleptic role in constructing the workers movement as a national workers movement. During the 25 January Revolution the shared activity-system between workers and civil-democratic actors was renewed and transformed, but this development was halted after the fall of Mubarak, when political demobilization on the one hand, and increasing workers mobilizations on the other, led to a divide (in general) between the movements.

When president Hosni Mubarak took over power it seemed as if the regime was embarking on a project of controlled democratization from above. Leaders of Tagammu the Egyptian legal left and the Communist Party abandoned street politics and grassroots mobilization in favor of a tolerated presence in Mubaraks restricted civil and political society. In the 1990s this strategy initiated an alliance between Tagammu and the regime under the guise of a secular front against the chief threat of so-called Islamic fascism. Activists dissatisfied with the opportunist turn of the old Left created their own organizations at the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s: new parties such as the Peoples Socialist Party and al-Karama , militant NGOs such as the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services, and vanguard organizations such as the Revolutionary Socialists. These organizations and networks laid the foundations of a new civil-democratic movement, but in the absence of mass movements they lacked any real social base.

The real start of the contemporary civil-democratic movement came with the return of street politics at the beginning of the new millennium. The Second Palestinian Intifada of 2000 ended two decades of apathy towards street politics, interpellating students and youth to join solidarity meetings, sit-ins and rallies. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq transformed the solidarity networks into anti-war committees. The repression of the anti-imperialist movement directed the attention of the grassroots activists towards the Egyptian regime itself. The new civil-democratic parties established the Popular Movement for Change which organized the first anti-Mubarak demonstrations, calling for free and democratic presidential elections. The Kefaya (Enough) movement spawned new grassroots civil society organizations. However, by 2006, the civil-democratic project seemed to have exhausted itself. The movement had not succeeded in building a coherent and homogenous organization, nor in drawing workers, peasants and the urban poor into its activity-system. Kefayas emphasis on broad political demands and its disregard for social issues did not attract the masses to its cause. Cut off from society at large and ridden with internal disagreements, the Kefaya movement started to disintegrate.

In 2006 the civil-democratic movement was eclipsed by the workers movement, which mobilized in a few years time some two million workers. In the 1970s, workers had began to organize strikes against Sadats Infitah, but the rise of a post-populist moral economy in the 1980s had embedded their class actions in a system of reciprocal rights and duties. The so-called work-in tactic exemplifies labor actions in this era. Instead of a classic work-stoppage, protesting workers remained in the factory after hours, reaffirming their allegiance to the cause of productivity and the national good and interpellating the state to fulfill its duties. The General Federation of Egyptian Trade-Unions played the role of

middleman between protesting workers and the State, pacifying most grievances. Militant labor actions remained isolated. The implementation of the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program and other neoliberal policies in the 1990s undermined the system of moral economy and forced workers to radicalize their methods of action. Worker struggles, in general, remained limited to one factory, however, and did not develop into a generalized strike movement. From 2006 on, the strikes at the Spinning and Weaving factory in Mahalla al-Kubra transformed the struggle of the workers. Because of the historical importance of the factory, the size of its labor force, and the militancy of the protests, the Mahalla workers were able to play a vanguard role for the whole national working class, stimulating spontaneous strikes in other companies, drawing in fresh layers to the class struggle, and constructing the foundations for a new and independent workers movement. The strikes have been covered in detail by scholars such as Joel Beinin, so I wont present the details in this paper.

Now I wish to draw attention to two aspects of the processes of collective learning in the struggle: prolepsis and the role of intellectuals. When considering the activity of learning and instruction it seems logical to put competence before performance. For how can one perform a task before knowing how to do it? This line of reasoning presumes that the capacity to resolve a task is already present within the subject in a dormant state. Vygotsky, however, claimed that it is not competence which determines performance, but performance which constructs capacities. A practice becomes a competence through the process of interiorization. With regard to the workers movement: the creation of strike committees, trade-unions, parties, songs, poems, slogans, etc. do not only organize the relation of the workers towards factory management and the State, but they also structure its own forms of consciousness and organization.

Vygotsky stressed the importance of instruction in the process of learning. Instruction by a teacher or more capable peers bridges the distance between the level of actual and potential development, but only if it is proleptic: when it anticipates, recognizes or imagines competence through the representation of a future act or development as already existing. Other psychologists of the Vygotsky school such as Meshcheryakov distinguish between autoprolepsis and heterolepsis. AUTOPROLEPSIS is self-instruction, whereby a subject imagines itself as a more capable actor. Through their strikes and actions during the last decade, Egyptian workers often anticipated a national workers movement, both in consciousness and organization. The process of autoprolepsis is echoed by worker leaders such as Sayyid Habib who claims that the workers movement teaches itself. The Mahalla strike committee acted in all regards as a de facto trade-union, leading and organizing workers. The realization in practice of the rights of election, assembly, protest and free speech of these committees also imagined a democratic reality which did not exist in the Mubarak era. Since 2009 workers increasingly protest in front of parliament, almost physically introducing their local and particular strike to the space of national politics. This chain of continuous strikes in the national sphere imagines these separate instances of struggle as part of one coherent workers movement, and it enabled workers to generalize their separate and particular experiences into shared class demands, such as the minimum wage. HETEROLEPSIS is the recognition of a subjects potential capacity to act by its more capable peers or a teacher. A real development is interpellated by the imaginary representation of the development as actual. Heterolepsis happens between different activity-systems of worker struggles, within a particular activity-system, and between worker and non-worker actors. By 2008 the successful Mahalla strike movement had become a role

model, an instructor, of labor resistance. Workers copied strike methods and demands from their peers, imagining a coherent national strike movement which did not exist on the ground. Within a particular activity-system heterolepsis is carried out by what Eyerman and Jamison called movement intellectuals, those leaders, organizers and thinkers who are organically connected to a certain social movement. Their concept is derived from Gramscis notion of organic intellectuals, the specialists who emerge historically alongside a specific class and who fulfill important directive or leading, technical or organizational and cultural or aesthetical functions of their class. With regard to the workers movement organic intellectuals are trade-union and party leaders, organizers, writers and artists who emerge from the ranks of the workers themselves. In Egypt, the strike movement of the last decade saw both a re-engagement of old organic intellectuals with the struggle as the formation of new organic intellectuals, a young generation which led the Mahalla strikes of 2007 and 2008. As the party and labor organizations of the Old Left were in crisis these new organic intellectuals were produced first and foremost in the process of the struggles themselves, and also in labor NGOs such as the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services. However, Gramsci points out that, in order to become a hegemonic social force, a power able to lead society, the working class also has to attract other subaltern groups and traditional intellectual to its project of emancipation. Traditional intellectuals are specialists who are the organic intellectuals of a class of a former social formation. From the perspective of the working class, they are the non-worker political activists, journalists, writers, artists, researchers, and so on, who may sympathize with the workers movement. Eyerman and Jamison call these actor establishment intellectuals. The disintegration of Kefaya and the saliency of the Mahalla strike movement called these traditional intellectuals back to class. They played an important proleptic-instructive role as their societal position enabled them to forge the different instances of labor struggle

into a shared activity-system and to imagine this decentralized activity-system as a developing national workers movement. Traditional intellectuals instructed workers through

transference, articulation, connection, organization and leadership. TRANSFERENCE. Journalists and political activists (who, by the way, because of the weakness of the existing parties of acted as political activists) could more easily transfer experiences, slogans, methods, forms of organization, and tactics, from one particular instance of struggle to another one. For example: technical instruments such as the use of whistles and drums but also methods of negotiation were transferred from the Mahalla experience to the strike of the tax workers in 2009. CONNECTION. By traveling from one instance of struggle to another and by using party branches, newspaper offices and radical NGOs as centers of information and coordination, political activists and journalists were able to forge networks between different groups of workers, and between workers and other subaltern groups such as farmers. These connections remained weak, however. ORGANIZATION. Political activists and journalists were often asked for technical advice on labor rights, how to conduct a strike and negotiations, how to deal with security, and so on, by groups of workers which were striking for the first time and/or lacked access to the collective memory of the working class. LEADERSHIP. Sometimes political activists and journalists played a crucial role in directing a strike by advising workers on the demands, duration and methods of the strike.

Traditional intellectuals played an important role in shaping the workers movement of today, but they also came to the workers movement with various interests, attitudes, and methods, depending on if and how they recognized the workers as a social force, a subject of emancipation. The post-Hegelian philosopher Andy Blunden offers an interesting framework

to analyze these relations of recognition, distinguishing between four modes of subjectivity: non-recognition, colonization, commodification, and solidarity. NON-RECOGNITION. Non-recognition means that the existence of the Other is not acknowledged. Before the Mahalla strike movement most political activists and intellectuals were little interested in the workers movement. The saliency of the movement forced most actors to recognize the workers as a social force. COLONIZATION is the subsumption of a subaltern Subject into another, dominant, Subject. The colonizer presents himself as the guardian of the interests of the Other. In Egypt worker subjectivities have traditionally been absorbed by nationalist, liberal, or Islamist projects: workers as (part of) people, citizens, or Muslims rather than being primarily workers. For example, a lot of workers I met criticized Kefaya activists for trying to colonize the strike movement as a part of their own civil-democratic project. Some leftist denied the workers movement any independent class agency until there is a stable democracy in Egypt. Workers have to be democrats first, and workers later. Also, Muslim Brother leaders such as Said Husayni in Mahalla were denounced by workers because of their attempts to recruit the workers movement as an auxiliary force for their political project. COMMODIFICATION is the one-dimensional recognition of a Subject as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. The Subject is fully acknowledged, but treated as a mere exchange value, a commodity. Recognition is conditional, depending on the usefulness of the Other. During the Mahalla strike movement, journalists, human rights activists, and leftist parties have been accused of commodifying the workers struggle. Journalists from the whole Egyptian spectrum came to the strike movement because it constituted a newsworthy event. As long as the movement remained a hot topic, this opportunist attitude did not have an negative effect on the movement as it enabled workers to reach out to other layers of the working class and the political community. Consequently, there was a trade between workers

producing an event and journalists sharing these events as news with civil society at large. However, as soon as the saliency and novelty of a particular strike diminished, it lost its status as event and most journalists became disengaged with the movement. For example, a few weeks after the repression of the 6 April strike in Mahalla in 2008, only a few journalists covered the repression of individual worker leaders by management and the State. In addition, some political parties and organizations, despite recognizing the strike movement as an important independent social force, approached the movement primarily as a field to recruit worker leaders and to expand their influence among workers. SOLIDARITY, is the assistance of another Subject by voluntarily lending ones own labor to the support of the others project according to their direction. Solidarity is the opposite of philanthropic colonization, because in assisting someone, the other remains the owner of the project and is thereby assisted in achieving self-determination. Solidarity is a single system of activity between two Subjects aimed at reinforcing the agency of both Subjects. The collective learning process which emerges from solidarity is what Gramsci called a dialectical pedagogy, a reciprocal relation of learning where the position of teacher and student is continuously inversed. This is also an echo of Marx his adage in the third of his Theses of Feuerbach that the educators should be educated themselves. Political leaders admitted that they learned a lot from the workers movement themselves, and cartoonists like Hassanein of al-Ahali and Essam Hanafi of al-Arabi claimed to be inspired by the Mahalla workers. The salient actions of the Mahalla workers educated activists and intellectuals outside the workers movement, whose solidarity, in turn developed the forms of organization and consciousness of the working class. For Gramsci, the ideal intellectual of the working class is a democratic philosopher, an activist-thinker who was the result of the encounter between organic and traditional intellectuals. In Egypt these activist-intellectuals take on the shape of either politicized strike

leaders such as Kamal Abu Eita, or political activists who are close to the workers. This latter group is expected to be in the words of Sayyid Habib c lose to the workers, speak the same language, and grasp their way of living when they participate in the labor movement. Intellectuals who are members of both their local working class community and the national political community have a clear advantage in establishing a relation of trust with the workers, as they are perceived as natural allies in the solidarity system. For example, young Tagammu militants such as Ahmed Belal and Muhammad Fathi, were more easily accepted by Mahalla workers because they already formed a part of the citys community. In addition, Belal could easily use his dual subjectivity as a grassroots actor and a Cairo based politician to advance the local struggle.

On 6 April 2008 Mahalla worker leaders and activists planned a new strike. Some civil-democratic actors seized this event to call for a political general strike or day of rage against the regime, trying to colonize the strike for their own political project without, however, organizing anything real on the ground. The regime reacted with a combination of repression and cooptation, dividing the Mahalla leaders and aborting the strike before it ever got started. The worker protests then moved to the streets of Mahalla, were its citizens started a small uprising. The defeat of the strike and the lack of support for the uprising in other cities spelled the end of the vanguard role of the Mahalla workers. In 2009 the center of gravity of the strike movement shifted to other instances of struggle, such as the tax workers for buildings who established the first independent trade-union in collaboration with political activists and leaders. Workers could immediately import the experiences, practices and ideas of the Mahalla vanguard into their own struggle and develop these forms of organization and thought to their logical next level: independent trade-unionism.

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Since the Mahalla strikes, worker leaders and political activists alike disagreed on the possibility of independent trade-unionism within the boundaries of the Mubarak regime. The 25 January Revolution solved this question in practice. At first, most members of the labor force joined the popular protests as citizens, participating in the spontaneous activity-system of the people against the regime. When the regime tried to reopen businesses on 7 February many workers took this as a signal to strike or demonstrate. The revolution constituted a school for the workers movement to develop its forms of organization and consciousness. It initiated a new dialectical pedagogy between the political civil-democratic movement and the economic workers movement. Working class urban communities such as Mahalla alKubra and Suez suffered the hardest confrontations with the State apparatus. In these cities independent trade-union committees and networks often constituted the organizational backbone of popular resistance. In turn, some of the popular committees which spontaneously emerged from the revolutionary process e.g. the Popular Alliance in Defence of the Revolution in Port Said developed trade-unionist practices and demands, engaging with the social dimension of the uprising. Within the activity-system of the revolution, the workers movement was organizationally strengthened with the emergence of new grassroots strike committees and the establishment of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions. General demands were raised such as the renationalization of privatized firms and a national minimum wage of 1,200 EGP, filling the empty signifier of social justice, one of the main slogans of the revolution, with a working class content. However, after the resignation of Mubarak the solidarity relations between the civildemocratic and workers movement were severed. In the following months a majority of civil-democratic actors were demobilized, while workers were mobilized in economic struggles to an even greater extent than before. As the revolutionary center of gravity shifted to the workers movement, workers were no longer generally recognized among civil-

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democratic actors as a legitimate revolutionary subject defending popular interests. Political activists and intellectuals began to question the legitimacy of the strike movement, designating the workers actions as parochialist and even counterrevolutionary because they threatened national interests, especially economic stability. For many militant civildemocratic activists who were critical of the role of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces in the so-called transition process, the fight for democracy or in the last few months, secularism, took precedence over the struggle for social and economic rights. The recent protests in Tahrir and the participation of worker organization may signify the beginning of a new dialectical pedagogy between workers and political activists. However, the disappearance of the unitary subject of the people against the regime and the crystallization of different class forces and political projects in the previous months also entails a differentiation of the civil-democratic movement along class lines. These lines cross ideological and even party boundaries. For example, while the Muslim Brotherhoods Freedom and Justice Party is close to factions of the Egyptian bourgeoisie, another offshoot, the Egyptian Current Party has developed a more pro-labor stance. Within Tagammu the leadership sides with Naguib Sawiris big business Free Egyptians Party, while many of the rank-and-file members have defected to the Socialist Popular Alliance Party.

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