The 6 April Egyptian Strike: a Fizzle?

The early reports seem to be suggesting that the big strike protest in Egypt scheduled for today is fizzling out as some other such attempts have: an overwhelming police presence, combined with a relatively small turnout of protesters and prompt arrests, rather like the protests on Mubarak's 80th birthday last May. There's a Twitter feed called #6 April, and the 6 April Facebook page, but the reports seem rather uninspiring: some arrests, some protests, a lot of online statements of solidarity, but no masses in the streets.

There's clearly no general strike. The trade unions did not buy into a general strike, merely some symbolic protests, so this is more of a youth-and-student protest day rather than a real attempt to bring the country to a halt. Being a product of the 1960s myself, I know how those in the streets may imagine themselves as real revolutionaries storming the Bastille, or junior Che Guevaras, but at the end of the day this particular Bastille is still standing and Che died horribly in Bolivia.

I know some Egyptians, especially on the fashionable left, are frustrated by the traditional Egyptian stoicism: it takes a lot to get the masses into the streets and really angry. In the salons of Maadi or Heliopolis, or the new gated communities in the desert, among doctors and lawyers and professors, there are plenty of revolutionary idealists, it's just the workers and peasants who never seem to get the message.

The country's history books talk about two "revolutions": those of 1919 and 1952. That of 1919 did have elements of a real popular uprising, but the "revolution" of 1952 was a classic military coup. ("Black Saturday" and the burning of Cairo earlier that year had more of a popular uprising to it, but it remained under fairly tight control as an anti-British protest.) The bread riots of 1977 certainly scared the government, which quickly rescinded the price increase which had provoked them — and the rioting stopped.

Perhaps it is the long history of the country that leads to a certain amount of fatalism: Egypt has a history that goes back to the First Dynasty, and arguably the periods of good government have been few and far between. Revolutionary violence often just brings in another set of faces and soon the new boss is just like the old boss: so why rock the boat?

Perhaps I'm misreading this: even in the age of social media and Twitter, I'm sitting in Washington DC and not in Cairo. But it's early evening there now, and nothing I've seen yet suggests that the impact of the strike efforts is much greater than a lot of student protests and probably expenditure of a lot of police overtime. Even the Mahalla textile plants, which were the center of the first April 6 protests a year ago, are apparently not on strike. There are scattered reports of arrests, but not in huge numbers.

UPDATE: The Arabist, who is there (unlike me), says essentially the same thing, and notes that others are reporting similarly. Only 40 arrests? That suggests a real fizzle indeed.