A Few Words on the Mahalla Declaration of Autonomy

Last Friday, as most attention was focused on the demonstrations in Cairo, workers in the big Egyptian textile city of al-Mahallat al-Kubra (Mahalla for short) took over the City Council offices, ousted the council, declared themselves a Revolutionary Committee, and declared that Mahalla was announcing its autonomy from the "Ikhwani (Brotherhood) State."

There were predictable jokes on Twitter about Mahalla joining the United Nations and laments that it was just one more item making Egypt look ridiculous in foreign eyes.

Of course Mahalla is not about to become an independent republic, but I suspect this incident deserves more attention, and I suspect less giggling, than it has received. If you haven't heard about it, that's because all the Western reporters are in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Most Westerners have probably never heard of Mahalla, or al-Mahallat al-Kubra, but it's of the most important industrial cities in Egypt, the center of the country's huge textile industry. You probably own some shirts or sheets or bathrobes made in Egypt; odds are,they were made in Mahalla.

It's a big place. (In fact, that's pretty much what "al-Mahallat al-Kubra" means: the Big Place. That may contribute to its anonymity.) Perhaps half a million people today. And for all those people who are arguing over whether the Egyptian Revolution is a revolution of Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood or a Revolution of liberal intellectuals led by a bunch of young folk with Facebook and Twitter accounts, the workers in the textile mills of Mahalla are convinced it's a revolution of an oppressed proletariat. And what's more, they think it started in 2006. And they sure don't think it's over.

Indeed from 2006 onward, and really picking up momentum in 2008, Mahalla has been wracked by labor activism, general strikes, and worker-management and worker-security forces clashes, and some of the inspiration for the later Egyptian Revolution took spark from the Mahalla strikes, most notably the April 6 movement.

Throughout the post-fall-of-Mubarak era, Islamists and liberals have fought constantly over politics and religion, while the economy has drifted steadily downward. Many political forces give lip service to the plight of Egyptian industrial workers, but no one has done anything effective. The real revolution may be yet to come, and the powers in office whether Muslim Brothers or liberals, will be held responsible,

Not wanting to sound like a Marxist here, but the day may yet come when last Friday's odd little declaration of an autonomous workers' soviet in Mahalla may not seem quite so humorous,

Mahalla's Big Textile Plant

Egypt Arresting Islamist Bloggers

Happy Egyptian National Day. The major news has been the arrest of at least three well-known, moderate bloggers associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Since this has already been covered extensively by Menassat, commented upon at some length by Marc Lynch and by The Arabist, Global Voices, and a lot of other sites, I'll only comment briefly: this is going after the younger, moderate wing of the Brotherhood that, in fact, is seeking to provide a more mainstream and reformist face to the organization. Perhaps that's why the government considers them threatening. It also comes in the wake of the arrest earlier, as these links note, of ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Abu al-Fattouh, a senior Brotherhood moderate. For those who read Arabic an interesting interpretation by ‘Amr Choubki here. And, though it precedes the arrests of the bloggers, this piece in English by Khalil Anani offers some important reflections.

This adds to the sense of growing tension in Egypt. I understand many people did turn out for the Mulid of Sayyida Zaynab despite the government ban on religious festivals due to swine flu. Strikes in all kinds of industries have been increasingly frequent and confrontational. The crackdown on the Brotherhood's younger and more forward-looking bloggers isn't a good sign.

Egyptian Tax Collectors Form Independent Union

In what looks, at least for now, like a major victory, Egypt's real estate tax collectors have formed an independent union, the first since 1957. It represents a break with the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions, the (government approved and hence pro-government) umbrella for official unions.

Egyptian opposition figures are celebrating what appears to be a breakthrough, though if you read the article carefully, while the Ministry of Manpower cannot "disapprove" the new union, the government has 30 days to challenge it in court.

Whatever the fate of the new union, it may serve as a reminder that Egypt may be authoritarian, but it is not totalitarian: there have always been elements of genuine representation, if only at the margins, among some of the professional syndicates, some local government institutions, and the courts. That has eroded in recent years, but it is not, and never has been, the fearsome monolith that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

First the Tax Collectors, Now the Clowns

Just about a month ago, I noted that the wave of labor actions in Egypt had reached the point where even the tax collectors were on strike. (With April 15 so close, that doesn't sound so bad.)

Now, however, it's the circus clowns who are on strike. Arabic story here, English version and a photo at the earlier link.

One of the things they're protesting is privatization. I had not realized that the circus was state-run. It must be a legacy from the Nasser era when everything was being nationalized. And apparently they want to keep it that way.

More on the April 6 Fizzle

Okay, I guess the age of Facebook as a fomenter of revolution isn't here yet, after all. The 6 April Movement is going to have trouble explaining the results of the day after all the preliminary hype.

Reading various accounts of today's demonstrations in Egypt, it seems clear that the earlier impression was correct: the 6 April Movement failed to even score major demonstrations, let alone a general strike. A few reports from various places: here, in which the total number arrested throughout Egypt is estimated at only 45, and it is noted that at the demonstration outside the Journalists' syndicate, the State Security Investigations and other police outnumbered the demonstrators; this article entitled "Some University Students Protest as Others Play Ping-Pong," and, given the fact that the organizers urged the demonstrators to wear black as a symbol of their protest, I have to look at this photo and ask, does riot police body armor count?

I'm not making fun of the protestors: there's plenty worth protesting, and they did take risks in organizing their movement, but their ability to rally supporters has proved to be virtually nil. They had a good virtual presence, as I noted in my earlier backgrounder, but 73,000 Facebrook friends using pseudonyms is not quite the same as protestors willing to stand up to the billy-clubs of the security police. The Muslim Brotherhood "supported" the demonstrators but had few people actually on the streets; it may be that this Al-Ahram assessment ("Too Old School to Strike") is on target. Ayman Nour showed up to rally demonstrators at one point and apparently became the center of attention for photographers, but there seem to have been only tiny clumps of people at the main targets of the demonstrations (trade union headquarters, the Journalists' Union, etc.).

UPDATE AND VOCABULARY NOTE: I've been surfing English-language Egyptian blogs, websites etc. tonight, and one word keeps cropping up in a range of blogs from the Trotskyite left through the Nasserists and Islamists and on out to the fairly pro-government folks. The most common word in the frequency cloud, at least in my unscientific opinion, is the one I've seen in almost every posting: pathetic. When left, rightl and center all agree on the same dismissive word, your revolution needs a bit of fine tuning.

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.

Backgrounder: Egypt's 6 April Movement

Now that we've reached the beginning of April, the threat of a major general strike in Egypt on April 6 looms nearer. This gives me an opportunity to mention one of the most vigorous online opposition groups to emerge in the age of Web 2.0, the Facebook group known as the 6 April Movement. Begun last year as a youth movement formed to support the striking workers at the big textile complex in Al-Mahallat al-Kubra, the movement has been harassed and its leaders arrested more than once, but it has blossomed into an opposition group primarily communicating through social networking, particularly its eponymous Facebook group, which currently has some 73,000 members (and is currently reporting a wave of arrests). I've commented previously on Web 2.0 and Authoritarianiam, after Egyptian police were attacked by Armed Forces cadets and video was up quickly even though there was a ban on all reporting of the incident. I've also noted that some young, web-savvy Egyptians have even found ways to make fun of the security police on Twitter.

Despite the fact that Reporters Without Borders recently listed Egypt as one of the top twelve "Internet Enemies" in the world — (my report here, the full Reporters Without Borders report here, with the section on Egypt on pages 11 and 12) — the 6 April movement has continued to grow. From the Reporters Without Borders report (punctuation in original):

"Unlike its Saudi and Syrian neighbours, Egypt is a country in which freedom of speech does still exist. An independent press has developed and criticism is permitted.

"More than a space for expression, the Web has become a space for action, particularly through social networks, which little by little have started taking on the role of trade unions, which were banned under the state of emergency law. In force since 1981, the emergency legislation banned trade unions from political activities. But the most active Internet users call virtual rallies that can give rise to genuine political demands. One group, created on the social networking site Facebook, and boasting more than 65,000 members, [Today it's showing 73,000 — MCD] was used to channel protests in April 2008. Calling on Egyptians to “stay home”, it contributed to a general strike and one of the largest expressions of unrest in several years. Since no law regulated this space, the interior ministry in 2002 set up a department responsible for investigating online offences. As a result, security forces arrested around 100 bloggers in 2008 for “damaging national security”.

"One of the members of the 6 April Facebook group, Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed spent two weeks in prison for being a member of this group. Its creator, Ahmed Maher, a 27-year-old engineer, was detained and beaten for 12 hours by police in Mahalla, north of Cairo, who wanted to identify the rest of the group. Shortly afterwards, another blogger, Kareem El-Beheiri, spent 73 days in custody in connection with articles posted on his blog (http://egyworkers.blogspot.com/), dealing with workers’ rights and official corruption."

And it gained a fair amount of attention worldwide. Among background reports on the movement, see this New York Times Magazine article; a writeup on Wikipedia; a feature story from Wired; and a page on the movement's website explaining themselves in English. Another mostly English website is here, but hasn't been updated since January. Those who read Arabic can consult the Facebook page, this Arabic website and its "About" page, and links from there. The genius of the blogging medium is that I can point my readers to lots of background information without having to repeat the information here: click away.

The efforts to pull off a general strike last year were met with heavy-handed security presence, a sealing off of the textile plants at Mahalla from Cairo to prevent protestors from the capital reaching them, and a heavy presence throughout Cairo as well; but Twitter and YouTube and other such services soon had plenty of firsthand accounts of events. The security forces prevented an explosion, but the social networking sites made sure the opposition knew what was going on.

The 6 April Movement has been calling for a new general strike and "Day of Anger" this April 6. You can even download your anti-Mubarak posters from Flickr. So expect a reasonably tense day of protests next Monday.

The future of social networking sites as hotbeds of protest or even revolution remains to be proven, and certainly the North Koreas and Burmas of the world can shut out the sites by keeping computers and Internet access limited, but countries that are part of the global information system will find it harder and harder to suppress the use of social networking.

The interesting thing is that until quite recently, Facebook did not have an Arabic-language "front end"; there were plenty of Arabic pages and Arabic groups, but one still had to have some knowledge of a Western language to navigate the buttons, etc. Last month it became available in a fully Arabic format. Perhaps to show evenhandedness, a Hebrew front end was launched at the same time. (To switch to either, in Facebook one goes to "Settings," then "My Account," then you have to scroll down as the languages are listed in their own alphabets after the Roman-Alphabet languages. Except for East Asian languages which are in the proper alphabetical place. Consistency is hard in cross-language matters.)

And I just followed some links and discovered this Arabic-language website explaining Web 2.0 step by step and service by service: a sort of introduction for the masses; it seems to have been around since January.

Egypt's Strike Wave: Even the Tax Collectors are Striking

I've previously mentioned Egypt's continuing wave of strikes. In recent weeks we've seen strikes by workers in the textile mills of Shibin al-Kom, strikes by television producers at the main Radio-TV building, protests by Al-Ahram columnists over restrictions on freelancing, lawyers' protests, a pharmacists' strike, scientific researchers demanding more subsidies, etc. etc.... and national level strikes last April to mark Mubarak's 80th birthday and ongoing labor troubles in the big industrial center of Mahalla al-Kubra.

Here's a bookmarks page by blogger Hossam al-Hamalawy, a labor activist (sort of a Trotskyite as near as I can tell) which collects a number of pieces (some in English and some in Arabic) on various labor actions and the efforts to create a free union movement. I'm not endorsing his Marxism or his interpretation, but this labor unrest has received very little attention in the West, at least outside of a few left-leaning academics such as the MERIP folks or Stanford's Joel Beinin, but it seems to be spreading and more of us should probably be following it.

You will notice that one of the major actions involves strikes by the real estate tax collectors. I will let you make up your own punchline on that one, but when the tax collectors start to strike, something is definitely going on.

Egypt's Continuing Labor Issues

The latest group to strike in Egypt is the pharmacists' syndicate (shorter English version here). With so many big international, war-and-peace issues in the Middle East, internal domestic problems tend to get little coverage in the international press, but in recent years, and particularly for the past two years, labor-related and pay-related issues have provoked a wave of strikes, demonsrations, and protests across Egypt. While some demonstrations, such as those in support of the people of Gaza, do get some coverage due to their international political content, many of the strikes go unreported or barely remarked upon.

For well over a year now Egypt's big industrial city in the Delta, Al-Mahalla al-Kubra, center of the Egyptian textile industry, has been wracked by labor actions; during intense periods of trouble there, the government has barred reporters from traveling from Cairo to Mahalla. Farmers across the country have protested low agricultural prices and incomes for some time, and there have been occasional reports of violence related to the farmers' protests. Most trade unions and professional syndicates have grievances; the doctors have protested in the past and now, as noted, it's the pharmacists' turn.

The troubles do not seem to pose a major threat to the government in the short term, but they are clearly a symptom of the international economic situation and Egypt's own economic troubles. With Husni Mubarak now past 80, they may also reflect a growing sense of fin du regime and a staking of claims against his successor, combined with the sense that the government is doing little to ameliorate the economic situation. The government has pursued its traditional approach of reactively appeasing demands by important groups and ignoring those it feels it can.

Egypt is certainly not the only country where major labor unrest has occurred, but as the biggest and most industrialized of the Arab countries, with some of the best organized and long-established professional syndicates, the growing unrest seems worthy of note.

While the unrest probably deserves more attention than it has been accorded in the West, none of this means that Egypt is in some sort of pre-revolutionary situation. Egyptians have long had a stoic acceptance of their government's inability to improve life (and Egypt has a much higher standard of living than it did a generation ago). But with political succession in the offing -- in 2011 assuming Mubarak lives out his term -- the turmoil deserves a certain amount of attention.