the peasantry, who drifted into the world of informal work. More and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs of North Africa. A decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rates reduced the budgets of the state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people. Less income and less services produced slumlands whose frustrations led in two directions, as the Cairo-based scholars Helmi Sharawy and Azza Khalil noted: “acquiescence or revolt.”
Revolts of various kinds were the order of the day, since at least 2006. Egyptian society sprouted a series of organizations in addition to the April 6 Movement: March 20 Movement, March 9 Movement for the Independence of Universities, Egyptian Movement for Change (Kefaya), Women for Change (Mesreyat Maa al-Tagheer), the Coordination Committee for the Defense of Worker Rights, Committee for the Defense of Insurance Funds, Centre of Manual Workers of Egypt, Federation of Pensioners, Engineers Against Sequestration, the Mahallah Committee for Workers’ Consciousness, Workers for Change and so on.
Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act. Over the past decade, peasant struggles in Sarando, Bhoot and Kamshish have been commonplace. The latter, Kamshish, is not twenty kilometers from the birthplace of Mubarak (Kafr el-Meselha) and only eight kilometers from that of Sadat (Mit Abu al-Kum). In May 2011, as Tahrir Square remained the focal point of the Arab Spring, the farmers of Kamshish honored the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Salah Hussein who led the charge against the local landlord al-Fiqi family by founding the Union of Egyptian Farmers. The doctors at the Zazazig Hospital and the lawyers of Port Said and Cairo, as well as the school principals of Minieh inspired other professionals to toss aside their hesitancy for dignity. “In Egypt,” economist Omar Dahi writes in the IDS Bulletin, “some 1.7 million workers took part in over 1,900 strikes between 2004 and 2008, before the financial crisis, when the number of strikes and work stoppages reached into the thousands. The laboring classes were reacting in fury not only to their higher cost of living, but also to the mounting extravagance and conspicuous consumption of the elite.” It was the rate of social inequality and the neoliberal consumerism of the upper ranks that unshackled the people’s hesitancy.
In Tunisia, the depth of an obvious political society such as in Egypt is not apparent. Nonetheless, as political scientists Laryssa Chomiak and John Entelis point out in the Middle East Report, “Tunisia’s disenfranchised masses developed mechanisms for dodging the tentacles of the authoritarian state, including tax avoidance, illegal tapping of municipal water and electricity supplies, and illicit construction of houses. Within this atmosphere of circumvention, moments of contentious politics nonetheless occurred eventually leading to the precipitous puncturing of Ben Ali’s system of control.” One of the most spectacular punctures took place in the southwestern mining town of Redayef (near the mining area of Gafsa) in January 2008. The state-owned phosphate company conducted a fraudulent hiring process, cashiering the unconnected and hiring eighty-one people with connections to the upper state apparatus. Redayef is the Tunisian Mahallah. The street protests of the workers and the unemployed expanded to include students in Tunis, Sfax and Sousse, and the broadest of the social classes from the Gafsa governorate. The main axis here was the underground cadre of the banned Workers’ Communist Party, whose cells among the Tunisian diaspora in France hummed with solidarity activity. Wives and widows of the imprisoned workers captured the streets in April, and the police responded with their own habits. In June, two protestors were killed. The dynamic smoldered, not erupting, but not dying down either. Bouazizi’s action would oxygenate it.
It has been a long-standing question in the Arab world: When will we rule ourselves? Not long ago, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and America’s Hillary Clinton offered praise for their “democratic” friends, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak. To top the obscenity, during the capture of Tahrir Square, Obama conferred with the Saudis on the democratic transition in Egypt: this is like asking a carnivore how to cook tofu.
In 1953, the aged King Farouk of Egypt set sail on his yacht, al-Mahrusa. Guarded by the Egyptian navy, he waved to people who he considered his lesser: Nasser, son of a postman, and Sadat, son of small farmers. Their Colonel’s Coup was intended to break Egypt away from monarchy and imperial domination. Nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy came alongside land reforms. But these were ill conceived, and they were not able to throttle the power of the Egyptian bourgeoisie (whose habit for quick money continued, with three quarters of new investments going to inflate a real estate bubble). The economy was bled to support an enlarged military apparatus, largely to fight the US-backed armies of the Israelis. Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 War led Nasser to resign on June 10. Thousands of people took to the streets of Cairo, and filled Tahrir Square, this time to ask Nasser to return to office, which he did, although much weakened.
The democratic opening of 1952 was, however, unable to emerge. Military officers, even if temperamentally progressive, are loathe to hand over the reins of power. The security apparatus went after the Muslim Brotherhood certainly, but it was fiercest against the Communists. Nasser did not build up a strong, independent political culture. “His ‘socialism,’” as the historian L. S. Stavrianos put it, “was socialism by presidential decree, implemented by the army and police. There was no initiative or participation at the grass-roots level.” For that reason, when Sadat moved the country to the Right in the 1970s there was barely any opposition to him. Nasserism after Nasser was as hollow as Perónism after Perón.
The revolt that broke out in 2011 was against the regime set up by Sadat and developed by Mubarak. The Sadat-Mubarak regime was a national security state that had no democratic pretensions. In 1977, Sadat identified Nasserism with “detention camps, custodianship and sequestration, a one-opinion, one-party system.” Sadat allowed three kinds of political forces to emerge, but then hastily defanged them (the leftist National Progressive Grouping Party), co-opted them (the Arab Socialist Party and the Socialist Liberal Party), or tolerated their existence (Muslim Brotherhood). Cleverly, Sadat put in place what he accused Nasser of building. It was under Sadat, and Mubarak (with his own Oddjob, Omar Suleiman, in tow) that the detention camps and torture centers blossomed. Egypt’s 2006 budget provided $1.5 billion for internal security. There is about one police officer for every thirty-seven Egyptians. This is extreme. The subvention that comes from the United States of $1.3 billion per year helps fund this monstrosity. This archipelago of torture would be essential when the United States needed to send those who had been placed in the “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11 to sing their songs under distress.
The revolt of 2011, in addition, was egged on by sections of the business elite who were disgusted with the neoliberal consumerism of the clique around Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son. This repulsed national bourgeoisie was no match for multinational capital and understood that the cannibalization of the country would not be a benefit to them in the long term: it would simply cut the heart out of the vast masses, whose anemic social condition would mean that the Egyptian economy would not be able to demand any of the goods produced and sold by the national bourgeoisie. No wonder then that on January 31 notable businessman Naguib Sawiris joined the Tahrir Square dynamic. As Paul Amar put it at jadaliyya.com, “Sawiris and his allies had become threatened by Mubarak-and-son’s extreme neoliberalism and their favoring of Western, European and Chinese investors over national businessmen. Because their investments overlap with those of the military, these prominent Egyptian businessmen have interests literally embedded in the land, resources and development projects of the nation.” Their interests paralleled those in the military who were also disgusted by the corruption and a policy of privatization that was plainly the defenestration of the national economy. That is why Gamal Mubarak and his cronies were ejected from the cabinet on January 28, and this is why the military gleefully put Gamal, his brother and his now hapless father on trial in August 2011.
In Tahrir Square, twenty-two year old Ahmed Moneim told the BBC, “The French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” His struggle in 2011 is to repeal the national security state and to bring into place a dignified society. That is the basic requirement, to return to the slogan of the French Revolution. The dynamic that Ahmed identifies returns Egypt to the original movement of 1952, but this time it
