The club HQ kept telling us the protesters were traitors, foreigners, and urging the ultras to go down there and do something about it. But when we got there, to Tahrir, we formed our own opinion: we bonded with the protesters and became part of them.
Ultras from rival club al-Ahly also joined in the fighting. By the end of the day numerous police cars had been torched, the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was on fire, and protesters controlled Tahrir Square.
He’s thin, Mahmoud, with a cheeky smile poking out from beneath his red-and-white Zamalek scarf. He says: ‘Why don’t you ask me about football?’ So I throw him some inane question about Zamalek’s position in the league. He chuckles: ‘Since the revolution I’ve been neglecting football hooliganism for a bigger cause: the revolution. I can speak for both myself and every ultra. We all have.’
A soft coup
On 29 January, with several hundred protesters killed across Egypt, the demonstrators forced the riot cops of the Central Security to vacate the streets; the ordinary police force withdrew too, in a calculated tactic to promote lawlessness. Army units were positioned at strategic points, but having refused an order from the interior ministry to use live ammo on the demonstrators, they took no part in the maintenance of law and order. All across Cairo, neighbourhoods responded by creating vigilante squads armed with clubs and small firearms. The main aim of these groups was to fend off the baltagiya—essentially a network of civilian thugs paid and organized by the police to carry out such beatings, rapes and tortures as are necessary to pacify a city of 22 million people without rights or decent livelihoods.
The moment was essentially a soft coup by the army against the parts of the regime loyal to Mubarak, but at the same time it created ‘fragmented power’ on the streets: not so much the ‘dual power’ of Marxist theory, but the kind of deconstructed power we saw taking shape in the vacuum left by Hurricane Katrina and would see, at isolated moments, in Greece and London later in 2011.
Though the precise details of how the military then seized power remain shrouded, there can be few clearer examples of an economics-driven split within a ruling class. Gamal Mubarak’s neoliberal programme of privatizations and corporate land grabs had been actively championed by the IMF and by leading European politicians: from Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson to French industry minister Eric Besson and, of course, Silvio Berlusconi, as well as many of the business leaders who gather annually at Davos.
Gamal and his brother Alaa had built a personal fortune for the family, estimated at around $70 billion, by extracting stakes in the newly privatized enterprises. Like many of the morally dubious enterprises that have collapsed in chaos since 2008, it was run from a business address in London.
But decades before the Mubaraks created their neoliberal fiefdom, the army had created its own economic empire: factories, tourist resorts and service businesses, replete with a supply chain of privately held companies dependent on army patronage. The politicians and media types aligned with this section of Egyptian capital saw the state, not global capitalism, as their meal ticket. The generals, together with this ‘national’ faction of Egyptian capital, had material reasons to resent the Mubarak clique—above all the impending stitch-up of the presidential succession—and they saw their moment.
While the masses were on the streets, these two factions fought a Shakespearean death-tragedy behind closed doors, and the army won. First, they forced Mubarak to concede the appointment of a vice president; next, the sacking of his cabinet and its replacement with army-aligned politicians. On 1 February, with a million people in Tahrir, they forced Mubarak to announce he would no longer seek re-election. The next day, Mubarak-loyal politicians paid camel drivers to gallop into Tahrir Square to attack protesters: the aim was to present to the world the illusion of a mass backlash, an ‘enough reform and lawlessness’ movement.
When, after two days and nights of hand-to-hand fighting, the camel-backed counter-revolution failed, Tahrir began to fill with a much wider demographic of protesters who, day by day, rejected the various compromises and reshuffles offered by Mubarak. Who can forget the old man holding up a placard that read: ‘Mubarak: Go! My arms are tired’?
Finally, on 10 February, at the demand of the first meeting in decades of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Mubarak recorded a speech announcing he would step down. But Gamal stormed into the presidential palace and forced his father to scrap the recording and make a new one. This promised only elections by September.
It was to be the final straw for the masses, who were flooding into Tahrir in their hundreds of thousands, and for the army, which was now beginning to split openly under pressure of demands from Tahrir and because of its fraternization with the protesters. The generals forced Mubarak’s departure—without further ado or speeches—on 11 February, to be replaced in power by General Tantawi and the SCAF itself.
But by now a new force was making itself heard: the working class.
The collapse of invisible walls
The Egyptian working class bears the birthmarks of its creation, first under British rule and then during the state capitalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser: it is concentrated in the public sector, in army-owned factories and in recently privatized enterprises. On the eve of the revolution, 28 per cent of the workforce was employed by the state and just 10 per cent in the ‘modern’ sector—that is, in textiles, construction, energy, transport and services. More than a third of workers were ‘informal’, and the rest worked on the land.4
Though shrunk by twenty years of privatization, and further diminished by job losses after 2008, the Egyptian working class had a clear demographic identity under Mubarak. You could see it on the picket lines that formed in early February.
At the gates of the Suez Canal Port Authority, it was middle-aged men and their sons in orange overalls. Big-chested guys who’d had to fight for these jobs—and defy the state-run union to go on strike and occupy the port. Among the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers in their blue baseball caps, who marched into Tahrir calling for Mubarak to go, there were more women: but that same confident, educated culture was evident. They’d been the first to break from Mubarak’s state-run union federation in 2008.
This is a class with status: the men seem physically larger than the urban poor, and the demographic is discernibly centred on the age group 35–55. And they have a culture of solidarity. For Mubarak, the price of maintaining the state-run union as an organ of control within the workplace had been to hold congresses, maintain the NDP’s membership of the Socialist International, to keep the ILO onside, and to deliver material concessions. In 2008, 5.9 million government workers won a 30 per cent pay rise in 2008, while Mubarak was forced to double food, health and education subsidies, from LE64 billion to LE128 billion ($22 billion).5
By 9 February the pattern of action was clear: workers were beginning to form unions separate from the state-run union, often seizing the workplace and kicking out the boss. At a textile factory in Daqahliya they sacked the CEO and began self-management. At a printing house in Cairo, they did the same. In Suez, where there had been heavy repression, the steel mill and the fertilizer factory had declared all-out strikes until the fall of the regime.6
Egyptian activists are split over the significance of this late-stage strike wave: some think it was a second-order effect of the mass unrest, others believe it was decisive in beginning to split the army—and thus forcing the SCAF to depose Mubarak. What is not in doubt is that, after 11 February, worker unrest took off.
Mohammed Shafiq, a psychiatrist at the Manshiyet el Bakri hospital in Cairo, had been in Tahrir Square as a volunteer medic from day one, treating the injured in one of the makeshift clinics:
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