Sarah Hawas
Cairo, Febuary 9 2010
It's not Facebook, or Twitter, or the MB, or the middle class, or Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the CIA, Mossad, Saudi, the PA, Timbuktu OR the illuminati! Read the signs - aren't there enough? This uprising has one single goal - the removal of Mubarak and his regime, and nothing less than that. Mubarak himself says he's "fed up" with being president. One of many running jokes on the streets here in Cairo suggests that any day now he might just self-immolate in protest! Perhaps we could all calm down and review the symptoms before, next thing we know, the Haitians are being accused of financially backing this uprising!
As independent labor unions make their way to Tahrir and thousands set up camp outside Parliament, over two weeks into the popular Egyptian intifada, many workers throughout the country have reportedly gone on strike in solidarity and in demand for higher wages and social equality. It would be a mistake to assume that this is a "new development" or that these actions merely adorn this national liberation struggle, whose main international symbol has become Tahrir square. The reality is quite the opposite.
The events of the last two weeks are not new and they are not unprecedented. They are the culmination of many years' worth of social organizing in the face of consistently brutal repression. My generation of students and activists was born in part out of the solidarity protests of the second Palestinian intifada, but more importantly, through witnessing virtually uninterrupted workers' strikes and sit-ins throughout the country. The last year rarely saw a quiet day in the downtown area of Cairo, where the People's Assembly is located, along with several ministries and the notoriously sinister-looking Mugamma' building which houses the government's largest archive of paperwork and has been a symbol of foreboding bureaucratic nightmares for Egyptians in the last four decades and more. These strikes and sit-ins were almost always ended by force, thanks to relentless police violence that most people had simply become accustomed to. On January 25th, and then again most definitively on Friday the 28th, the people of Egypt said Enough!
It is an insult to Egypt's people, particularly Egyptian workers, to suggest - as many media outlets and international officials have continuously done, since January 25th - that the current Egyptian uprising is a) new to the streets of Egypt, b) led or characterized exclusively by middle-class youth or, even worse, c) staged or hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. It speaks to the vast ignorance of some, and the racism of many, to espouse the stale Zionist mantra that chalks up any political activity to the "Islamist influence", just as it is wildly untrue that the Egyptian uprising exclusively (or even just primarily) owes its debt to a Facebook page, twitter, or the internet at large. I say this as someone who has not used Facebook or any other social networking site in over a year: the chants, slogans, signs and anger on the streets of Egypt are all too familiar to the ears of anyone who's been listening in the last few years.
The people in Tahrir square, outside the Parliament building, and their counterparts throughout Cairo and the rest of Egypt have been resisting with both conventional forms of protest, mass strikes, sit-ins and even factory takeovers and self-management for years. They have also been resisting the neoliberal ghetto run by the NDP and its mafia through more autonomous, day-to-day strategies of mutual aid and cooperative production. Almost half the country (if not more) survives through informal economy, and communities outside Greater Cairo have traditionally relied on their own collective forms of production and distribution, in the face of unruly privatization programs and microcredit slavery.
It was through a thoroughly grassroots, decentralized and localized form of mobilization that we came to see the success story of January 25th and the days to follow. It was through an uncontained, unled presence that we saw the central security forces pushed back and nearly destroyed on Friday the 28th. It was through popular word of mouth, neighborhood organization and voluntary participation that Egyptians survived the absence of the police, and their murderous return. It was through fearless cooperation and trust that Egyptians protected their homes and neighborhoods by night, defended eachother and the square against rabid, "pro-Mubarak" thugs and it is through the same cooperative spirit that they continue to share food, water and medical supplies in Tahrir square today.
There is enormous diversity in Egypt - social, political, ideological, and so on. Even our opposition movement has historically been characterized as a joke, because its parties and members run the gamut from Islamists to liberals to die-hard Trotskyites and Nasserites, and much more. But the absence of any agenda or blueprint in Tahrir square is seriously outdone by the presence of direct, cooperative action between people who are united by one thing only: their determination to end the reign of Mubarak and his appointed regime, at all costs. If anyone is to blame for this, it is Mubarak and his government itself.
Sarah Hawas is The Daily Nuisance's Arabic to English translator. She is based in Cairo.
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