Egypt's Revolution is Only Beginning

"Perhaps the Workers are the Real Heroes"

AN EXCELLENT PIECE
By ALAIN GRESH
(vice president of Le Monde Diplomatique.)
CounterPunch

"....Egypt’s prime minister, Issam Sharaf, described this agreement as “an encouragement to Arab and foreign investment through amicable negotiation”. The government and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) are still pursuing the same liberal economic policy. They have abandoned the idea of a progressive income tax (the rate is currently a uniform 20%) and a tax on corporate earnings. On 5 June they reached agreement with the International Monetary Fund on a loan of $3bn, subject to the usual conditions of macroeconomic and financial “stability”. (Note that in April 2010 the IMF had commended “the authorities’ sound macroeconomic management and the reforms implemented since 2004”.)

The privatisations of the 2000s were also hard on the workers, made redundant in tens of thousands or forced to accept ever harsher working conditions.....

Three Egypts

Perhaps the workers are the real heroes. In the Cairo offices of the daily Al-Tahrir, Mustafa Bassiouni, an expert on union and workers’ affairs, asked: “Why is it that the uprisings in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain have not yet succeeded? In Tunisia, it was the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT)’s call for a general strike that struck the fatal blow to the government. In Egypt, the country was at a standstill; public transport was no longer running. In the last few days there were calls for political strikes, and these mobilised the population. In Suez, a strike at a fertiliser factory where workers had already been out in January 2009, to prevent exports to Israel during Operation Cast Lead, triggered a political strike,” In an article on the triggers of the Tunisian uprising (“Tunisie, quelle gifle?”, Libération, June 11-12, 2011), Christophe Ayad refers to a demonstration in the Monastir area following Israel’s deadly assault on the Gaza flotilla (31 May 2010). The slogans in this demonstration evolved from “Down with Israel!” to “Down with the 7 November System!” (when Ben Ali came to power).....

These countless protests reflect the magnitude of Egypt’s problems, as do the subjects discussed by the SCAF, the government, the political parties and the media. The list is enough to dissuade any rational person from aspiring to lead the country: the organisation of the elections; a new law on places of worship; the future of the state media; the trials of senior figures from the former regime; the regeneration of the economy; the reorganisation of the police and the state security service; the dissolution and re-election of hundreds of municipal councils; the role of the armed forces in a democratic Egypt; the status of the universities; the establishment of a minimum wage; the replacement of all senior officials; a law on trade unions. The scale of the changes needed suggests that struggles will go on for years....

In June the SCAF announced that it would go ahead with the decision, taken soon after it acceded to power, to ban strikes, and several have been harshly repressed. Yet these movements are of limited scope and have not contributed to Egypt’s economic problems, which are due to the decline in tourism, the return of 500,000 expatriate workers from Libya and the neoliberal policies pursued in Egypt for decades. What the military, some of the Islamists and the “neoliberal” forces want is a return to order.

Khaled Khamissi, author of Taxi, which describes imaginary conversations in this popular forum for the exchange of world views, said: “We are seeing the clash of two opposing forces: on one side the army, which ‘speaks in the name of the revolution, the better to kill it off’; on the other, the revolution.” In spite of the pessimism of the small minority who are disappointed because they believed the revolution would be “as smooth as the pavement of Newski Prospect” (Lenin, quoting Chernyshevski) and had forgotten that revolutions take years, hope is not dead in Egypt. In the words of a placard in Tahrir Square: “If we stop dreaming, it will be better to die, die, die.”"