The Egyptian Uprising: The Mass Strike in the Time of Neoliberal Globalization

Hundreds of Egyptian workers celebrate Labor Day in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, May 2011.

Adham Korshed/Demotix

As the Arab Spring became an Arab Summer, the failure of other uprisings to replicate the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt has raised important questions about these increasingly impressive successes.

With this in mind, I want to scrutinize Egypt carefully, looking for the points of leverage that allowed and impelled the movement to oust Hosni Mubarak in only eighteen days of protest with low mortality counts, particularly in light of the much longer and far more lethal and less successful uprisings in other countries.

The outcome in Egypt was in large part a conjunction of several visible, but rarely scrutinized, aspects of the Egyptian political economy:

• • Egypt is the poster child of neoliberal reform in the Middle East. Its rapid integration into globalized capitalism since 1990 made it vulnerable to a savvy mass movement that could exploit the pressure points in the current world system.

• • Egypt’s recent history produced a legacy of working-class militancy and organization that provided a tangible foundation for the Tahrir Square movement.

• • This combination of political-economic vulnerability and a savvy mass movement created a strategic bind for Egyptian and global capitalism in which abandoning Mubarak was the least dangerous exit from an intractable crisis.

What is notably absent from this list of key factors is the most visible feature of Egypt’s almost-peaceful regime change. The Egyptian armed forces, unlike their Libyan and Syrian counterparts,¹ decided not to attempt to crush the rebellion; this forbearance may have been a key factor in enabling the protest to succeed.

However, making military forbearance a central explanatory factor in Egypt’s outcome doesn’t answer the causal question. It simply raises two related issues:

• • Why was the military so restrained this time around, when—as Egyptian scholar Shashank Joshi put it—for fifty years Egypt’s army had “stood at the core of a repressive police state”?²

• • Why couldn’t the government, with or without a military ready to turn its guns on the protesters, endure a few more days, weeks, or even months of protest, while waiting for the demonstrators to exhaust themselves, and—as the BBC put it—“have the whole thing fizzle out”?³ This waiting game has been applied with at least some success in Yemen.⁴

The answers to these questions began to appear at the start of the uprising on January 25, 2011.

The Initial Economic Impact

Once the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo attracted the world’s attention, the international media began recording and decrying what the BBC called the business “paralysis induced by the protests” and its “huge impact on the creaking economy” of Egypt.⁵ As Finance Minister Samir Radwan complained after fourteen days of protest, the economic situation was “very serious”⁶ and “the longer the stalemate continues, the more damaging it is.”⁷

It is important to note that this complaint was not registered with any regularity in the many other countries that were subsequently swept up into the Arab Spring. Even in Libya, where the uprising inspired a $30 rise in world oil prices, the New York Times coverage of the price increase carried this ironic headline: “Turmoil in Libya Poses Threat to Italy’s Economy.” No mention was made of the Libyan economy.⁸

Unlike comparably large rebellions in neighboring countries, the Tahrir Square uprising had the sledgehammer effect on the Egyptian economy of a general strike or—perhaps more appropriately—the impact and demeanor of the “mass strike” codified in Rosa Luxemburg’s classic analysis.⁹ Starting on January 25th, the first day of the protest, tourism—the largest industry in the country, which had just begun its high season—went into free fall.¹⁰ After two weeks, it had “ground to a halt,” leaving a large portion of its two million workers with reduced or nonexistent wages, many horses dead due to lack of food, and the few remaining tourists rattling around...