This is the text of a speech given by Workers’ Liberty supporter Clive Bradley at a public meeting in London on Wednesday 30 January. The transcript has been edited slightly, and some of Clive’s summating remarks have been incorporated elsewhere in the text.
There is a government now in power in Egypt which has put snipers on the roofs of buildings in the canal cities to shoot demonstrators. It has violently clamped down on demonstrations, including recent ones in the Suez Canal cities against the death penalty being given to people sentenced for violence at a football match last year. It sends armed thugs to repress democratic and secular opponents. There are allegations that there is a huge increase in sexual assault on female demonstrators in Egypt, from groups of thugs who may or may not be connected to the regime.
That’s just the immediate context. More widely, the government has introduced a constitution based on Islamic law. The question, two years on from the overthrow of Mubarak, is – “was it worth it?” Has the Egyptian revolution fulfilled of the promise it showed? Or is this all we were ever going to get?
These questions are not only pertinent to Egypt. They are relevant more broadly to what was called “the Arab Spring”. We had a revolution in Tunisia; there’s now and Islamic government. We had a revolution in Libya; Islamist movements have since gained much greater influence. In Syria, where we hoped for a democratic revolution, the opposition is increasingly dominated by Islamists. What has come of the hopes that people in these countries, and around the world, had two years ago?
It was never going to be plain sailing. No revolution is. Every revolution is contested, and there are always progressive and reactionary forces which are contending with each other. The surprising thing about the Arab revolutions that began two years ago was that Islamist forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, were not centre-stage.
Largely democratic and secular youth movements were the central force in that revolutionary moment. Prior to January 2011, many people thought that if there was to be any kind of upheaval in Egypt, it could only possibly involve the Muslim Brotherhood taking over. In fact it’s been a much more complex and contested struggle than that.
What is hugely significant now is that we are seeing enormous struggles against the Morsi government. The secular and democratic forces have not given up. They’re still on the streets, and still fighting in Tahrir Square and elsewhere. Most important of all, there is a new, independent trade union movement, which remains militant. The existence of that movement is the single most important gain from the revolutionary events of the last two years.
There is a certain despondency and cynicism in Egypt. In each of the polls there’s been – the parliamentary elections, the presidential elections, and the constitutional referendum – the turnout has got progressively smaller. The turnout for the constitutional referendum was only 32 percent. When you’ve had a huge revolutionary movement, and then within two years there’s a referendum on a huge political question that only 32 percent of people feel motivated to vote in, that’s indicative of something that’s happened to the popular mood. There’s a growing disillusionment. Morsi was elected with only 51 percent, on quite a low turnout.
The secular opposition is itself hugely divided. Most of it is entirely bourgeois – political parties whose policies, for instance on the economic front, are neo-liberal. The Muslim Brotherhood also has neo-liberal economic policies, so there’s a consensus across Egyptian politics – the Islamic government and the secular opposition – for neo-liberalism. The forces of any kind of leftist, never mind revolutionary leftist, alternative to that are very small.
There is a great deal of poverty and unemployment. Many people have not been paid for a long time, many of those that have jobs don’t have permanent contracts and haven’t for years. These were some of the factors behind the revolution in the first place. The opposition parties are presenting economic policies that have nothing to say to the masses of people except “tighten your belts”. Many of the opposition leaders are themselves millionaires.
There is one mainstream opposition force which is not quite of that character, which is led by Hamdeen Sabahi. He is an old-style Nasserite who came third in the presidential election, whose policies are not quite so bourgeois. He is certainly seen as somewhat more left-wing than other opposition leaders, but he has involved in the National Salvation Front with other bourgeois liberal opposition parties, so the extent to which he represents an actual alternative is debatable.
The radical youth movements which were at the forefront of the revolution two years ago have no experience of formal politics – standing in elections, canvassing and so on. Many of them are actively hostile to it and don’t believe that’s what politics should be.
The independent unions are a fantastic development. Such movements are rare in the region. There are strong independent unions in Algeria and Tunisia, and an independent union movement has developed in Iraq in the last decade, but it is a very new development in Egypt. There was a militant and powerful union movement in Egypt before the Nasser regime came to power in 1952. They had a system of so-called unions which were incorporated into the state, which the Mubarak regime inherited and maintained. Those bodies still exist, but the revolution facilitated the emergence of an independent union movement which declared itself in Tahrir Square on 30 January 2011.
On one level these independent unions are still weak. Over one million workers have joined the independent federations, but their organisation is still young and weak at a national level. That’s less true in individual workplaces, where rank-and-file workers’ organisations are still very strong. There’d been growing numbers of strikes throughout the 2000s in the run-up to the fall of the Mubarak regime, and strike levels have continued to rise. The union movement’s weakness is relative – existing at all is less “weak” than not existing – but the independent unions are not strong by comparison to either the forces of the government or the bourgeois opposition.
There are two independent union federations – the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), which is the main body that was declared in Tahrir Square in 2011, and there is what is effectively a split from it, called the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress (EDLC). The stated reason for their division is that the dominant forces in the EFITU wanted to push ahead with declaring a national federation, and the people who went on to form the EDLC thought this was too top-down and wanted to build grassroots organisation first. The EDLC includes the Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), whose leader Kamal Abbas toured Britain in 2011. CTUWS is a labour-movement NGO which has been working to build up grassroots workers’ organisation, largely clandestinely, since the 1990s, and they felt the approach of the EFITU was wrong.
It’s very difficult to judge that debate from a distance. The dominant figure in the EFITU is Kamal Abu Eita, the leader of the tax collectors’ union, which was the first independent union to form in the period immediately before the revolution. Abu Eita is a member of Hamdeen Sabahi’s Dignity Party, and is in fact now a Member of Parliament. Kamal Abbas comes from a roughly-Trotskyist background, so there may be other political differences too. The two federations have undertaken joint initiatives, so the division is not as severe as it might be and not irreparable.
The old state union federation still exists, and many workers are still members of it. For example, in many public sector jobs you have to be a member in order to access your pension, so you can’t just leave it. One of the proposals in the constitution was to legislate to allow only one union in each industry, which was clearly intended to squeeze out the new independent unions.
But even in December, when the constitutional debate was going on, there were major strikes, including some significant victories. Workers at the Eastern Tobacco Company struck for higher wages and won, and workers at the Egyptian Aluminium Company also struck and won their demands after the government was forced to interevene. In Mahalla, an industrial town which has been central to class struggle in Egypt for decades and certainly since the mid-2000s, some workers declared an “independent republic”. It was a significant gesture given that Mahalla is seen as the centre of working-class struggle in Egypt. It shows that independent workers’ organisations are still very much an element in politics in Egypt, despite their relative weakness.
The main force they face is the government party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was known for years under the Mubarak regime, and further beyond that, as the best-organised opposition movement in Egypt. Workers’ Liberty has called it clerical-fascist. So is Morsi’s government a fascist government? What exists in Egypt is not yet fascism. Struggle continues, and the workers’ movement has not yet been crushed. But there is something evolving which is increasingly, to say the least, nasty.
The Muslim Brotherhood has aimed for a long time to be constitutional, even though it was formally illegal under Mubarak. When the revolution began, they were slow to respond because they didn’t control it and didn’t know how to relate to it. But their caution was also motivated by their general tendency to attempt to be fairly legalistic and constitutional. I had previously felt that, given the Brotherhood’s apparent commitment to develop along those lines, into a legalistic Islamist party along the Turkish model, there were grounds to be reasonably sanguine about them. Certainly it is the case that the Brotherhood in power has moved more quickly in the direct of violent authoritarianism than I thought or hoped they might. So I was wrong two years ago.
What’s happened since Morsi was elected president is an increasing element of the iron fist inside the velvet glove. Morsi’s bestowing of essentially dictatorial powers on himself is what started the latest wave of struggle. The Brotherhood has groups of armed thugs, organised on the street, as an armed force. That’s a new element. There are also other Islamist gangs, associated with the Salafists, who are a more extreme Islamist movement than the Brotherhood.
This development, of armed gangs on the street which mobilise against working-class and democratic forces, is indicative of something potentially moving towards fascism, albeit not of the Nazi type. The recently formed “Black Bloc” is a reaction to this development. Impressionistically, there seem to be far fewer women on demonstrations now than there were during the revolutionary period. Part of that must be to do with fear, including fear of sexual assault. That’s a serious problem.
The Brotherhood’s religious sectarianism is also getting worse, leading to increasing polarisation with Egypt’s large Christian minority. In 2011, when the old regime shot at some Christian demonstrators, the Brotherhood made a show of being non-sectarian and talked about healing divisions. That mask is increasingly slipping. In the presidential run-off between Morsi and Shafiq, many Christians were backing Shafiq, the old-regime candidate, just to keep the Brotherhood out. Those fissures are getting worse. There’s an increase in outwards religious observance, such as women wearing the veil, which reflects a growth in religious authority. Christian religious authorities have grown in power too and there are conflicts within the Coptic community about the authority of their Pope.
One key difference between Morsi’s regime and the Islamist regime that took power in Iran is its attitude to America. Some leftists thought Khomeni’s government was progressive because it was “anti-imperialist”, but Morsi’s government doesn’t have this character. It needs to keep the aid money coming in from America, and Gulf states which are allied to America. The Egyptian army alone gets $1.2 billion a year. Their links with America represent a significant pressure on the Morsi government, but the fact that they’ve resisted this pressure, at least to an extent, in pushing through an Islamic constitution and greater dictatorial powers, shows that they’re something of a wildcard.
Morsi managed to remove some of the figureheads of the military elements that replaced Mubarak, but the infrastructure of that is still there. There’s been a fusion, certainly at the top, of elements of the old state apparatus with the Brotherhood. But the state apparatus is not entirely predictable. There is an enormous “secret state” in Egypt, and even in the last weeks army figures, including the Minister of the Interior, who’s a general, have made noises about intervening if the situation continues to worsen. The prospect of a military coup is a real one, as well as the prospect of “creeping fascism” from the Brotherhood.
The organised base of the Brotherhood is stronger than any on our side. It’s vital not to underestimate the threat they represent, or adopt a kind of “after Morsi, us”-type attitude, reminiscent of the German Stalinists’ complacency about Hitler that saw the workers’ movement, in which they were a significant force, crushed by Nazism.
The task is huge. The labour movement, and genuinely democratic, secular forces have to cohere into something capable of providing an alternative. My impression is that the Workers Democratic Party, which involved the Revolutionary Socialists (linked to the British SWP) and others, has not really developed. The legacy of the left in Egypt is not a good one; the Communist Party of the 1960s dissolved in Nasser’s party. Even before that, the Stalinist left had simply echoed nationalism. So there is no healthy tradition of democratic, socialist political organisation in Egypt. You can’t create that overnight, but the raw material for it exists in the form of the independent labour movement. Perhaps the leaders of that movement are moving too slowly in terms of entering the political stage. Something similar happened in South Africa – understandably so, because people are concerned to defend and maintain what are still weak organisations, and they’re afraid that if they move into politics too suddenly they’ll blow apart their trade union organisations.
But the self-assertion of the independent workers’ movement on the political stage is what has to happen. Therefore the urgency for solidarity with the democratic, secular, and working-class forces in Egypt is all the greater. What happens to that movement is incredibly significant for the whole region. If what is happening in Syria could poison the Middle East, the independent workers’ movement in Egypt could counterbalance that. The task to help them is not just a task for Egypt, it’s a task for us. Saying “we need to build solidarity” is easy, and actually building it is difficult. But it’s very important that we find a way.
