### And the revolution continues

Egypt's ruling elite seems determined to maintain the economic system and the political order which impoverished millions of Egyptians and created the impetus for ousting Mubarak. The SCAF, the Muslim Brothers (MB), remnants of the Mubarak business elite and the ancien régime have been flagrantly manipulating the political process in order to protect their political and corporate interests. In June 2012, the SCAF issued a constitutional declaration which granted it almost total control over military matters and a de facto veto on the drafting of the new constitution. This manoeuvre is intended to protect the military's huge corporate interests which estimates put at over 30% of the economy (Abu El-Magd 2012). The MB Freedom and Justice Party promotes an economic programme which is not at all dissimilar to the neoliberal project of the former ruling National Democratic Party. In an expression of the vested interest of the MBs in maintaining the same economic policies as Mubarak, the MB business tycoon Hasan Malek was quoted in March 2012 as saying that ‘Mubarak's economic policies were on the right track but were marred with corruption and cronyism’ (Al-Masry Alyoum 2012). The Islamist-dominated parliament, therefore, had no problem approving the 2012/2013 budget which paid only lip service to issues of redistribution and social justice.

Confronted with the same impoverishing economic policies and a political process persistently sabotaged by the elite, which is disregarding the demands of millions of Egyptians for freedom, dignity and decent living standards, a fresh wave of protests has intensified. The repertoire of contentious action continues to see road blockades by angry citizens protesting against water shortage and failing health services, factory occupations, protests by the unemployed and forcibly retired, and marches against the increasing powers granted to the military by the SCAF which has so far appointed the first two interim governments and granted itself extraordinary powers during the ‘transitional’ period.

The protests have in some cases brought whole sectors to a halt and even created complete gridlock in cities and towns. Despite the overwhelming power of the old/new ruling elite, the diversified nature of the protests has presented it with a major problem. Because of their disparate nature, protests are hard to co-opt or to crush. As Eckstein shows in the case of Latin America: The more diversified the base of resistance, the more difficult it is for a state to address the varied grievances of groups concomitantly through force or reform…. The diverse socioeconomic groups that rebelled in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua had different reasons for defying the government in power, but the net effect of their combined defection was a breakdown of the existing political and economic order. (1989, p. 49)

Faced with this same challenge, Egypt's ruling elite has resorted to isolating different struggles and institutionalising and strengthening a set of binaries in order to pit different groups against each other, such as Islamist versus secular, ballot box versus street protests and any form of protest which can be classified as ‘political’ or ‘economic’. Fashioning the legal system to this end, one of the early actions by SCAF was to decree the unprecedented Law 34/2011 which criminalises strikes and protests that curtail production and applies heavy fines and prison sentences for workers who participate in, call for or publicise strike activity (Human Rights Watch 2012). The riot police and so-called ‘unknown’ thugs, have since not hesitated to resort to violence against those who have dared to break this ban. While there are numerous, well-documented incidents in which the police have used brutal force to suppress ‘political’ protestors,5 striking workers have also been the target of violence. Examples are numerous and include the suspended sentence of one year in prison for five workers in the Egyptian oil company Petrojet in July 2011, the arrest and torture of striking workers at the Somid Company Port in March 2012, and indiscriminate shooting by riot police which caused serious injuries among the striking Mahalla El-Kubra Samoli Company workers (Socialist Worker 2012). Despite the legal ban, hundreds of thousands of workers have been involved in numerous forms of industrial action in what could only be seen as a political act of defiance.

Not only does the law criminalise labour strikes, it also strongly curtails opportunities for workers to organise. Egyptian labour and political party law, fortified by the military junta's constitutional declarations, continues to ban the formation of labour or any class-based political party which is, according to labour activists, a huge impediment to workers' ability to muster political strength. They argue that political parties, both before and after January 2011, continue to ignore workers' issues. One labour activist complains that these parties ‘provide us with no assistance or support during our struggles. Other than lip service, they offer us nothing’ (Charbel 2012). Moreover, the military junta has restricted efforts to create independent unions. Only a few days into the 18-day uprising, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions was launched to provide an alternative to the state-controlled ETUF. In the months that followed, workers in different sectors established literally hundreds of independent unions. In August 2011, the former minister of labour took the radical step of submitting a more progressive draft law for trade union liberties to SCAF for approval. The move encouraged the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to remove Egypt from its blacklist of countries that do not respect trade union freedoms. However, the shelving of the draft law for months on end despite pressure by workers and labour activists, led the ILO to return Egypt firmly to the same blacklist once more in May 2012. Revolutionary moments, one has to remember, can see the adoption of some of the most repressive legislation. The Le Chapelier Law, for example, passed by the French Constituent Assembly in 1791, prohibited any form of association based on occupation. Violators of the law were punished by hefty fines and the ‘suspension of citizenship rights’ for one year (Sewell 1980). While the Le Chapelier Law was justified on the grounds that under the regime of liberty, no intermediary bodies were necessary between the state and the individual (Rimlinger 1977, p. 212), Law 34/2011 defended banning labour strikes on the grounds of their threat to the production process and the national economy. In both cases, however, workers were left completely vulnerable vis-à-vis their employers.

While legal measures have been crucial to efforts of marginalising workers' protests, the use of the media to shape hostile public opinion has been the most powerful weapon. The manipulation of the official media as well as sections of the private media owned by the business elite, has allowed the ruling elite to intensify their campaigns of vilification against workers and other groups protesting for their ‘economic’ rights. The media have been promoting a discourse in which protests for economic demands are portrayed as a direct cause of the deteriorating economic conditions in the months that followed Mubarak's downfall. By labelling them as matalebfa'awyea (group or partisan demands), these acts of protest are immediately reduced to the status of narrowly focused, selfish demands that would benefit only members of specific groups regardless of their damaging effect to the economy as whole. Another term which has become a mantra in the official media is a'agalet el-intag (the wheel of production) which protests and strikes are allegedly bringing to a halt. In this portrayal, protest by labour and groups of citizens is responsible for reducing national production as well as putting off foreign investors, whose capital the country desperately needs. In October 2011, the minister of labour was quoted as blaming striking workers as irresponsible and unreasonable as they had to ‘take into consideration the financial crisis and the huge responsibilities which the government has to shoulder. Making exaggerated demands will not have positive consequences’ (Albassel and Khalifa 2011). Similarly, ‘increasing workers’ … strikes, constant protests and unrealistic demands' were blamed by the head of the Investors Association in the industrial zone of Bourg El-Arab for the closures of over 100 factories in the zone in the months following the ousting of Mubarak (Abdelsalam and Ismail 2012). The dominant Islamist parties in Egypt's first democratically elected post-Mubarak parliament have also been on the same page as the government and the business elite. During a mobilisation campaign for a general strike in February 2012, representatives of the Freedom and Justice and the Salafi Nour parties condemned the campaign as a ‘call to destroy the state and to ruin the economy’. According to the political and business elite, protests should be confined to Tahrir Square and to political activists who represent the true demands of the revolution. An official of the Nour party was quoted saying ‘Protest is enough as a form of popular pressure without hampering the economy…. [In place of strikes] I hope to see 300 or 400 thousand protestors every day in Tahrir to demonstrate the power of the revolution’ (Al Shourouq newspaper, 9 December 2012). In the weeks following the election of President Mursi, protests intensified in front of the presidential palace only to be dismissed by Hasan El-Prince, a high-ranking official in the Freedom and Justice Party, as being organised by hired agents working in a state security conspiracy to destabilise the president (Aswat Masrya 2012). Using the media, the SCAF and interim governments have managed to manipulate public opinion not only to refuse to recognise these forms of struggle as an integral part of a revolutionary process but also to condemn them as impeding a swifter transition to democracy and stability. From the ruling elite's perspective, the fragmentation of protests and demands is an essential strategy to weaken the forces of the revolution. For the business elite, separating the economic from the political sphere and disparaging the struggles articulated within the first, has always been one of the most effective defence mechanisms against labour. Fighting for economic demands, however, remains an obvious political statement whose strength is that it defies not only the oppressive tactics of the forces in power but also exposes the liberal forces whose members hope to convince the people to suspend their fight and accept a promise of symbolic representation through elections (Alexander 2012).

While human rights groups continue to provide legal and other forms of support to workers and other protesting groups, political parties and groups remain firmly disengaged from struggles which cannot be labelled directly ‘political’. Only some leftist groups and trade-union activists genuinely regard these struggles as an integral part of the process of changing the political order. However, leftist forces are themselves small and fragmented, despite the visible role they have played in the last decade, and remain unable to find a coherent strategy for working with labour. According to one labour activist, the left still has a problematic relationship with labour in which engaging with the labour movement is seen as optional; it is not regarded as integral to an overall revolutionary strategy (Gabr 2012). Because the left is not organically linked with labour struggles, its reaction to labour fluctuates between soaring elation when workers' strikes peak and total disillusionment when workers go dormant or, even worse, when they fail to rise in response to political activists' calls for a general strike as was the case in February 2012 (ibid.). It is clear that the left is confronted with a massive task of building organic links with workers. The process, even if successful, is long and will take decades. Leftist activists in the meantime are not always realistic about their ability to play a leadership role for workers or to get them to respond on cue. Against any delusion to that effect, Rosa Luxemburg reminds us that: It is clear that the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest social democratic party … even the greatest enthusiasm and impatience of the social democratic troops will not suffice to call into being a real period of mass strike as a living, powerful movement of the people. (1906, p. 53)