Articles with the Tag Jan25

Lenny:

Those middle class activists who think that Egyptians will now return to work to labour under a military regime – Wael Ghonim, the Google employee incessantly puffed by the Anglophone media as the ‘leader’ of this revolution, ‘trusts’ the army and urges people to go back to work – are about to be disabused and disillusioned. The protesters in Tahrir today are chanting that they want a civil, not a military government. The workers are still on strike. The steel mills, the sugar factories, public transport… they are not going to return to work just because the army now says it’s in control. In the last week, the hard cutting edge of this revolution was the working class, and those whose revolutionary agenda did not include the interests of the working class are likely to find themselves left behind by events very soon.

Ken:

In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being’s conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn’t mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons.

Mubarak has resigned.

What happens now will be interesting. A military council has taken power, the president is gone, the vice president still there but his future in doubt, the protestors happy for the moment but not dumb enough to think this is the end. Mubarak was the tip of the iceberg, the regime he represented is still in place and it will be difficult to dismantle it. The real revolution sarts today.

UPDATE: the response from Tafrir Square:

Al-Jazeera: Egyptians hold ‘Farewell Friday’

The Wall Street Journal:

Egypt’s labor movement has been the sleeping giant of the past two weeks’ protests, and its involvement could amount to a real fillip for the antigovernment demonstrations. The workers bring experience at protests and organization to the youth-led protest movement, whose efforts to extract major concessions from Egypt’s government was beginning to stall as it entered its third week.

The Socialist Worker (US edition) has more on the influence of the organised labour in the protest movement:

THE DEMONSTRATORS in Tahrir also called on workers who began returning to their jobs all across the country over the weekend to begin striking and occupying factories–both public and private companies–and to walk out in mass demonstrations.

But the workers were already in action. On the morning of February 9, workers at the important KOK Chemical Factory in Helwan, which is a historically militant industrial suburb of Cairo, began a strike, followed by petroleum workers at Petrol Trade.

By the afternoon, the strike began to spread to different factories around the region and beyond. Two of the most important places are industrial centers in the Nile Delta–Kafr Zayat and Kafr al-Tawar. These are also historically militant textile industry towns that have given the regime a hard time for many years. Kafr al-Tawar is only half an hour outside of Alexandria, the country’s second-largest city.

The interesting thing is that in these strikes, the demands were to raise wages, but also the removal of the government-appointed CEOs of the companies–in many cases, of course, these CEOs are members of the National Democratic Party, the ruling party of the Mubarak regime.