When the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 began, we heard media pundits, friends, and colleagues

milling about in search of apt metaphors to describe the mass protests and revolution in Egypt. In
so far as “history” was mobilized in these discussions, it was generally as repetition or analogy.
Hence: the Berlin Wall; Tiananmen Square; the first Palestinian Intifada; the Iranian Revolution;
the Paris Commune; and the French Revolution, as well as Egypt’s own 1919 and 1952
revolutions. But do these vivid comparisons conceal more than they reveal? Indeed, one could
argue that one of the most striking aspects of the contemporary media discussions surrounding
Mubarak’s Egypt is the absence of any real sense of history. It is not enough to fill this void with
rhetorical comparisons and poetic license.

While an understanding of the process of privatization, economic marginalization, consumerism,

and structural adjustment that we refer to as “neo-liberalism” is crucial to understanding the
contemporary unfolding of events, particularly in terms of the existence of vast economic
inequalities and the impoverishment of the demographic masses, a focus on neo-liberalism alone
fails to address the question of the historical relationship in Egypt between ruler and ruled. What
would a longer-term historical perspective, a deeper structural view of the events in Egypt look
like? Focusing on popular protest and mobilization in Egypt’s 1919, 1952, and 2011 revolutions,
I focus on the internal dynamics of, and discontinuities between, each of these revolutions,
characterizing them as nationalist, passive, and popular, respectively.

A primer in Egyptian history

1919 revolution

Egypt, occupied by Great Britain in effect since 1882, achieved its independence from colonial
rule only in the aftermath of sustained protests. In the wake of the 1919 revolution, and after two
years of stalled negotiations, the British abolished martial law and granted Egypt unilateral
nominal independence from colonial rule in February of 1922. Despite this, the British continued
to maintain control over the security of imperial communications, the defense of Egypt, the
protection of foreign interests and minorities, and the Sudan. The 1919 revolution had two
stages: the violent and short period of March 1919 that involved large-scale mobilizations by the
peasantry in rural areas that were suppressed by British military action; and the protracted phase
beginning in April 1919 that was less violent and more urban, with the large-scale participation
of students, workers, lawyers, and other professionals.

The economic and political crises of World War I, experienced in Egypt as the expansion of the
colonial-state bureaucracy, the forced conscription of Egyptians, the state appropriation of cotton
production, and the forcible provision of supplies for British troops resulted in a crisis of political
control. In the competition for political power that ensued between the effendiyya (middle class
nationalists) and the colonial regime, the Wafd or delegation Party (Egypt’s major nationalist
political party throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century) and the 1919 rebellion
were born. But was 1919 a unified uprising in which peasants, workers, and politicians coalesced
in support of a nascent nationalism when the British failed to give Egypt its promised
independence?
In the urban context, 1919 represented the consolidation of a labor movement (trade unions,
labor activism, nationwide strikes) that was forged at the intersection of national and class-
consciousness. Such labor movements were enveloped within the anti-colonial nationalism of the
time, while more radical leftist groups were unable to gain a foothold in the context of the
Wafd’s moderate nationalist platform of removing foreign economic and political exploitation.
Further, the mobilization of the peasantry and momentary subversions of the rural order did not
in fact materialize into a wide-scale peasant revolution; the Wafd (striving for political
sovereignty and parliamentary democracy) continued to oscillate throughout its tenure between
populism and social conservatism. Some have argued that the nationalist call for “independence,
freedom, and justice” could not have held the same meaning for peasants, who sought to liberate
themselves from the colonization of their economic life by landowning interests, as it might have
had for the urban intelligentsia. Whatever perspective we adopt, it is clear that the 1919
revolution meant different things to different segments of the population. But, at least from the
perspective of the emergent dominant national ruling elements, it did not aim at the radical
transformation of the social structure or class relations, but rather at the assertion of territorial
nationalism in the face of British colonialism. In other words, it was a nationalist revolution.

1952 revolution

Prior to 1952, the Palace, the Wafd and a multitude of oppositional groups ranging from
Communists to Muslim Brothers characterized Egypt’s political landscape. This intensely
variegated ideological landscape was marked by a commitment to economic nationalism and a
desire to rid Egypt completely of foreign control, in particular the presence of British troops on
Egyptian soil. Further, the larger question of complete political independence was cross- hatched
with the economic difficulties faced by the majority of the population. The years after 1929 were
the years of the worldwide economic depression, and during this time agricultural wages fell an
estimated forty percent. The 1930s were characterized by wide scale unrest with the increased
activity of peasants, workers, and trade unions, student agitation, and demonstrations.

Egypt’s 1952 military coup and revolution led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser and the Free Officers
ousted Egypt’s decadent monarch, King Faruq, and put Muhammad Naguib as President of the
new Republic in his place. An understanding of this period of Egyptian history helps to clarify
somewhat the ambivalent attitudes towards the military in Egypt, and the initial expectations of
protestors that the military would help protect them from Egypt’s violent security and police
services.

Interpretations of Nasserism have centered on the state apparatus. Discussions have focused on
the authoritarian-bureaucratic state structure, characterized by a highly state-centralized process
of socio-economic development, a corporatist patrimonial state bourgeoisie, a single-party
system bolstered by a repressive state apparatus, and a populist nationalist ideology. This
political formation, interpreters argue, proved incapable of radically restructuring the Egyptian
state, society, and economy, as signaled by the failure to build a fully industrialized, capitalist or
socialist, liberal democratic nation-state. This is the classic “authoritarian military dictatorship
model” we have been reading about in the press. But such a monolithic model fails to adequately
capture the complexity of Nasserism.

Nasserism was equally characterized by an ideology and practice of social-welfare, premised

upon the state apparatus as arbiter not only of economic development, but also of social welfare.
Such a social welfare model was premised on an ethical covenant between the people and the
state, a social contract in which the possibility of revolutionary or democratic political change
was exchanged for piecemeal social reform and the amelioration of the conditions of the working
classes. It was further based on a view of “the people” (al-sha’ab) as the generative motor of
history and as resources of national wealth (the motor of its development, as it were); and an
interventionist policy of social planning and engineering. Social welfare, of course, should not be
understood as a benevolent process whereby the state shepherds citizens in their own welfare.
Rather, it entails the social and political process of reproducing particular social relations, often
based on violence and coercion, at least partly to minimize class antagonisms.

Such a model was predicated on a foundational violence which can be traced back to the Spring
of 1954 during which a united front of Wafdists, Communists, Muslim Brothers, and others
demanded an end to the military dictatorship and a return to civilian rule and the constitutional
system. Demonstrators, led largely by students, flooded the streets in March as they surrounded
Abdin palace and demanded political freedoms. After a series of negotiations and political
maneuvers, Nasser consolidated his rule, becoming Premier and president of the Revolutionary
Command Council in April of 1954. Politically, the regime sought to contain the possibility of
any broad-based popular movement, hence the attempts at cooptation and the violence
perpetrated against its two main ideological contenders, the Muslim Brothers and the Marxist-
Communist Left, as well as the abolition of political parties and organizations. Similarly, the
regime’s policy towards labor activism and trade unionism was characterized by a two-pronged
policy of co-optation of labor and union leaders through their incorporation into the state
apparatus and extensive revisions of labor legislation (for example, legislating job security and
improved material benefits). Autonomous labor action and the political independence of the
trade unions were curtailed by a legislative ban on all strikes, laws on the arbitration and
conciliation of labor disputes, and a new trade-union law. This provides an important larger
context for understanding the historical significance of the newly emerging independent public
sector trade unions active in the 2011 protests.

The Nasser regime concentrated its efforts on dismantling the old landed aristocracy through
agrarian reform and co-opting the old industrial bourgeoisie to further its own aims of large-scale
national industrialization. The new class that emerged and characterized the state public sector,
however, was a “state bourgeoisie,” made up of the new class of technocrats together with older
elements of the industrial, financial, and commercial bourgeoisie who worked their way into the
public sector.

Nasserism thus represented the formation of a state capitalist class, the liquidation of its main
ideological rivals, and the suppression of popular mobilization from below even as it was
coupled with a powerful social welfare ideology and a charismatic anti-imperialist rhetoric
(immensely strengthened by Egypt’s mobilization in the face of a tri-partite foreign aggression
and nationalization of the Suez Canal). This social welfare model can be seen as a Faustian
bargain in which “the people” exchanged democratic political liberties and a more radical
restructuring of the social order for social welfare programs that deflected attention away from
the restructuring of class relations, by emphasizing the piecemeal and palliative reforms for the
laboring classes. In other words, it was a passive revolution.

1974 Neo-liberalism

The demise of Nasserism was a complex product of both internal ideological and class
contradictions within the regime’s pursuit of socialism, and of external political conflicts,
namely, the 1967 war with Israel. The liberalization policies of Egypt’s Infitah (opening) were
inaugurated by Anwar Sadat’s Presidential Working Paper of October 1974, in an attempt to
create a transition to a free-market economy. Infitah paved the way for a different set of
international and domestic relations, characterized by a general rapprochement with foreign
capital and a strengthening of the private sector through a series of governmental concessions,
that is to say a dual internal and external process of liberalization.

Among the marked features of Infitah, enabled through a series of regulatory interventions as
well as a shift in global conditions of capitalism, were the creation of a favorable environment
for foreign investment projects (usually in the form of joint ventures), through a new investment
law containing various privileges (such as tax exemptions for foreign ventures); a
decentralization and liberalization of foreign trade, signaling the end of the public-sector
monopoly on foreign trade and the opening up of the economy to foreign goods through the
private sector; an expansive influx of international aid; government liberalization of fiscal policy;
the abolition of public holding companies previously in charge of planning, coordinating, and
supervising the public sector and a concomitant decentralization in state economic planning; and
the weakening of the state’s control over public enterprise through a liberalization of wage and
employment regulations, facilitated in part by a redefinition of the public sector, thereby leaving
private-sector management with more autonomy.

The predominant agents and architects of Infitah were a combination of members of the old
industrial bourgeoisie who had managed to insinuate themselves into the state apparatus after the
1952 revolution; members of the state technocratic bourgeoisie that emerged under Nasser (the
upper stratum of the bureaucratic and managerial elite, high-ranking civil servants, army officers
and directors, managers of public-sector companies, etc.); and the emerging commercial
bourgeoisie whose financial activities were opened up by Infitah—wholesale traders, contractors,
importer-exporters, etc. This, in part, explains the complexity of the military apparatus divided
between the elite echelon of the military (given their involvement in capital accumulation during
Infitah) and rank and file soldiers, and the economic gap between them.

With the IMF-mandated structural adjustment policies of the 1990s, these processes were greatly
intensified with the concentration of capital into ever fewer hands. Thus large business
oligopolies, such as those of the Sawiris family—local agents of Hewlett Packard and Microsoft,
founded Orascom in 1976, a family business that has prospered greatly under Mubarak. Naguib
Sawiris, one of the individuals put forth for the so-called “Committee of the Wise,” built his
fortune, it is worth recalling, at the intersection of government (both civilian and military)
contracts and ties with private banks. This is the distinction currently being drawn by many
business leaders in Egypt between nationalist and neo-liberal capital, in an effort to bolster their
legitimacy. Such an attempt at legitimacy, however, will not be easily digested in a post-
Mubarak era by those who have suffered immensely under this neo-liberal regime. With neo-
liberalism has come the retreat of the state sector and the elimination of many of the safety net
social welfare benefits won by the working classes under Nasser. The immense polarization of
wealth, drastically exacerbated since the 1990s, has left many Egyptians consumed by the search
for food, shelter and human dignity, with an estimated 40 percent living below or near the
poverty line. Crucially, these policies have not gone entirely uncontested as demonstrated by the
Bread Riots in 1977 and the Central Security Services (amn markazi) riots in 1986.

2011

Rather than view the spontaneous eruption of protests on January 25, 2011 as signaling the
absence of ideological or political cohesion, we can view it instead as the product of an
unprecedented historical assemblage of complex forces and contradictions. As Mohammed
Bamyeh noted in “The Egyptian Revolution: First Impressions from the Field,” the revolt has
been characterized by a large degree of spontaneity, marginality, a call for civic government, and
an elevation of political grievances above economic grievances. Thus, we have seen the
participation of a wide range of groups with differing ideological orientations but nonetheless
coherent and articulate in their demand for an end to the ancien regime. These have included
strong elements of trade unions and other labor movements, inspired by the 2006 strike in
Mahalla. But labor movements do not exhaust the types of players involved—including, of
course, the new social movements (whether leftist, feminist, legal-judicial, NGO based, or
social-media galvanized organizations) discussed in Paul Amar’s “Why Mubarak is Out,” as well
as the Muslim Brotherhood who have publicly declared their commitment to a civil and pluralist
government.

Those on the ground in Egypt know what they want: an end to Mubarak, and end to the
emergency laws that have strangled political expression in Egypt since 1981, a civil government
with a new constitution guaranteeing elections and the curtailment of political power, and trials
for those involved in the massacres of the protesters. Despite the machinations of the West, it is
clear that what will simply not do is an insinuation of ancien regime forces of any kind into a
post-Mubarak Egypt, whether neo-liberal robber barons, counter-revolutionaries, or political
opportunists. The voices from Tahrir, Alexandria, Mahalla, Suez, and Minya must be heard in
their call for a “reversal of the relationship of forces.” In other words, this is a people’s
revolution.

Shakry, Omnia El. "Egypt's Three Revolutions: The Froce of History behind This Popular
Uprising." Jadaliyya. 06 Feb. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/569/egypts-three-revolutions_the-force-of-history-
behind-this-popular-uprising>.