Labour and the spring of revolution in the MENA region

The revolutionary upheavals in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region these past few months confirm the truism that there are times in history when three months could seem like thirty years. The wind of “massquakes” in the region: swept dictators in Tunisia and Egypt out of power within weeks of protests and strikes; shattered the myth of Gaddafi’s invincibility, while he stubbornly holds on to the shell of power, taking the country down the brinks of civil war; forced wide-ranging reforms in Saudi Arabia in an attempt to starve it off and; shakes Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria to their foundations with simmering echoes in Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. “Revolution” which had come to be seen as a thing of the past with the marketed triumph of neoliberal capitalism has now come to hold the attention of the world, inspiring millions across the globe.

The (ongoing) revolutions in each of these countries have emerged from the concrete realities of their socio-economic and political conditions. Thus there are certain distinctive elements in each. But, as is generally agreed, a wide range of similarities can be perceived in these region-wide spread of angst and people’s power. Many commentators, have seen the most determinant of these as being the use of the new (“social networking”) media. They have been described as “face book revolutions”, “twitter revolutions” & “bloggers’ revolutions”, for example. They have also been presented as “leaderless”, spontaneous revolts of youths against “sit-tight” dictatorships in a region filled with monarchies and effectively, “life presidents”. These perspectives present partial snapshots of a more dynamic and deep-seated reality. The “Arab awakening” and the patterns it has taken emerge from class struggles, within the MENA countries, and as well reflect the rising rage of disposed working classes in all continents of the world, in the aftershock of the Great Recession.

In understanding these patterns, at one end we see successful revolutionary climaxes in Tunisia and Egypt where despite incorporation of the formal trade unions, robust working class struggles had been waged in the past ten years. At the other end is Libya, where a totalitarian, anti-imperialist pretender of a police regime had virtually strangled life out of the working class and eroded any real spaces for a civil society’s spirit, with the contention of revolution and counterrevolution exploding into a civil war. The situations in the other MENA countries fall into a spectrum between these two scenes of the first act of revolution and counter-revolution in the region.

The regional conflagration as is generally known was sparked off in December, by the self-immolation of Said Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year old graduate in Tunis. He was a fruit vendor, despite his level of education, whose wares were seized by state authorities. In burning himself, he became a living rejection of the desperation and hopelessness of a generation of Tunisians, nay, youths across the world who have been pulverized by the relentless assault of rampaging capitalism which in the last few decades of its neoliberal restructuring have turned millions into a marginal mass of rejects eking out some form of existence in the shadows of what life could be. The protests that followed his Golgotha marked the beginning of what would be the January 14 revolution, with the 24-year presidency of Ben Ali brought crashing down.

The trade union confederation in Tunisia, the UGTT, and particularly some of the radical federations and trade unions within its ranks played key roles in mobilizing for the Tunisian revolution. Working class and youth activists in the communities organized people’s committees which took over local governance and self-defence. They were at the barricades chanting the downfall of Ben Ali and they downed tools as Tunisia was racked by a wave of strikes.

In the wake of the Tunisian revolution, the regimes across the region fell over each other with bribes of concessions to the people as the wind of revolt spread. It was however in Egypt that the reign of a dictator would also be brought crashing down and this in 18days! In Egypt much more than in Tunisia, the myth of a leaderless “face book revolution” is nurtured. But here, more than in any other place in “the Arab world”, the working class leadership of the revolution is very palpable.

The April6 Youth Movement, as many people now know, turned the political opportunity of January 25 (a public holiday in Egypt to honour police officers) into the beginning of 18 days that shook the world. The roots of this movement are themselves steeped in working class struggles as it was established to mobilize public support for the April 6 strike of workers in the militant city of Malhalla, in 2008. To jumpstart the revolutionary movement in January, its young activists started their mobilization from the poor working class quarters in Cairo. As millions took over Tahrir Square security had to be organized as well as feeding, toilet and even music. These necessitated leadership. As with every revolution, newer and newer layers of leaders sprung up as the revolutionary moment’s steam gave wind to the sail of struggle; throwing up slogans and chants, inspiring, and giving direction to the pent up anger, passions and yearnings of the mass. In the neighbourhoods as well, committees were set up which coordinated municipal functions and armed detachments of ordinary people to defend the revolution against the rampaging counter-revolutionary hordes unleashed by the regime.

New media was of great importance in this hour, no doubt. It served as a virtual notice board for Tahrir Square to millions of Egyptians and billions across the world. It is important though to point out an often overlooked fact. To every generation in modern society, its “new media” and enhanced transportation, engender greater possibilities of communication for mobilization. The printing press was no less revolutionary five hundred years back as twitter is now. Thomas Carlyle said it aided “disbanding hired armies” and “creating a new democratic world”. Quickened means of sending letters and newspapers also gave speed to the feet of the French revolution through the correspondence committees. But perhaps Marx and Engels in 1847 best captured the fact that forging of solidarity is “helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles...into one national struggle”.

This is not to discountenance the importance of social networking media, but to stress that they merely help living human beings waging real and not simply virtual struggles. Facebook and Twitter on their own did not and could not have made any revolution. The Daily Star, a leading Lebanese paper aptly captured this reality in its editorial just after the Tunisian Revolution: “Egypt’s Internet based campaign for political change, the country’s most critical voice, has failed to filter down from the chattering middle classes to the poor on the street”.

This statement of The Daily Star points towards the importance of classes in two ways. First, it is when the message for change, through whatever media, takes hold of the souls, minds and actions of the mass of the lower classes, the workers, the toilers, who create society’s wealth, that revolutionary political change can be a reality. This is a correct position which most revolutions from 1789 have confirmed (of course there have been “passive revolutions” from the top, but these have arisen more often than not, as reaction to stalemate the self-emancipatory struggles of the labouring masses from below).

Second, is that the internet is a preserve of “the chattering middle classes”. This is only partially true. The changing development of capital has resulted in the changing nature and heterogeneity of the working class. The 21st Century working class is not reducible to the blue collared industrial worker. Along with the new middle class of self-employed lawyers, doctors, contractors, etc, -a number of which come from working class families- the working class today comprises as well of well-trained nurses, teachers, engineers, academics, etc, who are no less wage-slaves than the rugged, hard knuckled, factory worker. These constitute a large number of internet users.

The working class is burdened with providing leadership for revolutions from below in modern industrial society for several reasons. The first is its crucial place in the process of production; “labour creates wealth”. It is hardly accidental that the two countries where revolutions in the MENA region have reached climaxes are those with the most powerful working class movements, particularly Egypt. It is also hardly surprising that in both Tunisia and Egypt, the final moments that spelt doom for the dictatorships where those in which the working class rose to its full stature, donning its awesome gown of the general strike.

This however does not suppose that the working class alone can carry out revolution, even in the advanced capitalist countries where it constitutes the majority of the population. A revolution entails class alliances-in-action; indeed it entails the vast majority of the middle classes crossing over to the standpoint of the working class i.e. a standpoint of the sans-culottes, having nothing to lose (as he who is down needs fear no fall) and having everything to win from struggle.

In normal times, the ideas of the ruling classes are dominant. Even amongst the middle classes and individual workers, the urge to “make money” and have a good life like the rich are intermingled with their hatred of the oppression of the wealthy. But it is simply “commonsense” to believe during such long periods of lull that things can not be different for society. Individuals thus try to rather make the little or big differences they can make with their individual lives. The wealthy classes thus rule on the strength of their hegemony over society, as Gramsci argues, with coercion helming its borders.

AbdelRahman al-Rashed of the Tunisian Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper noted on the eve of the revolution in that country that: “much of what prevents protest and civil disobedience is simply the psychological barrier.” This is the barrier instituted by such hegemony of the ruling class. Leon Trotsky in The History of the Russian Revolution had equally stressed the breaking through of the psychological barrier as one of the very first tasks of any revolution.
More and more people are inspired to rise up and fight when the first sparks of rebellion become beacons of the possibilities of revolt. It is thus in the nature of revolutions that its first phase more often than not is spontaneous, as was Bouazizi’s self-immolation. The embers from such self-generated fires could however then die, with the aroused masses rage fizzled out through reaction’s reforms or its counter-revolutionary repressions. For it to take up continued life at the critical juncture between its beginnings and the blossoming of its fruition, it has to be fired up by being consciously stoked, rising to its crescendo as the spirits of the possibilities of self-emancipation it has liberated possess the souls of tens and hundreds of thousands, and indeed, millions as we saw when Tahrir Square became the heart of Egypt’s body.

This presupposes the existence before the revolution of counter-hegemonic spaces claimed by –often small “forces”- of ideas, embodied in men, women, youths, who posit radical ideas to the status quo, within and beyond the working class. There was a plethora of such in both Tunisia and Egypt. Despite the repressive regime in place, which incorporated the official trade union structures, in Tunisia, there were federations critical of the official UGTT and a host of Left groups and in Egypt, several independent trade unions (which formed the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, in the heat of the revolution) and a diverse array of revolutionary socialists, radical and more liberal organizations filled in this role of the “organic intellectual”.

The situations in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and Libya were quite different. The working class was not only much weaker in these countries (though in each it still rose up to fight!); counter-hegemonic spaces in civil society had literally been strangulated. In Syria and particularly Libya, pantomime “socialist” regimes, with anti-imperialist sloganeering had not only claimed being the state but as well mirrored themselves falsely as being civil society. Independent unions or federations outside the official incorporated union structures were not allowed.

The situation in these countries as well reflect a critical element of revolutionary periods: revolution and counter-revolution are Siamese twins, one of which is fated to consume the other. Counter-revolutions do not only emerge as repressive monsters or with more benign parliamentary faces after the revolution. They fight it as it lives, bury it if it dies or still keep fighting against it after victory, as Egyptians have come to realize with recent unpopular laws and the brazen jailing of a blogger, for criticism of the military.

The working class faces the greatest ire of counterrevolution’s reaction. In Tunisia, attempts have been made to curtail strikes after the revolution. In Egypt, the military passed laws seeking to ban strikes and as ITUC has protested: “The Bahraini authorities seem to be intent on destroying the country’s trade union movement as a central part of a campaign of revenge against those who took part in peaceful demonstrations and strike actions”.

This is one very important reason for grasping the internationalist dimensions of revolutionary struggles for the working class. The voices of workers across the world must rail against attacks on the revolution. The ITUC for example has spoken out against the reaction in virtually every country sucked up in the pulsation of revolution in the region. Several other trade unions in Africa, including COSATU & NLC, and even beyond the continent have equally condemned attacks on the Arab working people in the strongest terms.

Labour internationalism however is never just one way; in defense of the forces of revolution. The struggles in Tunisia and Egypt have equally inspired workers awakening in Wisconsin and Ohio for example.

Indeed, the revolutionary struggles in the MENA region can hardly be understood except as part of the international rising of the working class in the wake of the Great Recession. It is one in spirit with the massive wave of anti-austerity strikes and demonstrations in Greece, France, Italy, Ireland and several other European countries late last year, the momentous anti-cuts protest by workers and youths on March 26 in the UK is its kindred and it will sire more glorious moments of rage, action, defeats and victories, as it has been sired by the gallantry and quest of working people over the generations for another possible world beyond capitalism’s drudgery and obsolescence.

We must note though, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto: “now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie, not in the immediate results, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. The revolutions in MENA, have come, and are still in the making. They will however pass, but their significance will not. A new world will be born, albeit not now; though its herald is sung. Bleeding from the scars of the Stalinist parody of “socialism”, the working class in the advanced capitalist world still hesitate at embracing the sharpest sword with which to pursue its self-emancipation. But its younger elements are being forced by concrete brick walls they run into to ask questions that will lead back to the ideas that spurred October 1917.

The expansion of democratic spaces being won today in North Africa and the Middle East represents progress for labour and indeed the ocean of humanity across the globe. They are part of the first act in the unfolding drama of re-writing human history; moving from the monotony of necessity to the emancipatory vigour of real liberty. The second decade of the 21st Century is being written in blood from the Nile and its environs. Battles lie ahead worldwide, beyond what we can now envisage. New and newer media will feature in those struggles and revolutions, but they will be fought and won by living men, women and youths, claiming their self-emancipation, as this century births a new and just world. That new world, will salute the memories of Tahrir Square and Said Bouazizi.