Year: 2008

Blogging the profs strike

Posted on By 3arabawy

I think the experience of the professors’ national strike on 23 March is worth more examining, and there are plenty of lessons to be learned from it.

One of the things I like about the current campaign is the blog the profs launched, not only to publicize their action, but also to communicate with one another from one province to the other.

Prior to the strike, the organizers engaged with fellow profs, receiving suggestions posted usually in the comments sections or sent by emails, and after the strike the blog is a place where profs from various departments in Cairo and the provinces post reports about the turn out and evaluate the performance.

You can check out more photos of the March 23rd Cairo University strike on the Socialist Students blog.

Some notes on the 6 April ‘general strike’

Posted on By 3arabawy

Over the past week email messages and blog postings have been circulating calling for a general strike on 6 April. If this happens, then it will be the first time in history that a general strike is organized by emails and facebook messages.

I’m afraid this will NOT happen.

Don’t get me wrong. I think anyone who follows this blog knows well I see no other way to overthrow the Mubarak’s dictatorship but a general strike. But what we have here is something different.

What is confirmed up till now is that Ghazl el-Mahalla, the biggest textile mill in the ME with its 27,000-strong labor force, is going on strike 6 April. There will be series of protests and solidarity actions planned in some industrial centers as well as protests by political activists in Cairo and other provinces…

But the call for general strike has another story… The opposition groups got together to discuss how to support the Mahalla strikers in April.. and that’s when Magdi Hussein, of the Islamist-leaning Labor Party, made this quixotic call for a general strike, and Abdel Halim Qandeel of Kefaya followed suit.. Hussein and his group, which has tiny presence in the political arena, have been known for such quixotic and highly sensationalist calls for general strikes (that never happened) since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. This is adventurism that even borders on political opportunism.

General strikes cannot be organized by basically issuing a call via emails, facebook messages and blog postings.. General strikes are organized when you have grassroots activists in the workplaces part of a national network that can push for such general strike from below.. not by some call dropping from the sky via an email from elitist groups. We neither have a mass revolutionary party rooted in the workplaces that can execute such general strike, nor do we have yet the national labor union that parallels the state-backed General Federation of Trade Unions and can push for such national action (like what happened in South Korea, Poland and elsewhere).

We have to focus comrades, and we cannot utter calls for actions that we are incapable of achieving on the ground.. coz the price of such quixotic actions will be high, in terms of demoralizing activists and supporters whose hopes are skyrocketing for a general strike and we can risk losing our credibility in the eyes of the public.

So again, let’s focus. Mahalla is confirmed to go on strike, so let’s channel our energies around this event which will have huge impact, if it succeeds, on the political arena in Egypt and the region.