Bringing the Global Revolt to Australia - Learning from the Arab Spring
I'm Patrick Harrison, I'm an activist with Resistance & the Socialist Alliance. Last year I travelled to Egypt, Tunisia & Palestine, in part to try and meet with revolutionary activists in those countries and to document the unfolding revolutionary processes, as well as to correspond for Green Left Weekly.
Another GLW journalist who writes on the region, Tony Iltis, said in a recent Socialist Alliance forum that the primary responsibility of activists in the West is to understand the Arab Spring in order to learn from it, then secondarily to show solidarity with it. Maybe we don't have unelected dictators committing major atrocities against their people here in Australia, yet the chapter in the MENA region's history being called the Arab Spring shows a lot about the functioning of the global political & economic systems – and what it takes to change them.
Background
Western politicians and the media love to talk about the Arab Spring as though it was this thing that came from nowhere and nobody could have predicted it. Yet when Mohammed Bouazizi doused himself with petrol in front of a police station on December 17, 2010, it was the final straw for many of those suffering under oppressive police states across the region. Decades of neoliberal economic reforms and spiralling oil prices since 2001 had been making life harder and harder for the vast majority living in the Arab world. This situation, this pressure, saw a variety of expressions over the first decade of this century. There were officially sanctioned demonstrations in 2000-1 in solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada, which brought street politics back to the region where it for the main part had been forced underground throughout the 90s. These protests were the first for a new layer of young people who'd spent their whole lives living under the dictatorship.
However, when these young Egyptians and veteran leftists started campaigning for democratic reforms in 2004, forming the Egyptian movement for change (or "Kefaya", enough), they began to face major harrasment from the regime. This came to a head in 2005, with the Mubarak regime organising a referendum approving constitutional changes allowing for multi-party elections while still ensuring the process was entirely sewn up by his National Democratic Party (NDP). Despite a strong grassroots campaign, Kefaya, as part of the National Front for Change coalition, only won 12 seats, with the NDP holding a super-majority of 388 seats and the Muslim Brotherhood winning 88. This reflected an important dynamic of this decade, which evolved out of imperialist interventions in the late 20th century; perhaps the majority of the population in most of the region, or at least a large section, saw political Islam, in one form or another, as the natural opposition to the pro-capitalist pro-Western pro-war on Terror regimes. It's worth noting that, of all the region's countries, this support for political islam movements was perhaps weakest in Tunisia.
After this experience of struggle, and with the worsening of unemployment, poverty & other social conditions, a large layer of Arab youth & workers became increasingly radicalised. This energy led to a growth in activism in a variety of areas; most significantly, some of the networks of leftists which existed, either underground as in Egypt or hiding as low-level activists within the regime-sanctioned trade unions as in Tunisia, used this period to agitate for workers to form independant unions and strike for their rights. This came to a head in 2008, with radical workers in the key textile manufacturing city of Mahalla in Egypt calling a general strike; although the strike was crushed, the consequent street demonstrations in the city articulated for the first time the demand for the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, as opposed to reforms or parliamentary change, and pitted the people against the state's apparatus of repression.
Asides from poor pay and the corruption of the regime, basic economic issues – especially the major food shortage – were factors in this uprising; the little reportage it got in the Western media oversimplified this episode into a "bread riot", just one of many around the world occuring. In Tunisia, too, there were strikes and demonstrations by workers and the unemployed in the Gafsa mining region, which were likewise heavily repressed. These struggles gave birth to the revolutionary social movements which found their expression in what's been called the "Arab spring" – for example, Egypt's leading April 6 Youth Movement takes their name from the date of the 2008 Mahalla general strike. And they were also an important test of strength for the revolutionary workers movement.
So when Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on December 17, there was a huge layer of youngnies.
So with the combination of these different factors, the Sidi Bouzid uprising spread like wildfire in a way the 2008 Gafsa protests had not been able to. And they brought a critical mass of people to the streets, shutting down the country until elements of the regime – including key military leaders – decided to cut their losses and temporarily side with the movement. This triggered Ben Ali's sudden departure – as documented ical repression going hand in hand with the economics of third world neocolonies.
One of the factors which made the difference between 2008 and 2010 was the technological revolution which had seen cheap broadband internet and internet-ready mobile phones spread through the population in the course of little more than a year. The limited space for digital freedoms was taken up by citizen-journalist bloggers such as Lina Ben Mhenni, Slim Amamou and Azyz Amami. When protests broke out in Bouazizi's city of Sidi Bouzid, young people began posting videos of the spontaneous protests and the following repression on Facebook, and the networks of online activists & journalists were crucial components, alongside the revolutionary workers who initiated demonstrations in most of the major cities, in growing this episode from just another chapter of repression to the point of nadir, the final straw.
So with the combination of these different factors, the Sidi Bouzid uprising spread like wildfire in a way the 2008 Gafsa protests had not been able to. And they brought a critical mass of people to the streets, shutting down the country until elements of the regime – including key military leaders – decided to cut their losses and temporarily side with the movement. This triggered Ben Ali's sudden departure – as documented by an air traffic controller at Tunis airport, part of the internet freedom movement, who forwarded on to the street protests the course of Ben Ali's plane as it attempted to land in France, the neo-colonial power with the biggest stakes in Tunisia's economy, before he was rejected and eventually fled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he remains – hopefully to fter that they were ready to demonstrate. Even my family, who normally didn't know anything about politics in Egypt, were asking me, "Are you going to the demonstrations on the 25th of January? We want to go."
I won't go on much further about the events of the uprisings against the dictators themselves. I think it is as important to understand how the situations of those countries have evolved in the last year to see the real strength of this revolutionary movement. As Lina Ben Mhenni told me when I interviewed her by chance in a Tunis cafe where activists and goths hang out - “The revolution did not finish on January 14 (the day Ben Ali was overthrown) — it started on January 14! Ben Ali left the country, but he is just the head of the system." And the same is true for Mubarak in Egypt.
Egypt
In Egypt, since February 11, Friday protests -- in Cairo's Tahrir Square and nationwide -- continubdeen, Shubra – very poor neighbourhoods – and when the police attacked again, many of my friends hid in the houses of ordinary people and told them about the demonstrations. I think this was as important as Facebooke year has progressed; first over a guaranteed transition to civilian rule, then demanding the end to political repression, especially military trials for protesters, then after the October 9 massacre of dozens of Coptic Christians, openly calling for General Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (the real power behind the throne; personally members control around 25% of the economy – us aid), to step down.
The Parliamentary elections which began at the end of November and finished in January were a crucial test; one that, in many ways, the movement failed. Mostafa Ali, of Egypt's Revolutionary Socialists, said: "THE political sentiment in Tahrir is ahead of the country. You can think of it as the revolutionary vanguard in society among students and workers and youth--but it is much larger than in January (2011). Political consciousness has developed tremendously.
These are people who understand that the SCAF is the continuation of the Mubarak regime. They are beginning to understand the connection between political and economic issues. They are beginnied more or less every week, with protesters reclaiming it for major sit-ins during July in the hundreds and then again in November in the thousands. These protests have also taken on the regime in more radical ways as the year has progressed; first over a guaranteed transition to civilian rule, then demanding the end to political repression, especially military trials for protesters, then after the October 9 massacre of dozens of Coptic Christians, openly calling for General Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (the real power behind the throne; personally members control around 25% of the economy – us aid), to step down.
The Parliamentary elections which began at the end of November and finished in January were a crucial test; one that, in many ways, the movement failed. Mostafa Ali, of Egypt's Revolutionary Socialists, said: "THE political sentiment in Tahrir is ahead of the country. You can think of it as the revolutionary vanguard in society among students and workers and youth--but it is much larger than in January (2011). Political consciousness has developed tremendously.
These are people who understand that the SCAF is the continuation of the Mubarak regime. They are beginning to understand the connection between political and economic issues. They are beginning to grapple with the role of police in society. And they are the ones who understand that the ruling class played a trick on them by using Mubarak as a scapegoat in order to save the rest of the political system.
So you have a minority in society--symbolized by Tahrir--which has advanced politically and in terms of its consciousness. And it's ahead of the rest of the country in that sense. Back in January, a majority of people in the country wanted Mubarak to go, so they supported Tahrir. At this moment, that isn't the case regarding the SCAF."
However, there was not political unity on the question of how the elections would be approached. Another wave of massive protests sprung up several weeks before the elections; initially it seemed the SCAF would have to postpone them, but it gambled that holding them on time would take the wind out of the sails of the protest movement, demanding a civilian council be appointed to take presidential power away from the military before the elections were held. This worked; the days when I was in Cairo, when the elections were being staged there, were some of the low points in Tahrir's occupation, with at best hundreds overnight and a thousand during the day. The Egyptian Socialist Party, the brotherhood youth (split) and some liberal or left forces sought to take parliamentary seats in the "Revolution Continues" alliance; however, other forces such as most of the online activists and the Revolutionary Socialists instead pushed for a boycott of the elections, but not until the days before the elections when it was clear the elections were going ahead.
Tunisia
Despite Egypt's greater geopolitical significance and much larger, poorer and perhaps more revolutionary population, I think the post-January 14 events in Tunisia are more exciting, more significant, and show more about the dynamic of the Arab Spring.
Since the ouster of Ben Ali, Tunisia has seen 22,000 labor protests that include strikes, demonstrations, and other protest activity; Unlike the activity happening before Ben Ali's downfall, this has been across the entire country, interior and coast, and in every sector and industry. Most of these actions have either been supported or led by UGTT (Tunisian General Workers Union). In January of this year left forces – PCOT, LGO, anarchists, social democrats- united to contest and win the leadership of the UGTT; under Ben Ali the union was allowed a stronger degree of autonomy than Egypt's totally anti-worker unions, and branch-level activists could quite often get away with a degree of political activism that only Egypt's journalists could.
Unlike in Egypt, the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia gave way within a month to even bigger protests (the Kasbah sit-ins). These demanded the next step, and the next step, and the next step, in the agenda of democratic reforms; getting rid of Mohammed Ghannouchi, the PM under Ben Ali; getting rid of other ministers; the dissolution of the domestic intelligence services; and the October 2011 constituent assembly elections. The Tunisian left was positioned a little better than the Egyptian left for these elections; nonetheless, the largest revolutionary organising running in the elections, PCOT, won only three seats, while a couple of other forces got one or two seats. However, the lion's share of those involved in the protest movements who wanted to relate to the elections did so as independants, and failed to make any kind of real impact.
The situation in Tunisia since then has continued to evolve; radical islamist forces have gained a lot of space from Ben Ali's downfall, but there has been a corresponding growth in women's rights, workers rights and democratic activism to counter the calls for sharia law and to call for de-criminalisation of dissent.
Lessons
What are the lessons that we here can learn about the revolutionary movements in Egypt, Tunisia and across the Arab World? To me, they come down to the question of leadership. A layer of activists – mostly young, all committed to changing the world – united behind the revolutionary goal of mobilising people to overthrow their dictators. Since the overthrows, these movements have developed and deepened – but an alternative vision to the Islamists wasn't put forward strongly enough in the electoral contests. Perhaps more importantly, efforts to advance the revolution's demands – for real democratic reforms, but also for the fundamental shift of economic priorities away from the washington/imf consensus of neoliberalism – are still yet to win a real political shift. To win this, revolutionary activists don't only need the objective factors to be on their side – the availability of new tools like the internet, the relative poverty, dissatisfaction with the regime – but also the subjective factors – how the layer of revolutionaries organise in these conditions. And until there is some way that the old left parties, the new left parties, the radical democracy activist groups and the independants are able to take the initiative away from the regimes and develop a united platform and work together as a united force, then these revolutions will remain unfinished.
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