Kit's blog

The Libyan revolution began as did most revolutions in the Arab world, with protests against a cruel dictator. The protests grew large by mid-February and were especially large in Tripoli.[i] What quickly distinguished Libya from the rest of the Arab world was the brutality of the dictator’s counter attack and the response of the protesters.

By early March the democratic protest movement had transformed into a civil war. Exactly how and why this happened is still not entirely clear. Muammar Qaddafi’s repression was deadlier than that of Syria’s Assad, or Yemen’s Saleh.[ii]  Protesters in several cities responded to Qaddafi’s repression by finding arms and fighting back. In Benghazi armed protesters battled Qaddafi agents, eventually driving them from the city.[iii] Several cities and towns in both eastern and western Libya were soon liberated.

These remarks were delivered to a recent meeting of the Solidarity National Committee to introduce a discussion on the Egyptian labor movement.

Egyptian labor confronts neoliberalism

This presentation could go back centuries because Egyptian labor history is so rich. I’m going to do a quick run through of some points which relate to the current labor uprisings. In a certain sense, what’s been going on with the Egyptian workers movement over the past month or so is a reaction to developments that have been building up for three and a half decades within Egypt.

These developments go all the way back to 1974 when Anwar el-Sadat started an assault on the so-called Arab Socialist state welfare policies of the Nasser period. This is the program that he referred to as the “open door policy.” Sadat negotiated with the IMF and World Bank and eliminated subsidies for foods and created huge openings for foreign investments, and joint ventures. That proceeded apace until 1991 when Mubarak unleashed a much more aggressive assault on labor through economic reform and structural adjustment programs that he instituted in coordination with the IMF. This undertook the privatization of more than 300 publicly- owned firms. The issue that came up with privatization is that these firms all had payrolls that, from a capitalist standpoint, were padded. You wouldn’t make profit as a private corporation with such large payrolls.