Tanta llKettan wel Zeyoot was a company established in Gamal AbdulNasser’s 1954 within the backdrop of a care-taking public sector. The company, emblematic of many public sector companies, got privatized as part of the larger neoliberal state vision stemming with Anwar al-Sadat’s ‘Open Door’ policies, embedded and solidified later within the nineties Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program policies package. In 2011’s Egypt’s utopic revolutionary imaginary and moments of open-ended dreams, the labor movement appealed to court to revoke its privatization decree. In July 2011, Tanta llKettan gets reinstated to the public sector and the labor movement gets entangled in another ongoing series of struggles. Looking at a decade of political becoming mirrored in the longest labor movement in Egypt, one questions the naturalized epistemic categories that stratify resistance and create imaginaries of criteria that constitute ‘resistance’. Looking into ‘re-existence’ as practices of otherwise, the paper, using Tanta’s melancholic experience from 2008 to 2019, will read how revolutionary imaginaries gets reconstituted beyond mere end-goal-oriented changes (Mignolo 2011: 47; Brown 2002: 574). The paper explores the following questions: how did this collective precarity influence the formation of a collective consciousness over resistance against the hegemony of the logic of neo-liberalism embedded in Capital [accumulation] and the State (Harvey 2004: 66)? How was the play manifested on the governmentality of time (i.e. its deferral, imaginaries creation over promises, contingencies, repetition) and contestations of space (seen as thrown-togetherness with reshuffling social relations) reflected in both State-Capital and workers strategies (Hage 2009: 56; Simone 2019: 4)? My methodology is based on oral narratives that I have personally conducted through my MA thesis fieldwork period between June 2019 and January 2020. This will also be complemented by archival research such as various newspapers coverage such as alSherouq and alMasry alYoum [two critical newspapers covering both state discourse over the struggle and labor’s efforts to render their struggle visible in media], labors personal documents which include their personal documentation efforts with labor statements, pictures, videos, court rulings, personal Facebook posts and company accounts paperwork.

After performing the Egyptian coup d’état of 2013, Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi became the beneficiary of a personality cult that baffled many. Notwithstanding the rapid deterioration of civil liberties, a significant level of popular enthusiasm about the new military strongman was undeniably there. How could popular support for an authoritarian leader reach such heights in a country that had so recently experienced a grass roots revolutionary uprising that celebrated the power of the people? There are multiple reasons that can help to explain this, but in this paper I will argue that a certain kind of authoritarianism in the Egyptian collective memory was tapped into at a crucial juncture of Egyptian politics. I will focus on the way in which Gamal Abdel Nasser was revived as a national icon during that period that became known as ‘Sissi-Mania’. In order to understand how Nasser could function as a model for a new ruler whose neo-liberal politics is far removed from Nasserist ideology, I will first reflect on how Nasser entered Egyptian ‘collective memory’ (Employing Jan Assmann, Jeffrey Olick, but especially Shar?f Y?nus, Al-zahf al-muqaddas, 2012). Consequently, I will trace how the horizontal nature of the protest movement and the political incompetence of the Muslim Brotherhood created a yearning for ‘law and order’ as well as a broad antipathy against the MB. In that context, Nasser was catapulted from collective memory into contemporary opposition discourse, as the arch nemesis of the MB and a symbol of national strength. Apart from explaining how we should understand the revival of Nasser in the public sphere in post-Mubarak Egypt, this paper will also critically address the extent to which the – rather Eurocentric - field of memory studies could be fruitfully employed in Middle Eastern studies.

In the late 1990s, as the Mubarak regime accelerated the implementation of market reforms the number of labor protests grew significantly. The wave of protests continued in the 2000s, reaching 3.9 a day in 2008, 4.4 in 2009, and 5.8 in 2010. Following the 2011 uprising the number of labor protest rose significantly averaging 38.6 protest per day during Morsi’s tenure. This high rate of strikes has persisted since Sisi’s coming to power despite growing repression. Although the number of labor protests has declined compared to Morsi’s time in office, they remain significantly higher, at more than 29 per day between mid-2014 and the end of 2015, than during the last years of the Mubarak regime. Even as repression intensified, there were 1,736 labor protests in 2016. Remarkably, despite continuing repression, labor protests and strikes have continued through 2020. Relying on The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Land Center for Human Rights, and interviews among other sources to document the patterns of labor protest since the late 1990s this paper will investigate why high levels of labor protests continue in Egypt despite the increasing repression. The paper draws on prospect theory to explain the continued willingness of workers to mount protests despite growing repression which has intensified in the lead-up to the presidential elections in 2018. This theory argues that people respond to and act differently depending on whether they perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses or the domain of gains. When in the domain of gains, people tend to act to protect what they have and thus are more risk averse. Because workers in Egypt have found themselves in the domain of loss, their assessment of risks associated with staging protests have shifted and they have become more willing to engage in high risk activities. Paradoxically, the heightened repression under Sisi may well be pushing more workers into the domain of loss and thus is making them more not less willing to engage in protests. In answering the second question, the paper will map out the patterns of protest across different sectors of the economy and argue that prospect theory can help us better understand why particular groups of workers are more willing to engage in high cost protest actions.

Inspired by Gramsci’s seminal work on the subaltern – taken back to its class dimension-, and based on my past extended fieldwork in Egypt, this paper is looking at the emergence of ‘subaltern subjects’ as the protagonists of the different waves of the Egyptian Uprising, from January 2011 onwards. My main argument is that, as ‘street politics’ played a fundamental role in the protest movements both before and after January 2011, the role played by old and new form of social and political resistance needs further and deeper investigation. Whilst my wider research is considering both those sites and actors of resistance with an established societal recognition–such as workers, women, students and civic activists- and at those without a tradition of political activism, like the football ‘ultras’ and the self-organised resistance in the ‘social nonmovements’ (Bayat, 2013), this study will focus on the experience of the independent Trade Unions (ITUs). The trajectory of the ITUs is pivotal as it emerged in the late 2000s as the first organized subaltern actor vis à vis the regime, helping to create the ‘Revolutionary conditions’ for the 2011 Uprising. It is therefore fundamental to look at how workers’ resistance has been transformed by ‘Revolutionary practice’, in the ‘window of opportunity’ (2011-13), and especially after July 2013 military-led coup, with ITUs leader becoming Ministry of Manpower. Against this background, Gramsci’s writings can help illuminate the different trajectories of ITUs and workers’ activism in general since July 2013, especially in understanding how and why they became distant from the subaltern actors they claimed to represent, thus failing to deliver their promise of resistance.

The Muslim Brothers were major beneficiaries of the Egyptian government’s economic liberalization policies (infitah) beginning in 1974. Starting in that year Egypt became open to foreign and private investments and encouraged private enterprises. Even though scholars have analyzed this shift as overwhelmingly unproductive, benefiting crony capitalists by manipulating policies for the sake of maintaining power, they have underestimated how economic liberalization benefited businesses and businessmen of the opposition, particularly the Brotherhood and Islamist sympathizers. Most of the literature view the connection between economic liberalization and civil society in terms of the infitah leading to either a liberal political opening (as a trigger for social protest and activism) or creating a vacuum due to the dismantling of the welfare state, leaving space to be filled by the Muslim Brothers. Instead, I argue that the infitah produced openings for the Brothers and other Islamists and that they strategized and negotiated their gains and benefits. My argument is embedded in a larger literature on Middle Eastern authoritarianism as well as social movement theory. Most of the literature has turned away from the classic view that authoritarianism is rigid, inflexible, and does not change. Scholars have shown how the opposition successfully functions under such conditions, creating change within but not of authoritarianism, while mobilizing financial resources. It is within this environment, that the Brotherhood and other Islamist businessmen have functioned. Based on primary research, including personal interviews with Brotherhood members, Islamist businessmen and economists, I conclude that during the period of 1974-1995, the business environment in Egypt was far more beneficial to Islamists than is often assumed. In the literature, their freedom to do business is often conflated with their (lack of) freedom as political actors. As a result, the literature looks at crackdowns as total blows, rather than as targeted prunings. There was, in fact, a difference between Islamists as political and economic actors. While Islamists negotiated and strategized their activities as political actors, they also negotiated their economic activities and opportunities. Some 'survival strategies' included maintaining businesses under the negotiated ceiling, sustaining connections with state personnel, having a foreign connection for their businesses, and exploiting Brotherhood networks.