Taking Things Seriously
Part 3: The Gravity of the Situation
Is there a paradox of effective cooptation? Writing of the Mubarak regime’s strategy to control labor dissent, Dina Bishara argued the state’s ability to fully co-opt leaders maximized the loyalty of the leadership to the regime, but that the extent of the co-optation undermined those leaders ability to fulfil their designated task of co-opting rank and file members (Bishara 2013: 28). In the immediate aftermath the military coup, Kamal Abu-Aita the president of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions was appointed to the post of Minister of Manpower, Kamal Abbass of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services was appointed to the states’ National Council for Human Rights (where he remains) and Yusri Ma’ruf the president of Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress was named to a new constituent assembly
155ONA News Serivce: “Tajdid Habs 30 mutahaman bi-harq qism shurtah al-saf 15 yawman ala-dhimat al-taqiq”
21 January 2014: http://onaeg.com/?p=1421937.
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charged with drafting a new constitution. There is therefore a striking similarity between the state’s complete capture of an institution’s leadership in the Mubarak era, and the complete hollowing out of that institution’s ability to act autonomously because of the capture.
There are, however, important differences. Egypt under military rule has been more oppressive than any time in its history as a republic; but within that shift in the overall level oppression, there remains a discrepancy between the degree and kind of state violence directed against explicitly political actors and localized labor protests. The fundamental division of modalities of control remains; that is the relative caution of taking direct policy action against groups whose democratic representation it will not accept, but would instead seek to implement the Mubarak era policy of ‘ignoring’ (Bishara 2013, 2016).
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Figure 15: Reda Sallam, third from the right, at a meeting in the new headquarters of the brick workers’ union in al-Saf in 2014.
It is therefore the case that though their leaderships were crippled by deprivations of resources and complicity, the institutions to which they belonged also remain as intact as they ever were – that is, in a legal limbo that has not ended despite the existence of docile, military friendly parliament elected in 2015. The strategies of pursuing legal change and engaging a wider public pursued at the elite level of what constituted itself as ‘the labor movement’ proved to be deficient, but a not insignificant number of the formations at the bottom of these defanged federations remain. It is not yet clear how many estimated of 1000 unions legally recognized in 2011 have become ‘paper unions,’ but it is also not clear that there exists any resources in the
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new authoritarian state’s repertoire of (in)actions to reach down into this denser network of bodies to find leaders to co-opt.
One of them is Reda Sallam whose union had, by 2014, grown to 4000 members. By then the growing membership was in increasingly desperate straits as an unresolved energy shortage had led to successive shutdowns and lockouts by the factory owners. I was also surprised to learn that Reda had been elected to the executive board of the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress.
His sorrow over his brother was never linked to the anti-government stance of his public pronouncements. The state’s energy policy that for years pushed owners to adopt natural gas instead of the environmentally polluting Mazot (Diesel) left the industry devastated when el-Sisi’s second government reduced energy subsidies such that many of the factories became untenable. By 2014, a reported half of the factories were closed down, leaving workers in al-Saf, who were never covered by social or health insurance, entirely without a safety net.156
The revolutionary re-enactment that preceded the military coup, as I have argued in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, signified a recognition that political change must be achieved through methods dictated by the popular revolution of 2011. Autonomous political actors, namely the military and the Muslim Brotherhood recognized, that what had happened in Egypt could not be assimilated into ‘an ongoing process.’ Their autonomy is signaled by ability to act in a new arena rather than merely become their product. But the derivativeness of the coup from the revolution that preceded it, the closing act of a democratic experiment from its opening one, has also signaled that the new authoritarianism is built on resuscitation of what had come before.
Hence successive governments of Egypt after the summer of 2013 that have sought to control labor, the law and the media, have done so through means derived from the last years of the
156 Salam, Walid. “Naqib ‘Umal Masani’ Toob: Irtifa’ Si’r Ghaz wa Asmant wa Solar Awqaf Masani’ al-Toob wa Kharab Biyutnah.” Ahdath al-Sharq. 25 July 2014: http://hisspress.net/?p=30240
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Mubarak regime, buttressed by, and requiring increasing levels of violence.157 The incongruence of this derivative political administration has meant an even greater degree of hollowing out of institutions such as the judiciary, the legislature and the media in order to immediately cement the seizure of power and make complicit groups who may at some point form centers of opposition. The crises of authority at the center of this storm of state violence is as acute as it ever was. Should the storm abate, there is some evidence of a different set of actors taking things seriously.
157 In July of 2015, a Special Forces contingent was sent to an apartment in the suburb of 6 October where 13 lawyers of Muslim Brotherhood were ‘liquidated’ by the Ministry of Interior, signaling the entry of the ‘Death Squad’ into Egyptian politics. See “Egypt Forces Kill 13 Muslim Brotherhood Members in Cairo.” Middle East Eye. 2 July 2015: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/9-muslim-brotherhood-members-killed-cairo-688879342
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Overture to Chapter 4
The systemic impact of changes in political communication and the media is poorly understood. Within a revolutionary political situation, the political function of mass
communication is subject to rapid transformation, wherein the causal impact is itself subject to enormous variation. There is a radical disjuncture between the temporally proximate situations in which ‘opinions count’ and one in which individuated and divided expressions are cast into an ether without resonance. This disconnect has proved useful to extant political actors and detrimental to the point of being annihilative to political projects seeking the attainment of affirmative consent of an audience.
The socialization of dyadic communication embodied in online social media stands accused of effecting monumental political change in world politics. First as mechanisms facilitating protest under authoritarianism, magnifying political forces that are otherwise assumed to be organizationally weak. Second as amplifiers of populist nationalisms that have taken hold in established democracies. In this chapter, I argue that analyses of politics that posit an ontological divide between fundamental politics and virtual politics in their consideration of media are flawed. Such analyses correspond to philosophical ideas about the mind and the body, and obscure more than they reveal. Instead, I identify and present three modes with which
citizens engage different forms of media: power signification, logistic transmission and
individuating monological. These analytical categories offer more purchase than theories rooted in a country’s assigned level of political development whilst allowing for variation in context and institutional checks and balances. Rather than rely on untenable counterfactuals, or surveys that measure what individuals think, I argue that the mechanisms with which individuals and groups utilize political communication and the media are best accounted for by non-Marxist materialism
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that emplaces these methods of political production in assemblages whose outcome may lead to collective action, demobilization or the constitution of a political actor.
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