Diary #7

2006-10

Leftist lawyer Khaled Ali speaking at the Workers Coordination Committee meeting, 9 February 2007.

Leftist activists met, in February 2007, to discuss strategy and tactics, as the Winter of Labor Discontent entered its third month.

The domino effect was by then in full steam, with the industrial militancy spilling over from the textile workers to other sectors of the economy. The 2006-10 mass strikes were the biggest and longest strike action in the history of modern Egypt, since 1946.

The strike wave started independently of any political group in general, but not for long. A growing network of Revolutionary Socialists and other leftist activists were tirelessly and quietly touring the provinces, trying to create channels of communication between the different striking factories to reach some level of coordination; exchanging experiences between different locations, and pushing for some important demands that became central to the labor movement, including the fight to raise the national minimum wage and to build independent trade unions away from the corrupt state-run federation.

More importantly, this growing network laboriously flooded both the local and international mainstream (and independent) media with strike news, photos, and videos, to ensure the domino effect that would encourage wider sections of the population, beyond our organizational reach, to follow suit and strike.

Meeting with industrial organizers in downtown Cairo, 25 March 2009.

Few details have been written about those efforts for security reasons, and probably much of it will remain undocumented. However, the first sign that the above-mentioned strategy was going in the right direction, was in 2008, in Mahalla.

For much of its history, except for the brief period of 2011-4, the Revolutionary Socialists has been a relatively small organization that never exceeded a few hundred members. But the visualization of dissent strategy allowed us to punch exponentially above our weight.