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Labor, Capital, and the State in Nasserist Egypt, 1952–1961

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Joel Beinin
Joel Beinin
Affiliation:
Department of History Stanford University
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Extract

In the decade before the military coup of July 23, 1952, an increasingly militant workers' movement was an important component of the social and political upheaval that undermined the monarchy and ended the era of British colonialism in Egypt. The ebbs and flows of the labor movement coincided with successive upsurges of the nationalist movement. Working class participation in the nationalist struggle infused the movement for full independence and evacuation of British military forces with a radical social consciousness, and since workers’ strikes and demonstrations were often directed against foreign enterprises, the labor movement was commonly considered to be a component of the nationalist movement. The working class was a social battering ram destabilizing the old regime, and many nationalists encouraged and legitimized labor militancy.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 71 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This study developed from a research project supported by a fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank James J. Sheehan, Harold L. Kahn, Zachary Lockman, Fred H. Lawson, and members of the Bay Area Middle East Studies Seminar for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

1 For a detailed discussion of this period see Beinin, Joel and Lockman, Zachary, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism. Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar

2 This is the approach of many Egyptians, especially Nasserists and Marxists. It was rather uncritically adopted by Tomiche, F. J., Syndicalisme et certains aspects du travail en République Arabe Unie (Égypte), 1900–1967 (Paris, 1974).Google Scholar American political scientists have also been interested in labor's institutional history. See Bianchi, Robert, ‘The Corporatization of the Egyptian Labor Movement” Middle East Journal, 40, 3 (1986), 429–44,Google Scholar and Coronis, Susan Dee, “The Impact of Trade Unions on Policy Making in Egypt, 1952–1984,” Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1985.Google Scholar'Atif's, Ulfat Mahmud Fu'ad, “al-'Ummal wa'-haraka al-'ummaliyya fi Misr: 1942–1961,” M.A. thesis, Cairo University, 1985, is a promising indication of a more analytical approach to labor history among Egyptian historians.Google Scholar

3 The principal source for this study is the workers' column of the daily al-Masa' (henceforth M) from October 1956 to March 1959. The column was edited first by Lutfi al-Khuli and after May 1957, by Ibrahim 'Abd al-Latif. It appeared three times a week containing trade union news, poetry and short stories by workers, legal advice, and news about workers’ participation in the government's anti-imperialist political campaigns. Because it was edited by communists and other leftists, M might be regarded as a source which would overemphasize the oppositional character of the working class. However, during this period the communists were allied with the government in an informal national united front. Sometimes the editors of M actually minimized news of oppositional sentiment in order not to provoke clashes with the government. Use of M as evidence of a struggle between labor and capital and of opposition to the regime's efforts to limit the political role of the working class represents a reading contrary to the intentions of the editors. Other newspapers of this period were more distant from the working class movement and covered mainly institutional and legal issues, if they treated labor affairs at all, and therefore are not useful sources for the issues discussed here.

4 Explanatory Note on the Land Reform Law of September 9, 1952.

5 See Davis, Eric, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–1941 (Princeton, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 O'Brien, Patrick, The Revolution in Egypt's Economic System (London, 1966), pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

7 For details see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, pp. 418 ff.

8 From the point of view of the capitalist market, dismissing a worker because of production cutbacks (for example) is not “arbitrary.” However, Egyptian workers judged this matter by a different standard, and I have employed the term that they used for this practice.

9 Khalid Muhyi al-Din, letter to Gamal Abdel Nasser, March 31, 1953, published with commentary in al-A hali, July 24, 1985.

10 Not all the unions supported Abdel Nasser. Some textile and transport workers' unions with a history of left-wing militancy supported Naguib. See Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, pp. 437 ff.

11 Quoted in al-Din, Amin 'lzz, “Thawrat yulyu wa'l-ummal” al-Tali'a, 1, 7 (07, 1965), 142.Google Scholar

12 Atif “al-'Ummal’, pp. 247, 249–50; Kamil, Fathi, Ma'a al-haraka al-niqabiyya fi nisf qarn: safahat min dhikrayat Fathi Kamil (Cairo, 1985), pp. 139–49.Google Scholar

13 “Taqrir 'can milaff maktab al-ustadh Yusuf Darwish al-muhami,” Yusuf Darwish papers, Cairo.

14 For more details on the structure of the textile industry see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, pp. 272–84.

15 M October 22, 1957.

16 Ibid., August 31, 1958.

17 Various Egyptian statistical sources give different figures. The data in this paragraph are based on the Census of Industrial Production for the relevant years as cited by Mabro, Robert and Radwan, Samir, The Industrialization of Egypt, 1939–1973: Policy and Performance (Oxford, 1976), p. 103.Google Scholar

18 No statistics on labor disputes before 1953 or after 1958 are available. Detailed breakdowns of these global figures are also unavailable. Most of the records of the Labor Department from the 1940s and early 1950s have not been preserved, although the texts of the decisions of Labor Tribunals in some cities during the post-1952 years are preserved in the Ministry of Manpower and Training.

19 Tomiche, Syndicalisme, p. 43, argues that these data indicate a favorable attitude of the government toward workers. But his statistics are incomplete. They omit the information given here in 2B. The overwhelming number of cases in this category were dismissed on technical grounds leaving workers no legal remedy. The court's decision not to hear a complaint is no reason to exclude it from the total. Moreover, Tomiche fails to indicate clearly the trend of decisions against workers because his figures do not go beyond 1956. Data on industrial disputes after 1958 are not available because the Egyptian Federation of Industry stopped publishing this information. The disappearance of this information from the public domain probably reflects an effort to deny that workplace struggles continued to occur.

20 Fédération des Industries de la Province Égyptienne, Annuaire. 1958–59, p. 387.

21 M, August 5, 1958.

22 O'Brien, Revolution, p. 100.

23 Budget Report. 1957–58, p. 13; cited in O'Brien, Revolution, p. 102.

24 See M, November 25, 1957, for a letter criticizing Mar'i on this issue. Tomiche, Syndicalisme, p. 43, interprets publication of the letter as proof of increased freedom of expression, but Criticism of a single government minister was not a new phenomenon in the Egyptian press. Moreover, in the context of a discussion of the government's labor policies, it seems more significant that a minister opposed the formation of a union than that a worker criticized the minister for this. Unions of agricultural workers were eventually established.

25 M, February 15, 1959.

26 O'Brien, Revolution, p. 103.

27 M, July 30, 1957. Lutfi al-Khuli's article on November 7, 1957, notes that textile firms in particular used these tactics.

28 Ibid., August 19, 1958.

29 Nouvelles d'Égypte, 4 (new series) (May, 1956), 1.

30 M, January 6, November 14, 1957.

31 Ibid., October 8, December 22, 1957.

32 ibid., January 14, 1958.

33 See ibid., September 2 and 10, October 7, November 11, 1957; January 6, March 9, 1958.

34 ibid., October 22, 1957. Madelaine 'Aziz's dismissal was first reported on August 20, 1957. For a rare report about the successful reinstatement of a trade union leader after a court trial see M, December 8, 1957.

35 ibid., September 2, 1957.

36 ibid., January 20, 1958.

37 ibid., November 11, 1957.

38 ibid., February 19, 1957, April 29, 1958.

39 Darwish, Yusuf, letter to Gamal 'Abdel Nasser, December 3, 1956, and “Asma' al-munazzamin fi al-muqawama al-sha'biyya—Shubra al-Khayma,” Yusuf Darwish papers; M, December 9, 1956. Darwish's Jewish background (he converted to Islam in 1947) was probably another factor motivating the government's action against him.Google Scholar

40 For example, Lutfi al-Khuli, “Ta'mim al-qanah wa'l-tabaqat al-'amila,” M, October 7, 1956, and Muhammad 'Ali 'Amir, “Khatt al-difa' al-awwal,' M, December 27, 1956.

41 Kamil, Fathi, Fahim, Ahmad, Nada, Sayyid ' Abd al-Wahhab, Sulayman, Nur, al-Tabaqat al-'amila fi al-ma'raka didd alisti'mar (Cairo, 1957), p. 7. Many of the events noted in the preceding paragraphs are mentioned in this book.Google Scholar

42 M, October 13, 1956.

43 ibid., February 18, 1957.

44 ibid., June 17, 1957.

45 ibid., July 2, 1957.

46 ibid., June 4, 1957.

47 ibid., October 28, 1957.

48 al-'Amiri, Tahir, “Ana al-'amil,” Nashrat ittihad niqabat al-ghazl wa'l-nasij bi-jumhuriyyat Misr, 3.(probably September 1955), 14.Google Scholar

49 al-Mihi, Darwish Muhammad, “Hikayat awwal mayu,” M, May 21, 1957.Google Scholar

50 Davis, Challenging Colonialism, p. 200.