Hazem Kandil: Revolt in Egypt. New Left Review 68, March-April 2011 hazem kandil Interview a. the movement After a reign of thirty years, Mubarak was overthrown by a popular movement in less than three weeks. How did the uprising originate? Over the last few years, a rebellion had been brewing under the surface. In 2004, the businessmen’s cabinet of Ahmed Nazif marked the first time this group actually took over government.
Parallel with this social change, and related to it, was an alteration in the forms of political repression by the regime. So, more and more, plain-clothes assistants were used for these tasks. Khaled Said was killed in the summer of 2010. January 25 is a national holiday commemorating the heroic resistance of police officers in Ismailia, a city on the Suez Canal, against a British force that asked them to hand over their weapons on that day in 1952. Over the next two days, not only did protests continue, but different oppositional groups came together for a bigger mobilization. The working class? Why did the Egyptian Middle Class March to Tahrir Square?
Buy & download fulltext article: Abstract: Building on the extensive literature on relations between the state and social classes, this article examines the reasons leading important sectors of the middle class to revolt against Egypt's Mubarak regime. The role of the middle class in the Egyptian uprising is both crucial and somewhat paradoxical. It is crucial because it was the middle class that overwhelmingly mobilized against Mubarak, with workers and peasants remaining, at least initially, on the sidelines.
It is also paradoxical because the Mubarak regime had courted the middle class for a long time and the latter did benefit from its privileged relations with the regime. However, the neo-liberal reforms undertaken more recently undermined many of the material and political achievements of the middle class, favouring instead a new class of tycoon capitalists linked to the regime. The economics of the Arab Spring. On the State of Egypt: What Caused the Revolution - Ala' Aswani. Wael Ghonim: Inside the Egyptian revolution. Egypt: Food for a revolution. In 2008, three years before Egyptians rose up against President Hosni Mubarak, the global food crisis provided a hint of what was to come. As world oil prices rose and Western countries planted ever more acres for biofuels instead of people, food prices skyrocketed.
Suddenly, cooking oil, tomatoes, lentils, rice and even bread soared out of reach for many families. Riots and protests broke out around the world. In Egypt, fights erupted in the subsidised bread lines and five Egyptians died in the clashes. "The revolution started because of the price increase, but in the old days, nothing like this happened before," recalls Sabah Orany Saber, standing outside a discount produce market that caters to the servant class in the wealthy 6th of October neighbourhood, near Cairo. Sabah, her husband, Qotb, and their children were once a farm family. "Life was getting harder there for me and my father, and income was getting more limited, so I came to Cairo," Qotb recalls. Blessed by the Nile.