Labour Protest and Hegemony in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula

Abstract

William Sewell’s (1993) article ‘Towards a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labour History’ challenged labour historians to abandon their basic economistic conviction that the arena of production and exchange was a uniquely material one. He cogently suggested that ‘we must imagine a worldin which every social relationship is simultaneously constituted bymeaning, scarcity and by power’ (ibid.: 34). Recent, significant, but under-reported rounds of labour protest in Egypt (since 2004) and in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (since 2005), however, can easily be read in a way that repeats rather than revises standard materialist premises in the labour historiography of North Africa and South West Asia. It is tempting to argue that intensifying capitalist globalization has led automatically to protests from below as workers suffer higher rates of exploitation, objectively defined. But even the most basic reminder that oppression and exploitation sometimes demobilize, and at other times spark collective action, indicates the inadequacy of mechanistic analyses. This chapter aims to respond to Sewell’s challenge by outlining how old and new movements of labour protest in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula can be understood in terms of hegemonic contestation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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