student civil disobedience, Part B

But here is a counter-argument from one of my faculty colleagues (young, Egyptian, female). She ends with an alternative idea:

Most of my students did not support [the strike] (yet). They said:

a) a general strike hurts the poor and unprivileged

b) it further cripples and hurts us nationally, whether financially or educationally or whatever, and with all the suffering we’ve faced, we’ve gotten beyond the point of “ends justify the means”, we don’t deserve to harm ourselves any longer, it is SCAF that should be harmed

c) it perpetuates negative stereotypes about the youth and activists being dangerous troublemakers who don’t care about the stability and growth of the country (and further marginalizes them once again)

d) there is no broad-based support, the majority of Egyptians do not support it so it will not be effective and could turn out to be a long drawn-out affair like the perpetual Tahrir protests – therefore it is not an effective form of social action

e) since Feb 2011 the country has seen no end of demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, etc. across all institutions, companies, political spectrums, etc… strikes are an “old tactic” that simply do not produce the same level of pressure as before and SCAF knows how to deal with it

f) if lots of students join in, they anticipate it will be more about wanting to skip classes, or going along with the flow without thinking deeply about their actions, or wanting to release some of the grief and anger they feel by doing some kind of action which will make them feel better

I should say that the students I spoke with seemed DEEPLY affected by Port Said the death of their colleague, and want to do SOMETHING to channel those feelings but argued that this was not the right tactic.

The students suggested that we need to come up with new, creative, and alternative ways to fight SCAF. They didn’t have answers, but one potential solution mentioned was a NATIONAL BOYCOTT OF ALL MILITARY’S FINANCIAL INTERESTS (products, stores, events halls).(which apparently has started but hasn’t gotten much traction yet) They said this will hurt ONLY SCAF where it hurts the most (after all, isn’t their financial interests the main reason for holding onto power) and NOT hurt the rest of the Egyptians, is a different strategy SCAF will not be used to. After listening to those arguments I also thought:

1) It is an effective form of social action since it requires people do things that they can easily do (not buy things) and is not illegal or violent.

2) It will raise national awareness about military’s economic stronghold which most Egyptians don’t know about, which could lead to anger and envy against them just like the release of Mubarak’s financial figures was a turning point during the revolution.

3) It depends primarily on people with purchasing power, so if there is no support from the majority of Egyptians even the minority of the privileged can make an impact

4) Unlike demonstrations that can be ended violently, this is a pervasive action that SCAF can not stop (we do it in our own homes or when we go shopping)

5) It will be harder to get a counter-revolution going (will SCAF supporters argue for a “military product buy-in” to compensate for the money lost?). Good luck doing that, Egyptians don’t have a lot of money to spend on trying to show support for SCAF and it’s not like Abbaseya demonstrations where SCAF supporters can pay and bus people to go. And the Islamist parties – which have an easy time now of simply denouncing and criticizing the strike because it obviously hurts our economy – wouldn’t be able to argue for people to BUY SCAF products (that would show outright support for SCAF) and there is no simple argument against the boycott because just arguing that it is destroying the economy is an admission that SCAF runs the economy!

Overall, the students argued that we need to come up with other strategies.