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The mass strikes of September 2011 paralysed the government and the military council and opened up the road to the crisis of November. The independent unions and strike committees which led these strikes are part of what is now probably the biggest social movement in Egypt (with the possible exception of the Muslim Brotherhood), and certainly the biggest organised movement with real roots in the everyday struggles of the poor

Will organised workers move into the leadership of the mass revolutionary movement? This article argues that two conditions for this happening have already been met: the workers’ movement has begun to gain enough mastery over its constituent parts to be able to use its social power in battle with the state, while the demands that are now being raised by this movement cannot be satisfied within the limits of neoliberal capitalism in the context of intensifying economic crisis at a local and global level.

While the numbers of participants were probably lower than February, the significance of September’s strikes lay in the qualitative shift towards coordinated national and sector-wide strikes.

The Indepenence List also won total, or near total, control of provincial syndicate boards in Ismailiya, Suez and Aswan – governorates where the Brotherhood could claim widespread support for its brand of politics.

in the last years of Mubarak, a younger generation of doctors started to organise in rank and file militant groups such as Doctors Without Rights (DWR) outside of the Syndicate’s internal body, against both Mubarak’s regime and the Brotherhood’s conservative union policies. In the aftermath of the January 25 revolution, these radical doctors, many of whom actually took part in the uprising against the dictator and were emboldened by their success in ousting him, embarked on organising their co-workers for campaigns to take workplace actions and strikes to improve their conditions.

This contrast between the new attitude of emboldened members and a static leadership was illustrated during the unprecedented national doctors’ strike last May. When doctors in public hospitals took industrial action against the government to demand minimum salaries and increased spending on healthcare from 4 per cent to 15 per cent of the budget, both the president of the Syndicate, Hamdy El-Sayed, and the Brotherhood-controlled national syndicate board denounced the strikers. Dr Mona Mina, a member of DWR who won a seat on the new national syndicate board in last Friday’s election and was one of the organisers of that historic strike, told Ahram Online that doctors found it hard to win that battle because of the Syndicate’s hostile position