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left by Hurricane Katrina and would see, at isolated moments, in Greece and London later in 2011.
    Though the precise details of how the military then seized power remain shrouded, there can be few clearer examples of an economics-driven split within a ruling class. Gamal Mubarak’s neoliberal programme of privatizations and corporate land grabs had been actively championed by the IMF and by leading European politicians: from Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson to French industry minister Eric Besson and, of course, Silvio Berlusconi, as well as many of the business leaders who gather annually at Davos.
    Gamal and his brother Alaa had built a personal fortune for the family, estimated at around $70 billion, by extracting stakes in the newly privatized enterprises. Like many of the morally dubious enterprises that have collapsed in chaos since 2008, it was run from a business address in London.
    But decades before the Mubaraks created their neoliberal fiefdom, the army had created its own economic empire: factories, tourist resorts and service businesses, replete with a supply chain of privately held companies dependent on army patronage. The politicians and media types aligned with this section of Egyptian capital saw the state, not global capitalism, as their meal ticket. The generals, together with this ‘national’ faction of Egyptian capital, had material reasons to resent the Mubarak clique—above all the impending stitch-up of the presidential succession—and they saw their moment.
    While the masses were on the streets, these two factions fought a Shakespearean death-tragedy behind closed doors, and the army won. First, they forced Mubarak to concede the appointment of a vice president; next, the sacking of his cabinet and its replacement with army-aligned politicians. On 1 February, with a million people in Tahrir, they forced Mubarak to announce he would no longer seek re-election. The next day, Mubarak-loyal politicians paid camel drivers to gallop into Tahrir Square to attack protesters: the aim was to present to the world the illusion of a mass backlash, an ‘enough reform and lawlessness’ movement.
    When, after two days and nights of hand-to-hand fighting, the camel-backed counter-revolution failed, Tahrir began to fill with a much wider demographic of protesters who, day by day, rejected the various compromises and reshuffles offered by Mubarak. Who can forget the old man holding up a placard that read: ‘Mubarak: Go! My arms are tired’?
    Finally, on 10 February, at the demand of the first meeting in decades of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Mubarak recorded a speech announcing he would step down. But Gamal stormed into the presidential palace and forced his father to scrap the recording and make a new one. This promised only elections by September.
    It was to be the final straw for the masses, who were flooding into Tahrir in their hundreds of thousands, and for the army, which was now beginning to split openly under pressure of demands from Tahrir and because of its fraternization with the protesters. The generals forced Mubarak’s departure—without further ado or speeches—on 11 February, to be replaced in power by General Tantawi and the SCAF itself.
    But by now a new force was making itself heard: the working class.
    The collapse of invisible walls
    The Egyptian working class bears the birthmarks of its creation, first under British rule and then during the state capitalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser: it is concentrated in the public sector, in army-owned factories and in recently privatized enterprises. On the eve of the revolution, 28 per cent of the workforce was employed by the state and just 10 per cent in the ‘modern’ sector—that is, in textiles, construction, energy, transport and services. More than a third of workers were ‘informal’, and the rest worked on the land. 4
    Though shrunk by twenty years of