Middle-Class Employees in the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 Nada Matta, Drexel University, USA ABSTRACT As participants in political and workplace protests, middle-class employees (MCEs) were overrepresented during the 18 days of the Egyptian uprising of 2011. This is quite surprising, because the democracy movement that called for the uprising had limited organizational capacities that could not have mobilized these sectors, and MCEs historically constituted the social base of the Egyptian regime. By the 2000s, however, the decline in state institutions that tied MCEs to the regime had intensified, aggravating their grievances. I argue that those MCEs who were able to build formal organizations or had joined the democracy movement were mobilized through a for- mal path, while those who did not joined spontaneously. Spontaneous action here was institutionally structured. It built on preexisting informal networks and prior ex- periences in both workplace and work-related anti-regime protests. The democracy movement thus created an opening for already aggrieved and mobilized MCEs to join the uprising. S cholars have interpreted the magnitude of Egypt’s uprising in 2011 by sug- gesting that the scale of protests was due to economic grievances, youth bulge, youth unemployment, and the availability of new social media. 1 I would like to thank Mark Cohen, Suzy Lee, Adaner Usmani, Michael McCarthy, and Bashir Abu-Manneh especially for their extensive comments and suggestions. Rene Rojas, Jeremy Cohan, Ahmad Al Sholi, Jonah Birch, Erez Maggor, Vivek Chibber, Jeff Goodwin, Kathleen Gerson, Michael Schwartz, also offered generous support and valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. Last but not least, I would like to thank the editors and reviewers of Critical Historical Studies for their very helpful comments. 1. Adam Hanieh, “Egypt’s Uprising: Not Just a Question of Transition,” Socialist Project EBulletin, no. 462 (2011), http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentEgyptsUprisingNotJustAQuestionOfTransition.html; Jack Goldstone, “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3 (2011): 8–16; Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Kate Critical Historical Studies, volume 9, number 1, Spring 2022. © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press in association with Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). https://doi.org/10.1086/719124 103