From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Egypt: Military and Islamists Target Women, Copts, Workers-For a Workers and Peasants Government!

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Workers Vanguard No. 994
20 January 2012

Egypt: Military and Islamists Target Women, Copts, Workers-For a Workers and Peasants Government!

JANUARY 14—As the beginning of parliamentary elections approached in November, almost a year after the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, mass protests demanding an end to military rule broke out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and across urban Egypt. Police and the army attacked demonstrators with whips, tasers, truncheons and live ammunition, killing dozens. With more rounds of elections scheduled, it is far from clear that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has any intention of allowing a civilian government to be established. Ominously, Islamists, the largest organized opposition, have swept the polls, with the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood and the even more hardline Salafists winning some 70 percent of the vote between them.

Last winter’s uprising toppled Mubarak’s hated, military-backed regime, only to result in an even more open dictatorship of the armed forces. At the time, the bourgeois media and almost the entire left internationally hailed this as the Egyptian “revolution.” Since taking power, the SCAF has strengthened the police powers of the capitalist state and cracked down on social unrest. This is precisely what we warned about at the time, in opposition to widespread illusions that “the army and the people are one hand.”

The military’s repressive measures have been aimed centrally at the restive working class. Within months of Mubarak’s ouster, the regime banned strikes and demonstrations. In September, the SCAF expanded the hated emergency law to ban damaging state property, disrupting work and blocking roads with demonstrations. Between February and September, at least 12,000 civilians were tried in military courts, more than under Mubarak’s 30-year rule. With the first anniversary of the outbreak of mass protests approaching, the regime postponed the verdict in the trial of Mubarak for ordering the killing of protesters.

The oppressive conditions of life in neocolonial Egypt have generated enormous popular anger. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day or less, many families spend more than half their income on food. In 2008, when the prices of basic foods doubled, riots broke out across the country. Today the military regime is threatening to slash the bread subsidy. Unemployment is pervasive, affecting a quarter of youth and 60 percent of the rural population. The peasantry, more than 30 percent of Egypt’s population, toils in conditions that have scarcely changed from the time of the pharaohs. Malnutrition and anemia are rampant. Most peasants are either smallholders with less than one acre, tenants or migrant rural laborers. The terrible impoverishment continues to be enforced through police-state repression. As one striking worker explained, there are no jobs, no money, no food, and those who complain about it are thrown in prison.

The leadership of last spring’s protests offered nothing to alleviate the material conditions of life for the majority of the population, instead subordinating everything to the question of electoral democracy and preaching the nationalist lie that Egyptians of all classes had common interests. As we emphasized shortly before Mubarak’s ouster, “What is urgently posed in Egypt today is that the powerful proletariat—the only class with the social power to overturn the brutal and decrepit capitalist order—emerge as the leader of all the oppressed masses” (“Egypt: Mass Upheaval Challenges Dictatorship,” WV No. 973, 4 February 2011).

The industrial working class has amply demonstrated its social power and militancy, particularly in the textile industry. Strike waves continue to sweep the country. Bus drivers, textile workers, government employees and others have fought in defense of their unions and their livelihoods. But for the proletariat to emerge as a contender for power in its own right will require a tremendous leap in political consciousness. It must be broken from nationalist illusions and religious reaction and be won to the defense of all those oppressed in capitalist society. This requires the leadership of a vanguard workers party that opposes all bourgeois forces—from the military and the liberal opposition to reactionary political Islam—in the fight for proletarian revolution.

The Military and the Islamists

In the absence of a revolutionary proletarian alternative capable of addressing the felt needs of the mass of the population, the election returns are giving a measure of the grip that politically organized religion has on the downtrodden. The Muslim Brotherhood’s reactionary purpose is expressed in the slogan “the Koran is our constitution.” Promoting itself as a civilian alternative to military rule, it would dominate any government elected today. Its self-proclaimed “tolerance” for Coptic Christians is belied by its long history of organized terror. The Brotherhood’s historic aim of establishing an Islamic state has often brought it into violent conflict with the Egyptian government; nonetheless, successive regimes have encouraged the Islamists in countless ways and used them as a battering ram against workers, leftists, women and minorities.

The military, police and Islamists have all joined in recent attacks on women and on the Coptic Christian minority, which constitutes some 10 percent of the population. On October 9, protesters rallying against the burning of Coptic churches outside the Maspero state television studio in Cairo were attacked by uniformed military forces and Islamist mobs. In collusion with the army and riot police, armed thugs roamed the streets seeking out Christians, including women and children, killing more than 20 and maiming hundreds.

Women were targeted soon after the military takeover. Thugs who were mobilized around slogans such as “the people want women to step down” and “the Koran is our ruler” violently attacked a March 8 International Women’s Day demonstration in Cairo. In an act of calculated humiliation, women arrested at a protest the next day were forced to undergo “virginity” tests. Now, the image of a young woman, some of her clothing torn off, being dragged through the streets by military thugs in a December protest has become symbolic of the public degradation of women. This earned the regime a slap on the wrist from its U.S. patron, with Hillary Clinton commenting that such conduct “dishonors the revolution.”

Dead-End Reformism

In December, the Islamists launched a vicious campaign against the Revolutionary Socialists (RS) that was seized on by state security forces and propagated in much of the bourgeois media. The Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper ran a front-page article baiting the RS as violent while the Salafist Al-Nour Party accused the organization of “anarchy” and of being funded by the CIA, setting it up for state repression. It is in the interests of the whole working class to defend the RS and to defeat such slanderous attacks, which are meant to send a message to all leftists and the workers movement as a whole.

Along with its cothinkers of the international tendency founded by the late Tony Cliff, the RS countered the attack by organizing a public defense campaign. At the same time, they were taken aback that the Muslim Brotherhood had joined in the witchhunt against them: “The attack on the Revolutionary Socialists by prominent Brotherhood members sparked outrage because the RS played such a central role in defending the Brotherhood at the height of Mubarak’s campaign against the Islamists” (socialistworker.co.uk, 26 December). In the mass protests last year, the RS embraced the Brotherhood as allies in the struggle against dictatorship, even posting on the RS Web site a statement by the Brotherhood, complete with the Brotherhood’s emblem of crossed swords cradling the Koran. Even when the RS itself is the target, these inveterate tailists have continued to pursue an alliance with the forces of religious reaction.

In March, the military government issued a law regulating the formation of parties. With the pretense of defending secularism against the Islamists, the law targets organizations of the working class as well as those that seek to represent women and oppressed minorities. It reasserts a reactionary 1977 ban on parties that are based on “religion, class, sect, profession or geography” or are established “on account of gender, language, religion or creed” (“The Main Features of the Amended Law on Political Parties 2011,” www.sis.gov.eg).

As we wrote last year in a polemic against the RS and its international cothinkers, we reject the “bankrupt reformist framework, which posits that the only two ‘choices’ for the working class in Egypt are to capitulate either to the ‘secular,’ military-backed bourgeois-nationalist regime or to political Islam. In fact, these are alternative ways of propping up capitalist class rule, the system which ensures vast wealth for its rulers and dire poverty for the urban and rural masses” (“Pandering to Reactionary Muslim Brotherhood,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).

The three major electoral blocs—those representing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and the bourgeois liberals—have all taken aim at the working class in their election campaigns, explicitly condemning strikes. While the widespread strikes and protests of the last year have given leftist organizations an opening to operate more publicly, the situation has also made clear how the reformist organizations act as an obstacle to the fight to build a revolutionary party that champions the working class, poor peasants and all the oppressed.

The Democratic Workers Party (DWP), which is associated with the RS, promotes itself as representing the interests of the working class. Along with other left organizations and prominent figures like feminist author Nawal El-Saadawi, the DWP has called to boycott the elections in protest against the military regime’s brutality. The DWP’s program makes no pretense of socialism, instead demanding “the establishment of a parliamentary republic” (International Socialism, 28 June 2011). This is simply a call for a species of bourgeois government.

In promoting the call for a parliamentary republic, the reformists falsely tie the democratic aspirations of the population to the class rule of the Egyptian bourgeoisie. In Egypt, where successive parliaments have served as fig leaves for military dictatorship, the desires of the masses for political democracy, including freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, are just and deeply felt. However, the burning needs of the Egyptian masses—from fundamental democratic rights to women’s emancipation and eradicating the desperate urban and rural poverty—cannot be addressed except by uprooting the capitalist order and establishing a workers and peasants government. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bourgeois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.

—V.I. Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” (December 1918)

Imperialism and the Mask of “Human Rights”

The imperialist rulers are past masters at cloaking their bloody depredations in the rhetoric of “human rights” and “democracy.” Bourgeois liberals, the supposedly “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) and the reformist left have done their bit to embellish this image. In Libya, the imperialists carried out the terror bombing that led to the ouster and assassination of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi under a “humanitarian” banner, with the authorization of the United Nations. Cheerleading for the “Arab revolution” against dictatorship, much of the reformist left internationally fell into line with the imperialists’ campaign, hailing the Libyan “rebels” who were willing tools for the NATO attack. The RS enthused over rebel-controlled “liberated Libya,” where “all the institutions, including the courts, military forces, police and prisons, are under the popular democratic control” (Center for Socialist Studies, 4 March 2011).

The Libyan “rebels” comprised a collection of defectors from the Qaddafi regime, monarchists, Islamic fundamentalists, former CIA assets, tribal chiefs and others. They gave a pretext for the imperialist bombing, acted as the ground troops for the imperialists and carried out pogroms against black African immigrants in the territories they had seized. In a statement issued the day after the imperialist bombing began, the International Communist League put forward a perspective of proletarian internationalism, giving no political support to Qaddafi but calling on “workers around the world to take a stand for military defense of semicolonial Libya.” We added: “From Indochina and the Korean peninsula to the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan today, the ‘democratic’ imperialist rulers wade in the blood of millions upon millions of their victims” (“Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!” WV No. 977, 1 April 2011).

Egypt was and remains a top recipient of U.S. military aid, to the tune of $1.3 billion a year. At the same time, provoking bitter complaints from the SCAF, the imperialists have also cultivated “democratic” opposition groups to give a humanitarian guise to their operations and to influence protest movements. And now that the Islamists are riding high on their electoral victory, the Obama administration has held high-level meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to forge closer ties.

Since Mubarak’s overthrow, the U.S. has given more than $40 million to Egyptian “human rights” groups. In December, Britain announced plans to double the amount of aid it gives to NGOs in the Near East. A major sponsor of NGOs around the world is the United Nations, which itself was set up to give a humanitarian veneer to the depredations of imperialism, particularly American imperialism. The NGOs, sanctioned by and receiving funding from the imperialists, are hardly independent from their bourgeois sponsors.

Showing how little tolerance it has for political activity even when it is backed by its own imperialist patrons, Egypt’s military regime raided the offices of 17 NGOs on December 29. These included the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, as well as the notorious CIA conduit Freedom House. After the U.S. State Department announced it was “deeply concerned” and threatened to cut military aid to Egypt, the regime promised to return all of the seized materials and allow the NGOs to return to normal operations.

A 14 April 2011 article on the “Arab Spring” in the New York Times reported that “the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans.” One vehicle for this is the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which has advised “pro-democracy” activists on overthrowing regimes that are in the imperialists’ crosshairs, from Zimbabwe to Iran to Venezuela. In Egypt, the role of organizations such as CANVAS is to steer mass protests in directions acceptable to the imperialists.

CANVAS describes itself in the vaguest of terms, stating that it does not receive funding from any government and that “our agenda is educational, not political” (www.canvasopedia.org). But CANVAS’s purpose is amply illustrated by its history. It was founded by Slobodan Djinovic, the head of Serbia’s largest private Internet and phone company, and Srdja Popovic, a former member of parliament. Both were leaders of the Serbian student opposition group Otpor, which received funds from imperialist conduits such as the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, another CIA conduit. Otpor spearheaded the protests that toppled Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the fall of 2000. These protests amounted to a continuation by other means of the 1999 NATO “human rights” bombing campaign against Serbia, carried out under the pretense of defending the Kosovar Albanians. The April 6 Youth Movement, hailed in the bourgeois media for its role in the Egyptian “revolution,” modeled its logo on Otpor’s and used CANVAS’s materials to train its membership.

April 6 is part of the Revolution Youth Council (RYC), a bloc that formed last winter and claimed to speak on behalf of protesters in Tahrir Square. The RYC also includes representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of “democratic” oppositionist Mohamed ElBaradei. The U.S. International Socialist Organization, former affiliates of the Cliff tendency, hailed them as “Egypt’s young revolutionaries.” Both April 6 and the RYC have demanded that the SCAF hand power to a “national salvation government” headed by ElBaradei, who announced today that he was withdrawing from the presidential race, saying that the military was not about to hand power to elected rulers. ElBaradei has proved his usefulness to the imperialists: While head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, he led the charge to investigate Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

For Trade Unions Independent of the Capitalist State!

In the decade leading to Mubarak’s ouster, the Egyptian proletariat engaged in a wave of struggle that included over two million workers participating in over 3,000 strikes, sit-ins and other actions. These were carried out in defiance of the corrupt leadership of the state-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), the only legally recognized union body, whose predecessor was established by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1957. For over two decades, it was customary for the federation’s president to serve as the Minister of Labor. Acting as the Egyptian dictatorship’s lieutenants within the labor movement, the ETUF leadership refused to approve strikes, sabotaged workers struggles and informed on militants, setting them up for repression.

Since Mubarak’s fall, a number of new trade unions have flourished. According to historian Joel Beinin, “Some independent unions—like the Cairo Joint Transport Authority union of bus drivers and garage workers and the RETA [Real Estate Tax Authority] workers’ union—are quite large and command the loyalty of a great majority of the potential bargaining unit. Others have only fifty to one hundred members in factories employing hundreds or thousands” (“What Have Workers Gained from Egypt’s Revolution?” Foreign Policy, 20 July 2011). The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), founded last January, has been feted by the tops of the AFL-CIO and the British Trades Union Congress, labor bureaucrats who act as the agents of their imperialist ruling classes, as well as by reformist “socialists.”

Although the EFITU is not directly run by the Egyptian state, it is not politically independent from the capitalist rulers. Beinin approvingly reports that the EFITU and other organizations filed a court suit calling on the military regime to dissolve the ETUF and seize its assets, which the military did. This was an open invitation for the bosses’ state to attack not only the ETUF unions but the workers movement more broadly, serving to renew labor’s ties to the state. The development of a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions—one that would fight for strong industrial unions independent of the capitalist state—is a crucial part of the struggle to build the revolutionary workers party that is urgently needed.

Bankrupt Nationalism Breeds Religious Reaction

Born of a history of imperialist subjugation, Egyptian nationalism has long served the country’s capitalist rulers by obscuring the class divide between the tiny layer of filthy rich at the top and the brutally exploited and impoverished working class. Rather than struggling to break the working class from these illusions, left organizations including the RS have bolstered them. Harking back to the 1950s-60s, when the left-nationalist strongman Nasser wielded substantial influence in the Near East, the RS proclaimed, “Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region” (see “Egypt: Military Takeover Props Up Capitalist Rule,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011).

Nasser’s bourgeois regime, which continues to be idealized by the Egyptian left today, came to power in a military coup during a period of mass protests and strikes that followed World War II. Military forces led by Colonel Nasser overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk in 1952, followed shortly afterward by the departure of British troops. While Nasser won wide recognition as an “anti-imperialist,” especially with the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Egypt remained an impoverished country ultimately subordinated to imperialism.

Nasser succeeded in stabilizing the rule of the capitalist class, in part through concessions—such as a partial land redistribution, raising wages and expanding access to health care and education—but most characteristically through brutal repression. To consolidate his rule, Nasser suppressed the Communists, imprisoning, torturing and killing them. But even as he brutalized them, the Stalinist Communist Party continued its class-collaborationist support to Nasser, liquidating into his Arab Socialist Union in 1965. The Soviet Union provided economic and military aid to Nasser’s regime, allowing him a degree of independence from imperialist control that would not be possible today.

The bankruptcy of both secular nationalism and Stalinism, forces that were once dominant among the poor and oppressed in the region, fed the dramatic rise of political Islam. Generously funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Islamists, even while nominally banned, built a mass base in large part by providing charity and social services to masses of people to whom the bourgeois state has nothing to offer except abject poverty and police repression. American journalist Mary Anne Weaver described her experience in Cairo’s Imbaba slum:

“The Islamists, led by the Brotherhood, had built their own social and welfare system here, rivalling that of the state. [The hardline Islamist] Gama’a-controlled ‘popular’ mosques had set up discount health clinics and schools, day-care centers, and furniture factories to employ the unemployed, and they provided meat, at wholesale prices, to the poor. Despite an aggressive $10 million social program launched by the government at the end of 1994, the Islamists’ institutions remained generally far more efficient and far superior to run-down government facilities.”

—A Portrait of Egypt (1999)

Today the Islamists are once again trying to establish a base among the organized working class, where they historically have had little support. In 1946, when they did have a hearing among a layer of industrial workers, they played a strikebreaking role. The Muslim Brotherhood opposed major strikes in the Shubra al-Khayama textile plant while its newspaper spread anti-Communist and anti-Semitic poison. When the strike leaders were arrested during a strike in January of that year, the Brotherhood condemned them, saying they were “members of communist cells headed by Jews.” During a June strike in the same plant, the Brotherhood “informed the police of the names and addresses of the strike committee” (Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile [1998]).

Cliffites and Islam: Feeding the Hand That Bites Them

The RS and its cothinkers in the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have gone out of their way to bolster illusions in the Muslim Brotherhood, promoting it as a potential ally of the working class in the fight against imperialism and capitalist oppression. In an article titled “Comrades and Brothers” published in Middle East Report (Spring 2007), RS spokesman Hossam El-Hamalawy boasted that his organization “pushed for close coordination” with the Brotherhood and praised its “brotherly spirit.” Half a year ago, in an article printed in the SWP’s Socialist Review (June 2011) titled “The Islamists and the Egyptian Revolution,” Egyptian Cliffite Sameh Naguib complained about the “state of hysteria” among the left and liberals over the resurgent Islamist movement. Naguib went so far as to denounce those “lured into debates over Article 2 of the constitution, which enshrines Islam as ‘the religion of the state…and Islamic law as the principal source of legislation’.”

Long before that, in the seminal International Socialism (Autumn 1994) article “The Prophet and the Proletariat,” SWP leader Chris Harman went to some lengths to present political Islam favorably for seeking “to transform society, not to conserve it in the old way” and for “anti-imperialist slogans and some anti-imperialist actions which have embarrassed very important national and international capitalist interests.” This was the criminal line taken by the bulk of the left internationally in supporting Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces in the mass upsurge in Iran in the late 1970s against the bloody, U.S.-backed Shah. The result was the beheading of the militant working class, as Communists and other leftists were butchered, women were further enslaved, and national and other minorities were brutally repressed by the new Islamic regime.

While the SWP can fill reams of paper with nonsense about the Brotherhood’s “anti-imperialist stance,” Islamists, including the Brotherhood, have historically been the willing tool of imperialism against Communists, modernizing nationalists and secular liberals. Following World War II, U.S. imperialism promoted and funded the Brotherhood as part of its Cold War drive against Communism. This was one expression of the policy described in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, who would later serve as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”

The Cliff tendency has a long history of siding with the forces of Islamic reaction, including cheering the mujahedin—anti-Soviet “holy warriors”—in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The imperialists funneled vast quantities of arms and money to these Islamist terrorists in the largest CIA operation in history. The Muslim Brotherhood provided a major contingent of the mujahedin, whose jihad against a Soviet-backed, modernizing nationalist government was sparked when the regime introduced such reforms as lowering the bride price. In the first war in modern history in which the status of women was a central issue, the Soviet Red Army battled Islamic fundamentalists who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and killed teachers who taught young girls to read.

We hailed the Red Army in Afghanistan. Its presence opened the possibility of extending the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution to Afghanistan, just as those parts of Central Asia that were incorporated into the Soviet Union progressed centuries beyond the medieval conditions that prevailed in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988-89 was a betrayal by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy that left the country mired in backwardness and internecine bloodletting. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was the precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Although deformed by the parasitic rule of a bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union represented the dictatorship of the working class. When the USSR was destroyed through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, the SWP welcomed this, proclaiming “Communism has collapsed” and adding “It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991). A grave defeat for working people and the oppressed internationally, the end of the Soviet Union has meant a more dangerous world, where U.S. imperialism has a free hand and forces of religious and social reaction have grown stronger.

Permanent Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution was a defining event of the 20th century. The working class took state power, leading the peasantry, national minorities and all of the oppressed in overthrowing bourgeois rule, sweeping away as well the tsarist autocracy and the state church. It established the dictatorship of the proletariat, liberating the working people from capitalist exploitation. The Revolution confirmed the theory of permanent revolution developed by Leon Trotsky in 1904-1906. Trotsky had projected that, despite its economic and social backwardness, Russia was already part of a world capitalist economy that was ripe for socialist transformation, requiring proletarian revolution not only in backward countries like Russia but especially in the advanced capitalist states. The workers in Russia, who were small in number but strategically concentrated in large industry, could come to power before the country had undergone an extended period of capitalist development. Moreover, the workers in Russia would have to come to power if Russia was to be liberated from the yoke of its feudal past.

As Trotsky wrote in 1929 in The Permanent Revolution:

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses....

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property.”

In the same work, Trotsky stressed that “the socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.”

In articles on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt a year ago, we raised the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly along with a series of democratic demands while centrally stressing the need for the working class to establish factory committees and other organs of dual power. As a result of subsequent discussion, the ICL rejected on principle the call for a constituent assembly, which can be nothing other than a form of bourgeois state. As we wrote in “Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries” (WV No. 993, 6 January): “Our understanding of the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial countries as well as the advanced capitalist states, means that there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. The call for a constituent assembly consequently runs counter to the permanent revolution.”

Permanent revolution provides the only program for resolving the fundamental questions posed in Egypt and throughout the Near East today. The region is marked by abject poverty, benighted enslavement of women, the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Israel and the oppression of numerous other national and religious minorities by the Arab-nationalist and Islamist regimes. This legacy of social backwardness and oppression is reinforced by domination by the imperialist powers, whose overriding concern is control of the supply of oil. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation and site of the strategically important Suez Canal, is ruled by a venal bourgeoisie that has been a willing pawn of U.S. imperialism and, since 1979, a stalwart ally of Israel. In recent years, Egypt’s capitalist rulers have aided in the starvation blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza, including by sealing the border in Sinai.

Today, almost 60 years after the withdrawal of the last British colonial troops, Egypt is mired in some $35 billion of foreign debt. Over the past ten years, $24 billion in debt servicing payments has been bled from the country, while its debt burden has increased by 15 percent. Under the “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the International Monetary Fund, Nasser-era state control of industry has been progressively rolled back and factories sold off below cost to Mubarak’s cronies and foreign investors. At the same time, the military has retained extensive holdings, although their extent is kept secret. Journalist Joshua Hammer described them: “The military controls a labyrinth of companies that manufacture everything from medical equipment to laptops to television sets, as well as vast tracts of real estate…with command of as much as 40 percent of the Egyptian economy” (New York Review of Books, 18 August 2011).

The neoliberal “reforms” that led the World Bank to declare Egyptian agriculture a “fully privatized sector” by 2001 have vastly increased the misery of the rural population. Since the mid ’90s, tenant farmers’ rents have shot up from an equivalent of about $4 an acre annually to as high as $60, the equivalent of three months’ earnings. Some five million peasants and their families have been forced into penury after having been evicted because they were unable to pay their rent or because of state-sanctioned land grabs. Dispossessed peasants were driven into the slums and shantytowns of major cities, where they became a fertile recruiting ground for the Islamic reactionaries. Resistance to the land “reform” has continued over the years: peasants have marched in demonstrations, blocked main roads, set landlords’ houses on fire and attacked government offices. The government has responded with severe repression, with police and armed gangs attacking peasants, seizing crops and occupying fields by force.

The end of legal protections on land tenure opened the way for foreign companies to purchase huge tracts. The past two decades saw a tenfold rise in agricultural exports as production shifted away from staples for domestic consumption to high-cash produce for sale in Europe. Once capable of producing enough food to feed its population, Egypt is now the world’s biggest importer of wheat, leaving the impoverished population at the mercy of the world market, which is dominated by U.S. agribusiness.

In a country where more than 90 percent of women, both Muslim and Christian, are subjected to genital mutilation, courts run under Islamic law adjudicate family disputes and “honor killing” runs rampant. For Marxists, the question of women’s liberation cannot be separated from the struggle to emancipate the whole of the working class. Women workers are a vital part of the Egyptian proletariat. They have been prominent in the wave of strikes that has swept Egypt over the past decade, especially in the textile industry. Won to a revolutionary program, they will have a leading role to play in breaking the chains of social backwardness and religious obscurantism. As Trotsky stressed in his 1924 speech “Perspectives and Tasks in the East,” “There will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker.”

For Proletarian Internationalism!

The liberation of the Egyptian masses requires the overthrow not simply of the military but of the capitalists, landlords, Islamic clergy and imperialists who profit from the grinding oppression of the populace. The power to do this lies in the hands of the working class, whose consciousness must be transformed from that of a class in itself, fighting to improve its status within the framework of capitalism, to a class for itself, realizing its historic potential to lead all the oppressed in a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. Crucially, this includes the mobilization of the working class in the imperialist centers to overthrow their “own” exploiters. The capitalist economic crisis that has ravaged the lives and livelihoods of working people from North Africa and the Near East to Europe, North America and Japan only further underscores the necessity for a perspective that is at once revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist.

In Egypt, the struggle of the proletariat must be welded to the defense of the many oppressed layers in the society, including women, youth and Coptic Christians as well as Bedouins, Nubians and other minority groups. A workers and peasants government would expropriate the capitalist class, including the landlords, and establish a planned, collectivized economy. A planned economy on an international scale would open the way to develop industry at the highest level, providing jobs for the impoverished urban masses and applying the most advanced technology to agriculture.

The struggle against imperialist domination and the oppressive rule of the sheiks, kings, colonels, ayatollahs, nationalist and Zionist rulers throughout the region cannot be resolved under capitalism. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of a thoroughgoing proletarian revolution that opens the road to the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, as part of the struggle for world proletarian revolution. To bring this perspective to the working class requires the construction of a Leninist vanguard party, which will be forged in combat against the reformist “socialists” and others who seek to subordinate the working class to the imperialists, nationalists and forces of Islamic reaction. The International Communist League is dedicated to forging such parties.

From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- In Defense Of Marxism- "Revolutionary Aftershocks" -The Middle East At Glance

Markin comment:

The key question as posed here in this article is the question of questions, the formations and leadership of a revolutionary communist parties that fights for workers and peasants government (and students too, okay). And to build that party while the revolutionary wave is on the upswing. Such moments do not last forever as we have seen before, including in Barcelona in 1936.


Revolutionary Aftershocks
Written by Alan Woods
Monday, 21 February 2011

In nature an earthquake is followed by aftershocks. These can be as catastrophic in their effects as the original explosion. What we are now witnessing is the same phenomenon in terms of society and politics. The revolutionary earthquake in Egypt and Tunisia has sent seismic shocks to the most distant parts of the Arab speaking world. Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Sudan, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Djibouti -- the list is growing longer, not by the day but by the hour.

February 19, Bahrain. Photo: Al Jazeera EnglishIn Bahrain, which is next to both Iran and Saudi Arabia, the desperate attempt of the monarchy to crush the mass movement in blood has failed. The revolutionary people showed immense courage in the face of the bullets of the regime's hired mercenaries. As a result the authorities were forced to retreat and withdraw the thugs in uniform, allowing the masses to retake possession of Pearl Square, which has now become the centre of gravity for the uprising, like Tahrir Square in Cairo.

The upheavals in Bahrain also represents a potential fuse that can ignite a powder keg in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, where there is also a large Shiia minority and an increasingly disaffected population.

The crisis is already beginning to affect the reactionary Saudi regime. Last week the Mufti of Saudi Arabia warned the ruling clique that unless they carried out urgent reforms to improve the living standards of the Saudi people they could face overthrow like the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. In an unprecedented statement, he criticised the royal family for its extravagance, contrasting it with the poverty of the masses.

It is impossible to understate the importance of this development, since the entire Saudi regime is based on an understanding between the House of Saud and the clergy. A split between them would be a clear harbinger of a revolutionary crisis in this bastion of reaction in the Middle East and the broader Islamic world. It is something that sends shivers up the spine of the US imperialists.

In Iran also there are indications that the mass movement is reviving. There are clear signs of splits in the regime and in the state upon which it rests. According to a document received by The Telegraph, several lower ranking commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (a professional militia counting 120,000) have signed a document stating that they do not want to shoot on demonstrators. As we have pointed out in Marxist.com, if this document is correct, it marks a very important milestone in the development of the Iranian revolution.

Febraury 21, Bahrain. Photo: Mahmood Al-YousifThe hypocrisy of the imperialists knows no bounds. On the one hand they are obliged to make noises in public expressing their profound sympathy with the pro-democracy movement. But in reality they have backed every reactionary regime in the region, including Bahrain, which is home to the Fifth Fleet, the main US naval force in the Middle East. The British and Americans have armed these regimes for decades against their own populations. The tear gas and rubber bullets and other symbols of western democratic civilization used on the protesters in Pearl Square come from Britain, where the government is currently “reconsidering” its policy on arms sales to places like Bahrain and Libya.

Iraq
For all their economic and military might, the US imperialists are powerless to intervene directly against the revolution. They have already burnt their fingers badly in Iraq. Nine years, hundreds of thousands killed and maimed, and billions of dollars later, Iraq is no closer to “democracy” and “freedom” than when GW Bush toppled the US' former ally in Baghdad. Ironically, the debt incurred during this adventure has laid the foundations for mass unrest in the US itself. Despite this draining of blood and treasure, the US still does not and cannot control Iraq. By contrast, mass mobilizations and the entry of the organized working class has resulted in the overthrow of two dictators, with more to follow. This exposes the lie by the imperialists that only they can bring “civilization” to the “backwards” peoples of the region, which was, lest we forget, the cradle of human civilization.

17 February, Sulaymaniyah. Photo: Karzan KadoziThe revolutionary wave sweeping the region shows that once the masses are mobilized, no force on earth can stop them. Not even the mighty Mubarak could survive. If it can happen in Egypt, it can happen anywhere. Now, in Kurdish Iraq, mass unrest has erupted, threatening the shaky edifice put in place by the imperialists as they try to cut their losses while maintaining influence over the country's affairs – and oil.

Tunisia
In Tunisia tens of thousands marched over the weekend in the main cities against the Gannouchi government and demanding the immediate convening of a Constituent Assembly. “The Tunisian revolution is not over yet” was the common message of these demonstrations. The largest of these demonstrations took place in the capital Tunis on Sunday February 20, where tens of thousands marched to the government building shouting slogans like “Leave – Degage” and “We don't want the friends of Ben Ali”. Most media sources tried to minimise the size of this protest, but Reuters journalists who were present put the number in attendace at a massive 40,000. This video clearly shows there were at least tens of thousands present (Video ). Similar marches took place in Sfax (Video ), Kairouan (Video ), Bizerte (Video ), Monastir and other cities with thousands demonstrating.

Despite heavy police presence and the army firing on the air, the protestors

Libya
The revolutionary wave has reached its latest and bloodiest point of influx in Libya, where the situation has now reached white heat. Sandwiched between Tunisia and Egypt, many commentators (and Gadaffi himself!) imagined Libya could somehow avoid the general conflagration. According to the latest reports the uprising has spread from eastern Libya to the capital of Tripoli. Last night heavy gunfire was heard in central Tripoli and other districts. Al Jazeera puts the number of people killed in Tripoli at 61. Other unconfirmed reports say protesters attacked the headquarters of Al-Jamahiriya Two television and Al-Shababia as well as other government buildings in Tripoli overnight.

The People’s Conference Centre where the General People’s Congress (parliament) meets was set on fire, and police stations and other government buildings were also attacked, ransacked and set on fire. This is now a full-blown armed insurrection. Clashes have been going on between the protesters and security forces in eastern cities of the country and in Benghazi in particular, where opposition to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is most intense. But this has spread to the south and wets of the country and to Tripoli itself.

The protests in Tripoli were not pacified but intensified following a televised speech by Gaddafi' s son Seif al-Islam. He promised political, social and economic reforms and said that the killing of demonstrators was a “mistake”, but described the protesters as drunks and drug addicts following orders from foreigners. He promised a conference on constitutional reforms within two days and said Libyans should "forget oil and petrol" and prepare themselves for occupation by "the West" and 40 years of civil war if they failed to agree.

The younger Gaddafi attempted to draw a contrast between the situation in Libya with the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia: “Libya is different, if there is disturbance it will split into several states,” he said. But the same things were said before about Egypt, which was said to be different to Tunisia and therefore immune to revolutionary contagion. Events soon exposed the hollowness of these assertions. There were no pyramids in Tunisia and there are none in Libya. But there is mass discontent in all these countries, which is seeking a way out. The harder it is repressed, the more violent will be the explosion when it finally breaks through.

The speech implied that the army and national guard would crack down on “seditious elements” spreading unrest: “You can say we want democracy and rights, we can talk about it, we should have talked about it before. It's this or war. Instead of crying over 200 deaths, we will cry over hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet,” Gaddafi said. But the question is: for whom is the last bullet reserved?

Civil War
Saif Gaddafi admitted that some military bases, tanks and weapons had been seized and acknowledged that the army, under stress, opened fire on crowds because it was not used to controlling demonstrations.

Witnesses in Libya have reported that some cities, especially in the east, which is perceived as less loyal to Moammar Gaddafi, have fallen completely into the hands of civilians and protesters. After the speech, the protesters in the street began chanting slogans against Seif al-Islam as well as his father.

There have been reports of army defections in Benghazi and Al Bayda in eastern Libya from February 20, and now spreading unrest to Tripoli on Feb. 21, This suggest that the regime is losing its grip on the the situation.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said Saif Gaddafi's speech appeared “desperate”.

“It sounded like a desperate speech by a desperate son of a dictator who's trying to use blackmail on the Libyan people by threatening that he could turn the country into a bloodbath,” Bishara said.

“That is very dangerous coming from someone who doesn't even hold an official role in Libya -- so in so many ways, this could be the beginning of a nightmare scenario for Libya if a despotic leader puts his son on air in order to warn his people of a bloodbath if they don't listen to the orders or the dictates of a dictators.”

If the Libyan regime tries to cling to power by force it may end up like the regime of Ceaucescu in Romania. Such a prospect is a nightmare scenario for the imperialists and their puppet regimes everywhere. The latest reports indicate that the Libyan air force and navy are firing on rebellious military installations and even civilians. It would now appear that open civil war has erupted as Gaddafi desperately clings to power, but it is a gamble he may well not win.

Wherever one looks, the whole vast expanse of North Africa and the Middle East is in flames. Regimes which were regarded as stable and unassailable only two months ago, are being rocked to their foundations. The Arab masses who were described in contemptuous terms by bourgeois commentators, as passive, ignorant and apathetic, have emerged as the most revolutionary force on the planet. This is a major turning point not only in the history of this region but in world history.

The Bible says “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first”. Those who for so long regarded themselves as the “vanguard” have shown themselves to be completely unprepared and out of step with the real movement of the working class and the youth. Those who were “advanced” have turned out to be the most backward and retrograde elements in the equation. And those who were supposed to be “backward”, now stand in the front line. Thus it is, thus it always was.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Lenin said that the working class is more revolutionary than the most revolutionary party. The events of 1917 proved him to be correct. On the streets of Cairo, Teheran, and Manama, history is being repeated. The revolutionary instincts of the masses have carried the movement forward despite all obstacles. They have brushed aside bullets and truncheons as a man swats a mosquito. The only thing that is lacking here, that guaranteed the final victory in 1917, is the presence of a genuine revolutionary party and leadership.

What is astonishing is the extraordinary degree of revolutionary maturity shown by the workers and youth of these countries. With no party, no real leadership, no preconceived plan of action, they have achieved miracles. They bring to mind the marvelous movement of the workers of Barcelona, who in 1936, armed with just sticks, knives, and old hunting rifles, stormed the barracks and smashed the fascist counterrevolution. They bring to mind the Paris Commune, which in the words of Marx, “stormed heaven”.

It is impossible to predict with accuracy how the revolution will develop. This will depend on a number of factors, both objective and subjective. But in the absence of genuine revolutionary leadership, it is inevitable that the revolution will be prolonged in time. There will inevitably be ups and downs, ebbs and flows, periods of euphoria followed by disappointment, defeats, and even periods of reaction. But it will be impossible to reestablish anything resembling stability as long as the capitalist system exists. One regime of crisis will follow another.

February 11, Tahrir Square. Photo: Ramy RaoofThe most important thing, however, is that the revolution has begun. It is impossible to turn the clock back in any of these countries. And through all the stormy events that are unfolding and will unfold over a period of months and even years, the working class and the youth will learn. They will learn which parties and leaders have betrayed them and which can be trusted. In the end, they will come to understand that the only way forward is a radical break with the past and the complete elimination, not just of this or that leader or regime, but of a fundamentally unjust system of society.

The overthrow of Ben Ali and Mubarak was the work of the revolutionary masses, and in particular the working class and the youth. These are the only genuinely revolutionary forces in society. There can be no solution to the problems of these countries unless and until the working class takes power into its own hands and expropriates the wealth of the oligarchy and imperialism.

When the present wave of fighting is over, when the clouds of teargas and gunpowder is lifted, the workers and youth will look around and see that they are not alone. The revolutionary movement has gone beyond all the artificial frontiers established by imperialism in the past, frontiers that cut across all natural boundaries and divide the living body of the peoples. The power of imperialism over the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East is based on this criminal division. To overcome it is essential if the peoples are ever to achieve their freedom and raise themselves to their true height.

The instinct of the masses is to spread the revolution. It is spreading and will spread further. This poses the question of the unity of the peoples of the region. The only way to achieve this is through a Socialist Federation of the North Africa and the Middle East, not as a utopian and distant aim, but as a burning and urgent necessity.

•Long live the Revolution!
•Down with capitalism and imperialism!
•Workers of the world unite!

The Latest From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- From The In Defense Of Marxism Website-The Egyptian Revolution: “The people want the downfall of the system”

Markin comment:

The question of propaganda for people's armed militias is on the order of the day in Egypt.

The Egyptian Revolution: “The people want the downfall of the system”
Written by Alan Woods
Friday, 04 February 2011

The masses have once again taken to the streets in the biggest demonstrations yet seen in Egypt. They call it the "Day of Departure". Already this morning Al Jazeera showed an immense crowd of people thronging Tahriri Square. The mood was neither tense nor fearful, but jubilant. The very instant Friday prayers finished the masses erupted in a deafening roar of “Mubarak out!” The few Mubarak supporters who were slinking on the streets outside the Square like impotent jackals could do nothing.

In Alexandria there was a massive anti-Mubarak demonstration of over a million. There were no pro-Mubarak people in sight and no police or security forces of any kind on the streets. There were demonstrations on Thursday in Suez and Ismailia, industrial cities where inflation and unemployment are rife, and although I have not yet seen any reports today, there can be no doubt that there will be very big demonstrations today all over Egypt. The Egyptian people have spoken and the message is unmistakable.

The class dynamics of the Revolution
January 30 - Tanks in Tahrir Square - Photo: RamiRaoofMarx pointed out that the Revolution needs the whip of the counterrevolution. This is the case here. The brutal onslaught of the counterrevolutionaries yesterday created the conditions for a new advance of the Revolution today. A revolution is characterized by violent swings of public opinion. We have seen this in the last 24 hours. Yesterday the mood of the protesters was grim. Today the revolutionary masses scent victory in the air.

This represents a complete turnabout in a few hours. But how can this transformation be explained? To understand what has happened it is necessary to understand the class dynamics of the Revolution. Different classes move at different speeds. The advanced layers – especially the youth – are the first to move into action. They draw the most advanced conclusions. But they are a minority. The mass of the people lag behind. Their consciousness has been moulded by past defeats. They are weighed down by decades of routine, habit and tradition.

The father of modern physics, Isaac Newton, explained that objects at rest tend to stay at rest. The phenomenon of inertia applies not only to the physical world but to society. To overcome the resistance of inertia a powerful external force is necessary. The present epoch is preparing shocks that will shake the masses out of their inertia. But this does not happen all at once. Mubarak has tried to play on the innate conservatism of the population, the fear of sudden change and the danger of chaos.

February 3 - Detention Place Demonstrators Use to Keep Thugs and Security they Catch - Photo: RamyRaoofMubarak mobilized the forces of the counterrevolution in an attempt to crush the Revolution by force. At the same time he made soothing speeches offering peaceful reforms. This speech had an effect on the minds of the inert mass of the population, especially the middle class who are fearful of disorder. “If you remove me there will be chaos, like Iraq,” he tells them. Such arguments can have an effect on the more backward strata of the masses. They have not yet begun to move. They are not on the streets. They are watching events on the television and they are worried. By promising reform and a return to normality, the President was telling these people what they wanted to hear.

After the speech many of people who were initially sympathetic to the protesters were saying: “That is enough! You have got what you wanted. The old man is going to stand down in September. Why can’t you wait a few months? We are tired of all this. We want a peaceful life, with the shops and banks open and business as usual.” This was a dangerous moment for the Revolution. The mood of the middle classes was swinging towards the President. The counterrevolutionaries were gaining ground on the streets. The army was passive. At this point, the whole process could have begun to go into reverse.

At this critical point, the fate of the Revolution was determined by the courage and determination of the advanced guard. It is true that the active forces of the Revolution were a minority. But it is equally true that the shock troops of the counterrevolution were a minority. In order to defeat the Revolution, Mubarak summoned every last ounce of his support. He bussed in people from the provinces and they concentrated their strength outside Tahrir Square.

This was the decisive turning point. If they had succeeded in driving the protesters from the Square the whole process could have been thrown into reverse. But they failed. Not only were they driven back by the heroic resistance of the revolutionaries. After seven hours of fighting for every inch, the revolutionaries finally got Mubarak’s thugs on the run. This was a decisive turning point. This produced a change in the psychology of the wavering elements. The ferocious violence of the counterrevolutionaries produced a new swing in public opinion that may well prove fatal to Mabarak’s cause.

February 3 - Fences to guard entrance to Tarhir Square - Photo: RamyRaoofThe battle was live on Al Jazeera, and millions of people could see what was happening. The scenes of a police van hurtling down the street at top speed, mowing down demonstrators said it all. The same people who had illusions in Mubarak’s promise of reform could now see they had been deceived. The smiling mask of the Father of the People slipped to reveal the ugly physiognomy of a cruel and despotic Pharaoh.

So it was all lies, after all! Mubarak’s warning of chaos if he stepped down was contradicted by these images. The chaos already exists, and the President is responsible. Down with the President! Al Jazeera reported one case that explains the process whereby the consciousness of the masses is transformed in a revolution. A man came to Tahrir Square and said: “I believed that the protesters were paid by foreign powers, but now I have come here and seen for myself I have understood that it is not true.” And this man, who only yesterday was supporting the counterrevolution, joined the demonstration.

Crisis of the regime
February 2 - Protesters gathering to defend demonstration - Photo: RamyRaoofThe defeat in Tahrir Square has provoked a crisis in the regime. In a clear expression of weakness the government is publicly apologising for bloodshed on Wednesday. There are signs of divisions at the top. Ahmed Shafiq, the new prime minister, said he did not know who was responsible for the bloodshed. That is exceedingly strange because everyone else in the world knows that it was the work of undercover police. He also said the Interior Minister should not obstruct Friday's peaceful marches. For his part, the Interior Minister denied that his men ordered their agents or officers to attack the demonstrators, although not even his own mother believes him.

There are indications that the 82 year old President, who remains hidden inside his heavily guarded palace, is tired and partly demoralized. Yesterday he told the American TV network ABC News.: "I am fed up. After 62 years in public service, I have had enough. I want to go." But he immediately added: "If I resign today, there will be chaos."

Speaking in the presidential palace, with his son Gamal at his side, Mubarak said: "I never intended to run [for president] again," Mr Mubarak said. "I never intended Gamal to be president after me." Since everybody in Egypt knows that these were precisely his intentions, this shows that the old man at least does not lack a sense of humour. He then repeated his long-held assertion that the Muslim Brotherhood would fill the power vacuum left by his absence.

Photo: RamyRaoofThe government gives the impression of struggling to regain control of events that are slipping out of its hands. It also does not seem to know what it is doing. While Mubarak utters dark warnings about the Muslim Brotherhood, his prime minister is inviting the Muslim Brotherhood to talks, a very kind offer which the latter have politely declined. They are not so stupid as to offer a hand to a drowning man who only wishes to pull them into the water to keep him company as he goes under.

The Americans are constantly repeating this argument that this is an Islamist movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood and that if Mubarak goes the jihadis will take over. That is a lie, although American diplomats and politicians are stupid enough to believe it. This movement has nothing to do with jihadi fundamentalism or Islamic politics. The New York Times correctly pointed out: “For many, the Brotherhood itself is a vestige of an older order that has failed to deliver.”

This great revolutionary movement was not organized by the Muslim Brotherhood or any of the bourgeois political parties. The Muslim Brotherhood is well organized and has a strong apparatus and money. Its leaders are manoeuvring behind the scenes. But the youth movement is the largest and most determined component of the revolution. It is they who have played the leading role from start to finish.

When these courageous young men and women went to the streets on 25th January, all the political parties including the Brotherhood were taken by surprise. The Muslim Brotherhood did not support them. The youth of 6 April are the ones calling for action. They are the ones who called today’s demonstration. And today, when the revolutionary people marched in their millions, every political party including the Brotherhood were negligible.

The revolutionary people are not fighting for Islam or any religion. They are fighting for their democratic rights and for national and social liberation. Under Mubarak Islamic extremists murdered Christians. But on the demonstrations Christians and Muslims march together. In Tahrir Square there are Muslims and Christians, believers and unbelievers – all united in the same struggle against the same oppressors. The Revolution has cut across all sectarian divisions. That constitutes its great strength.

A “meaningful transition” – to what?
The immediate threat of counterrevolution has been defeated by the courage and determination of the revolutionary people. But victory has not yet been won. The ruling class has many ways of defeating the people. When state violence fails, it can resort to trickery and deception. The situation is very clear. Mubarak cannot control Egypt. Either he will leave, or the Revolution will sweep all before it. This prospect is what fills the Americans with terror.

Washington has lost its grip on events. Taken by surprise at every stage, they lack even the semblance of a coherent policy. The CIA, Saudi Arabia and the Israelis want Mubarak to stand his ground, not out of any personal loyalty, but to prevent the Revolution from spreading to other Arab countries. But the Americans are playing a double game. Obama and the State Department can see that Mubarak’s days are numbered and are manoeuvring behind the scenes to maintain the old regime under another name.

It has emerged that the White House has been in talks with the Cairo government about how Egypt can begin making a "meaningful transition". US Vice-President Joe Biden spoke to his Egyptian counterpart on Thursday; one day after Suleiman had similar talks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Times among the proposals was a plan for Mubarak to resign immediately and hand power to a military-backed interim government under Mr Suleiman.

Neither the White House nor the State Department have directly denied the report. But a spokesman for President Barack Obama's National Security Council said it was "time to begin a peaceful, orderly and meaningful transition, with credible, inclusive negotiations". However, the BBC's Mark Mardell in Washington says other reports suggest the US plan has already been rebuffed in Egypt, and that the administration has been “surprised” by the attitude of the military and Suleiman.

The Americans know very well that Suleiman was involved in the attacks on the opposition, and yet they consider that he is the right man to lead an interim government. Everybody knows Omar Suleiman is the man of the CIA and of Israel. This is just a means of maintaining the system while giving the impression of a change. It would be the negation of all the democratic aspirations of the people: a lie and a cynical deception.

What the people want
In Tahrir Square today there is a placard that reads: “THE PEOPLE WANT THE DOWNFALL OF THE SYSTEM” Note the exact wording: not just the downfall of Mubarak, but the downfall of the entire system upon which he rests. The people read out a list of all the present political leaders and after each name shouted out: “Illegitimate!” That is a warning to the politicians that they will not accept any deals that involve the inclusion of any figure from the old regime. This shows an absolutely correct political instinct.

The problem is one of leadership. The bourgeois liberals cannot be trusted. The men who are trying to usurp control are like merchants in a bazaar who will use the Revolution as a bargaining piece with which they can haggle with the regime to win positions and careers. They will always betray the people to further their own selfish interests. The Wafd party and other liberals immediately accepted Mubarak’s "concessions" and ended their participation in the revolution. Al-Baradei is a stooge of the Americans who Washington wishes to put in power as a replacement of Mubarak. How can we place any confidence in men like these?

The revolutionaries must be on their guard! The people of Egypt did not fight and die to allow the same old oligarchy and their imperialist backers to stay in power. The movement must not be demobilized. It must be stepped up. The Revolution must be carried on to the end! No deals with Suleiman or any other figure of the old regime! Not a single one must remain!

The revolutionary people must take a big broom in their hands and sweep out the entire political establishment. For a wholesale purge and the dismissal of all the old officials! Those guilty of corruption must be put on trial and their property confiscated and used for the benefit of the poor.

As long as the old apparatus of state repression remains in being the Revolution will never be safe. The people can accept nothing less than the complete dismantling of the old state apparatus. For the immediate disbanding of the repressive apparatus! For the establishment of popular tribunals to try and punish all those guilty of repressive acts against the people!

The Revolution must be organized. It needs structured, democratic, popular organizations and a fighting machine able to defend it against any aggression. For popular committees for the defence of the Revolution! For a people’s militia! Once the people are armed, no force on earth can oppress them.

The armed people are the only force that can guarantee the conquests of the Revolution, defend democratic rights and convene genuinely free elections to a Constituent Assembly.

A proud people awakes
The New York Times yesterday published interviews that reveal the real content of the Revolution:

“I tell the Arab world to stand with us until we win our freedom,” said Khaled Yusuf, a cleric from Al Azhar, a once esteemed institution of religious scholarship now beholden to the government. “Once we do, we’re going to free the Arab world.”

“For decades, the Arab world has waited for a saviour — be it Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the charismatic Egyptian president, or even, for a time, Saddam Hussein. No one was waiting for a saviour on Wednesday. Before nearly three decades of accumulated authority — the power of a state that can mobilize thousands to heed its whims — people had themselves.

“I’m fighting for my freedom,” Noha al-Ustaz said as she broke bricks on the curb. “For my right to express myself. For an end to oppression. For an end to injustice.”

Mubarak is justly regarded as a traitor and an American and Israeli stooge. The same sentiment is shared by many parts of the Arab world. The same conditions that provoked revolution in Tunisia and Egypt will cause a domino effect across other Arab states. That is why the demands of the Egyptian people have found an echo in the streets from Algeria to Morocco, from Palestinian camps in Jordan to the slums of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

Cynical western observers have often described the Egyptian people as apathetic and passive. Now this stereotype, the product of superficial thinking and feelings of racial superiority, has been stood on its head. Where is the apathy now? This is an ancient, proud and noble people who were exploited, oppressed, insulted and humiliated for generations by foreign masters and their corrupt local agents. They are in the process of breaking with the past and building a new and better future.

The Revolution has given a voice to those who had no voice, it has articulated the sense of hopelessness, the frustration, the humiliations at the hands of the police and the outrage of the youth who do not have enough money to get married and raise a family. The masses are not just fighting for bread and elementary human rights. They are fighting for human dignity. Thanks to the Revolution, the people of Egypt have stood up and raised themselves to their true stature.

“From minute-by-minute coverage on Arabic channels to conversations from Iraq to Morocco, the Middle East watched breathlessly at a moment as compelling as any in the Arab world in a lifetime. For the first time in a generation, Arabs seem to be looking again to Egypt for leadership, and that sense of destiny was voiced throughout the day.”

These words of the New York Times show the real situation. All this is having a tremendous impact that extends far beyond the Middle East and North Africa. Revolutionary Egypt can now begin to occupy its real place in world history.

London 4 February, 2011

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard'- The Struggle In Egypt- Fight For A Workers And Peasants Government!

Markin comment:

The events in the Middle East, as the current situation in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate, are moving quickly but our propaganda efforts to fight for workers and peasants everywhere is germane.
******
From Workers Vanguard No. 973, 4 February 2011

For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa!

Egypt: Mass Upheaval Challenges Dictatorship

Down With U.S. Aid to Egypt, Israel!

For Revolutionary Workers Parties!

FEBRUARY 1—As we go to press, the bonapartist capitalist regime of Hosni Mubarak—a strategically important client state of U.S. imperialism—is tottering in the face of an unprecedented wave of mass protests. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square and throughout the country, protesters chant: “The people demand the fall of the regime.” Mubarak’s appointment last week of a new set of ministers, naming longtime cronies and former military commanders as vice president and prime minister, only further inflamed opposition to his dictatorship.

Well over a million rallied in Tahrir Square today, while hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Alexandria, Suez and other cities in a nationwide stay-away strike. Tonight, Mubarak announced his “concession”: he will not seek re-election this fall(!). In response, crowds in Tahrir Square angrily chanted, “We won’t leave!”

One United Nations official estimates that as many as 300 have been killed and over 3,000 injured since protests broke out on January 25. Nevertheless, within days the massive demonstrations overwhelmed police lines in a number of cities. Countless police stations, as well as the Cairo headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), were reduced to burned-out rubble. The widely reviled police withdrew from the scene, although they have since been redeployed. The shaken government then mobilized the military—the core of Egypt’s bonapartist state apparatus—to try to control the streets. The army has officially declared that it will not fire on protesters. But make no mistake: there remains the dire threat that whatever happens to Mubarak, Egypt’s bourgeois rulers will demand fierce military repression to restore and maintain capitalist “order.”

The upheaval has drawn in virtually every layer of the society—unemployed youth, university students, workers, shopkeepers, professionals. Overwhelmingly, their demands are for Mubarak to go and for democratic elections and other reforms. The situation has also created an opening for the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood, which initially abstained from the protests but called for its followers to join them on Friday, January 28. With the ports, banks and other businesses closed, the economy has ground to a halt, while prices for scarce food supplies are soaring. As for the filthy rich at the top, they’re either hunkered down in their gated mansions or flying off to Dubai.

There is no question that the U.S. and other imperialist powers have been shaken by the dramatic events in Egypt, the most populous Arab country with the largest working-class concentration in North Africa and the Near East. The arrogant imperialists, who act as though nothing can stand in the way of their rampages around the world, are now faced with threats to the survival of crucial client regimes. The Obama administration desperately seeks to quell the upheavals in North Africa and prevent their further spread. Jordan and Yemen, an outpost in Washington’s “war on terror,” have already seen mass anti-government demonstrations (dominated by Islamic opposition movements). Today, Jordan’s King Abdullah fired his cabinet. Meanwhile, student demonstrations have begun in Sudan. What is particularly remarkable about the mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt is that in a region long dominated by religious and ethnic strife, they have centered on secular-democratic demands, spurred by increasingly intolerable conditions of life.

The immediate spark for the upsurge in Egypt was the mass protest movement that overthrew the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia. But there was ample social tinder ready to be ignited. With nearly half the Egyptian population scraping by on $2 a day or less, the last few years have seen a wave of militant strike activity. Unemployment was massive even before the outbreak of the international financial crisis. Rural areas, especially in southern Egypt and the northern Nile Delta, are marked by excruciating poverty, with landless peasants at the mercy of ruthless landlords. Corruption among the ruling elite is notorious. Expressions of discontent are regularly met with brutal police beatings, torture and imprisonment.

The unraveling of the Mubarak dictatorship has thrown its U.S. imperialist patrons into crisis mode. Every year, Washington pumps $1.3 billion in military aid into the regime, the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel. Egypt has been a linchpin of U.S. imperialist interests in the Near East, especially since 1979 when it became the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel. The Egyptian regime has long served as an accomplice to the Zionist state in oppressing the Palestinian people, currently by policing the southern border of the Gaza Strip. Down with U.S. aid to Egypt, Israel! Defend the Palestinian people!

Having declared the Mubarak regime “stable” at the onset of the protests, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled to shift her approach as the upheaval spread, intoning about “the universal rights of the Egyptian people.” Demonstrators were hardly assuaged, with many holding up tear gas canisters with “Made in the U.S.A.” labels for reporters. Washington is now talking about an “orderly transition.” Meanwhile, it’s finalizing “plans to evacuate thousands of US nationals to ‘safe havens’ in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus” (Financial Times, 31 January). A much-touted “transitional” figure is Mohamed ElBaradei, a bourgeois liberal who helped work out the 1978 Camp David Accords that normalized relations between Egypt and Israel and later headed the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he helped ensure that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was disarmed in the face of U.S. war preparations.

Working Class Must Take the Lead

What is urgently posed in Egypt today is that the powerful proletariat—the only class with the social power to overturn the brutal and decrepit capitalist order—emerge as the leader of all the oppressed masses. The current upsurge comes amid a years-long strike wave that historian Joel Beinin described as “the largest social movement Egypt has witnessed in more than half a century” (The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt, February 2010). His study tallied an average of 194 strikes and sit-ins per year from 2004 through 2008, nearly four times the rate of the previous three years.

The spike in factory occupations, strikes and demonstrations started in 2004 when the government stepped up the pace of privatization of state enterprises. The spearhead of this movement has been the workers at Mahalla al-Kobra textile mills, the country’s largest industrial complex with some 40,000 workers. In April 2008, as people groaned under soaring food prices, a planned strike was headed off by a massive show of police force. This touched off two days of rioting in which three people died by police fire. After the government granted the workers a bonus, a close adviser to Mubarak haughtily and fatuously told the Washington Post (27 September 2009): “Once you give more money to those people, it’s over.”

Mahalla al-Kobra workers walked out on the very first day of the current protests, directly opposing the regime for the first time since the start of the strike wave. Workers in Suez, a port city and oil refining center, have also been out from the beginning. Police there showed no mercy in trying to smash the protests. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (31 January), Mansoura Ez-Eldin cites a message from a friend describing Suez as a war zone: “Its streets were burned and destroyed, dead bodies were strewn everywhere.” But the city’s working-class residents fought back.

The often exemplary militancy of Egyptian workers has repeatedly run up against the treachery of the regime’s bought-and-paid-for officials of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), who are integrated into the capitalist state apparatus. At the 1957 founding of the federation that would become the ETUF, its entire leadership was appointed by the regime of bourgeois-nationalist strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. For over two decades, the president of the ETUF usually doubled as Minister of Labor. Today, virtually every member of the ETUF executive committee is a member of the ruling NDP; ETUF president Hussein Megawer was head of the NDP parliamentary bloc and currently chairs the parliamentary Committee on Manpower. Last week, he instructed union officials to head off any labor demonstrations. As police were shooting protesters down on January 25, the ETUF issued a statement congratulating the Interior Ministry in celebration of “Police Day”!

In the course of the recent strike wave, Egyptian workers have acted in defiance of the regime’s “labor lieutenants.” Because strikes must by law be approved by the ETUF leadership, every one that took place was illegal. Often the workers elected strike committees to provide leadership, commonly raising the demand for independent unions. This points to the potential for broad organs of working-class struggle to emerge out of the current political turmoil, such as factory committees and workers defense guards as well as neighborhood committees to oversee the distribution of food and to organize self-defense against the police thugs and their criminal accomplices. All this underscores the need to fight for the independence of the working class from the capitalist state and all bourgeois political forces.

For a Leninist Vanguard Party!

As in Tunisia, what is necessary in Egypt is the forging of a revolutionary party that can lead the fight for a workers and peasants government. Such a party would be, in the words of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, a “tribune of the people,” fighting against the oppression of peasants, women, youth, homosexuals and ethnic and religious minorities.

A Leninist vanguard party would champion women’s emancipation in Egypt, where “honor killings” and female genital mutilation are common practices, especially in the rural areas where some 60 percent of the population lives. It would also actively defend the rights of the Coptic Christian minority, which suffers discrimination and violent persecution at the hands of the state, abetted by pogromist incitement by Islamic fundamentalists. In December, when Copts protested against the government’s refusal to allow them to set up a church in Cairo, two were shot dead by riot police. This gave a green light to the bombing of an Alexandria church on New Year’s Eve that killed 23 people. Joint protests by Copts and Muslims against the bombing were attacked by riot cops.

A key task for revolutionary Marxists is to combat the widespread nationalist ideology that is evident among the protesters waving Egyptian flags and embracing the army as the supposed friend of the exploited and the oppressed. Many rank-and-file soldiers of the conscript army have fraternized with demonstrators, even allowing them to paint anti-Mubarak graffiti on their tanks. But it is the military brass—subsidized and trained by the U.S. imperialists—that is calling the shots.

Illusions in the army run deep in Egypt, where military officers led by Nasser overthrew the despised British-backed monarchy in 1952. While Nasser, with the support of the Stalinist Communist Party, would lay claim to leadership of a mythical “Arab socialism,” he aimed from the beginning to crush the combative working class. One month after coming to power, Nasser seized on a textile workers strike in Kafr Al-Dawwar near Alexandria to deliver a dramatic blow to the workers movement. Two strike leaders were hanged on the factory grounds, the Communists were banned and strikes were outlawed. Subsequently, Nasser turned on his Communist supporters with a vengeance, rounding up almost every known leftist in the country.

Even as their comrades were beaten to death or left to die for lack of medical aid, the Stalinists maintained their political support to this bonapartist ruler, officially liquidating into his Arab Socialist Union in 1965. Stalinist parties throughout the Near East and North Africa sacrificed their proletarian bases on the altar of bourgeois nationalism, betraying historic opportunities for socialist revolution. This opened the door to reactionary Islamic fundamentalists like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—a deadly enemy of women, Copts, secularists and leftists—to posture as the only firm opponents of the unbearable status quo. While suffering severe repression, the Muslim Brotherhood has also been tolerated, and at times promoted, by successive Egyptian regimes. Mubarak has often silenced his opponents by claiming that if not for him, the Brotherhood would rule Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood plays little role in the workers movement but is heavily entrenched in the lumpenproletariat of the impoverished slums and among professionals and other petty-bourgeois layers. Many protesters today say that they would oppose the Brotherhood coming to power. Nevertheless, its emergence in the protests points to the threat that it could win a hearing among the desperate masses. The need to politically combat the forces of Islamic reaction was highlighted by the events in Iran in 1978-79, when the Shi’ite clergy under Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in subordinating to its reactionary agenda a powerful wave of opposition to the hated Shah that included the organizations of the working class.

After having been supported by virtually every left group in Iran, Khomeini unleashed a murderous wave of terror against worker militants, leftists, Kurds, unveiled women and homosexuals. Uniquely on the left, the international Spartacist tendency, predecessor to the International Communist League, declared: Down with the Shah! Don’t bow to Khomeini! For workers revolution in Iran! In regard to Egypt today, we say: Down with Mubarak! No to ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood! Workers to power!

It is vitally important for leftists and proletarian militants to study the example of the Bolshevik Party, which provided the necessary leadership for the working class in Russia in 1917. As soviets (workers councils) re-emerged with the fall of the tsar in the February Revolution, Lenin’s Bolsheviks raised the call “All power to the Soviets,” opposing any political support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. Amid rapidly growing opposition to the slaughter of working-class and peasant soldiers in the interimperialist World War I, soviets spread to the peasantry, which was in open rebellion against the landlords, and into the military as well. Under the influence of the organized working class, the soldiers councils served to set the worker and peasant ranks of the military against the bourgeois officer corps. Following the Bolshevik-led October Revolution, the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers deputies became the organs of the new proletarian state power.

As elaborated in the accompanying article on Tunisia, revolutionary Marxists, based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, must put forward transitional demands linking the masses’ democratic aspirations to the struggle for proletarian power and for its international extension. Out of the ferment in Egypt, the International Communist League seeks to cohere the nucleus of a Leninist-Trotskyist party, the indispensible instrument for the victory of proletarian revolution

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Struggles In Tunisia- Fight For A Workers And Peasants Government

Markin comment:

The events in the Middle East, as the current situation in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate, are moving quickly but our propaganda efforts to fight for workers and peasants everywhere is germane.

From Workers Vanguard No. 973, 4 February 2011

For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa!

Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue

For Revolutionary Workers Parties!

The following article was written by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League.

After 23 years in power, Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali ignominiously fled the country on January 14. His exit to Saudi Arabia followed several weeks of protests, initially from layers of youth demanding jobs and to be treated with some dignity by the state. Starting in the town of Sidi Bouzid in Central Tunisia, the protests rapidly spread to the whole of the country, encompassing broad layers of Tunisian society, including the working class, and were met with brutal police repression. Even official sources state that over 100 people have been killed in the course of the five weeks of social struggle, the great majority shot down by police fire.

In the hours following Ben Ali’s flight, Mohamed Ghannouchi, Ben Ali’s prime minister for over eleven years, declared himself president. Faced with further protests, which are increasingly being met with police repression, most of Ben Ali’s loyal servants have been fired from their ministerial positions in the latest attempt to put a lid on the protests while keeping in place the core of the governing apparatus. For now, Ghannouchi is once again prime minister. The Tunisian teachers union held a two-day strike over January 24-25, and other strikes including in public transport have been taking place to drive out the detested Ben Ali bosses, who in recent years have imposed ever more draconian working conditions. Pictures of workers chasing out the president of the country’s largest insurance firm, Star, which is partly owned by a French group, have made the rounds of the Web.

Fed up with unemployment, rising food prices, the widespread corruption of Ben Ali and his family and cronies, as well as police-state repression, Tunisians have heroically braved Ben Ali’s cops and thugs to fight for the most elementary democratic rights. Under Ben Ali, who since 1987 has been re-elected in grotesquely fraudulent elections, political opponents were generally co-opted or smashed. Now the bourgeoisie and its imperialist sponsors are regretting that their deposed despot left no ground for an opposition with “clean hands” to jump into the saddle, thus prolonging instability in Tunisia and beyond.

The masses’ democratic aspirations continue to be a powerful spark for struggle. What is vital is for the proletariat, the one class with the social power and historic interest to overthrow the capitalist system, to emerge out of these struggles as the leader of the country’s unemployed youth, urban poor, peasants, women and other oppressed sectors aspiring to emancipation.

The tumultuous events in Tunisia provide an extraordinary opening for popularizing the Marxist program of socialist revolution, which alone can address the masses’ demands. The upheaval has been marked by an outpouring of all social classes other than the upper echelons of the Tunisian bourgeoisie, a good many of them cronies of Ben Ali. Tunisian flags have been everywhere. This reflects a nationalist consciousness that is also expressed in widespread illusions in the army, whose chief reportedly refused to fire on civilian demonstrators and is rumored to have orchestrated the ouster of Ben Ali. Such illusions are a deadly danger to the working people and the oppressed.

Amid the political vacuum created by Ben Ali’s departure and the jostling for political influence by various forces in the country, what is needed is a Marxist working-class vanguard putting forward the program of permanent revolution: the seizure of power by the working class, fighting to extend its revolutionary victory to the centers of world imperialism—the only way to break the fetters of political despotism and economic and social backwardness.

For a Workers and Peasants Government!

In Tunisia, as in other countries of belated capitalist development, historic gains—such as political democracy and national emancipation—associated with the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th century in Britain and France cannot be realized so long as bourgeois rule remains. Tunisia is a neocolonial country whose bourgeoisie is tied by a million strings to world imperialism, particularly France, the former colonial ruler, which benefits from the deep oppression of Tunisia’s masses and served as the main prop for the Ben Ali regime.

French foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie even offered to send security forces to help crush the uprising. (A cargo plane full of tear gas canisters was stopped from heading to Tunisia only after news came out that Ben Ali had left the country.) Over a thousand French companies are active in Tunisia, owning the bulk of the financial sector and employing over 100,000 people. U.S. imperialism was also key in propping up the Ben Ali regime. One of the documents recently released by WikiLeaks quotes a July 2009 cable by the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia: “The United States needs help in this region to promote our values and policies. Tunisia is one place where, in time, we might find it.”

The subordination of Tunisia to imperialism serves to ensure the brutal exploitation and oppression of its people. Authentic national and social liberation requires mobilizing the proletariat in a frontal attack against the imperialists and the domestic bourgeoisie, which is the deadly enemy of Tunisia’s workers and oppressed. Indeed, amid continuing protests, there is a real danger of the military carrying out a coup to stabilize the bourgeois order. Addressing protesters on January 24, General Rachid Ammar, the army chief of staff, ominously stressed that “the national army is the guarantor of the revolution” (Le Monde, 26 January). For its part, the right-wing Le Figaro (18 January), a French government mouthpiece, openly and threateningly mooted a military coup as the next stage to save bourgeois order and imperialist domination in Tunisia: “Except for accepting this government of national unity [with Ben Ali cronies] to organize upcoming democratic elections, the Tunisians have no plan B to re-establish civilian peace, except resorting to the military to occupy power.”

In Tunisia today, even a small Marxist propaganda group putting forward a series of transitional demands that link the democratic aspirations of the masses to the struggle for proletarian power could have a great impact on unfolding events. This would lay the basis for the building of a revolutionary party that can lead the proletariat in the fight for a workers and peasants government that expropriates the bourgeoisie. Such a party must be forged not only against Ben Ali’s cronies but also against all manner of bourgeois “reformers” as well as the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists.

A proletarian victory in Tunisia would have an electrifying impact throughout North Africa and the Near East and would serve as a bridge to socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, especially France, where some 700,000 Tunisians reside. Summarizing his theory of permanent revolution, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined in The Permanent Revolution (1930):

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses….

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution….

“In a country where the proletariat has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”

The Bankruptcy of Tunisian Nationalism

Tunisia has long been touted by its rulers, including by the late Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first president after it received independence from France in 1956, as well as by the imperialists and international bourgeois press as an exception in North Africa for its development, high level of education and supposed equal opportunities for women. However, the case of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation sparked the revolt that led to the toppling of Ben Ali, encapsulates the grim reality of life in Tunisia today.

After becoming the main provider for his family at the age of ten, selling fresh produce at the local market, he gave up on his plans to study and left high school at 19 without graduating in order to support his family and give his younger siblings the chance to stay in school. Those who knew Bouazizi spoke of years of abuse and harassment by local police who would confiscate his wares and fine him, ostensibly for not having a permit to sell. On December 17, the police took his scales, tossed aside his cart and beat him. Less than an hour later, after local officials refused to hear his complaint, he set himself alight. Outraged by the events, the city of Sidi Bouzid erupted in protests. Mohamed Bouazizi died on January 4.

Untold numbers of Tunisians and other North Africans, mainly youth, have died in venturing the dangerous boat trip to reach Italy and the rest of Europe to look for work—only to then be subjected to backbreaking exploitation and racist oppression, living under constant danger of deportation. And even that route has become increasingly closed as the European imperialists clamp down on immigration. According to Sami Aouadi, a leader of the Tunisian UGTT trade-union federation, there are today at least 200,000 people with a college degree who are unemployed in Tunisia—that is, 27 percent of all the unemployed in a country numbering about ten million people.

The Tunisian economy is based on agriculture and related processing industries, some oil extraction, phosphate mining in the Gafsa area, tourism and some industry. Textiles, with its heavily female workforce, makes up nearly half of the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing, including French-owned spare parts factories for the auto and aeronautical industries, constitutes about one-fifth of Tunisia’s GDP. There is also an increasingly important service industry with a number of foreign companies, particularly French telecommunications operators, having outsourced call centers to Tunisia. Tunisian workers earn one-eighth of West European wages.

While Tunisia is hardly a heavily industrialized country, it does have a significant trade-union movement, with the UGTT claiming to represent some 600,000 blue-collar workers. The UGTT has a unique history in North Africa of not being completely subservient to the bourgeois-nationalist ruling government. It has engaged in both class struggle and deep class collaboration with the nationalists in power. Ben Ali seemed to have finally brought the UGTT to heel after many years of repression, and in recent years the top leaders of the union federation were also members of the leadership of Ben Ali’s Democratic-Constitutional Rally (RCD) party. The UGTT tops called for a vote to Ben Ali in 1999, 2004 and again in 2009, at a time when the population was sarcastically changing the “Ben Ali 2009” campaign posters to “Ben Ali 2080” and “Ben Ali 2500.”

On December 28, the UGTT demanded the release of those imprisoned following the protests in Sidi Bouzid and elsewhere. However, it insisted that its demands were made “with the aim of contributing to devising constructive solutions in order to appease the situation in that area and contain its fallout.” Under pressure from its ranks, and as protests swelled, it made statements increasingly hostile to the government and finally allowed its regional chapters to call for local general strikes on January 14, the very day that Ben Ali fled.

The UGTT leadership then jumped into the “new” government, the key posts of which, including the police, remained manned by Ben Ali associates. Again, it was only under the pressure of mass protests against the sham “transitional government” that the UGTT ministers resigned from their posts, saying they were still willing to participate in the capitalist government provided that prime minister Ghannouchi was the only Ben Ali crony in it. As Jilani Hammami, a UGTT leader, delicately put it, the trade-union federation “was subjected to heated debates, counterposing the leadership, with its links to the regime, to the federal and regional chapters, which supported the popular uprising.” More recently, the UGTT has endorsed the reshuffled “interim government” in a (so far futile) attempt to quell protests.

The 2008 Gafsa Revolt: a Precursor

The contradictory role played by the trade unions, as well as the divisions between the base and the tops of these unions, was also seen in the 2008 revolt in Gafsa. This revolt was a precursor to the current social upheaval and had previously been the most significant protest Tunisia had seen since the Bread Revolt in 1984, which erupted after Bourguiba instituted an IMF-dictated 100 percent hike in the price of bread.

A phosphate mining area, the Gafsa region has been hit particularly hard by mass unemployment. Over the past three decades, the government-controlled CPG (Company of Gafsa Phosphates), the region’s main employer, has reduced its payroll from 14,000 workers to little more than 5,000. A popular upheaval broke out in January 2008 when the mining company produced a list of people to be hired that favored individuals loyal to the government and to the UGTT regional leaders. Since the company had a policy of not replacing its retirees, this was its first hiring opportunity in six years; hopes were thus particularly high.

For months, workers, women and unemployed youth in the mining region protested. Their banners declared, “Work, Freedom and National Dignity,” “We Want Jobs, No to Promises and Illusions” and “No to Corruption and Opportunism.” In June 2008, the government cracked down. Two people were killed, in addition to one the month before, while dozens were injured and many more were imprisoned. In November 2009, most prisoners were released under a presidential pardon by an increasingly unstable Ben Ali regime, but with the sentences remaining in place and the individuals subject to regular police controls. However, Fahem Boukadous, a journalist who covered the Gafsa revolt, was sentenced last year to four years in prison and released only on January 19. The workers movement in Tunisia and internationally must demand: Freedom now for all the heroic fighters of the Gafsa upheaval and all other victims of bonapartist repression!

Local UGTT activists played a key role in the Gafsa struggle, particularly in the town of Redeyef. However, the central and regional leadership denounced the protests and even suspended one of the trade unionists leading the protests—Adnane Hajji, a teacher who was subsequently sentenced to more than ten years in jail. While on paper the UGTT is opposed to temporary jobs, local UGTT honcho Amara Abbassi, a member of the RCD central committee and of parliament, set up a company of labor brokers to supply the mines with temporary workers. He also set up other labor broker companies to supply maintenance workers, enriching himself and his family on the backs of the superexploited workers. As part of the struggle to forge a Marxist workers party in Tunisia, it is vital to fight to replace the reformist leadership of the UGTT with a class-struggle leadership dedicated to the independence of the trade unions from the bourgeoisie and its state.

For a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly!

In fighting for working-class power, it would be impossible for a Marxist party in Tunisia merely to reject the bourgeois-democratic program. Rather, as Trotsky put it in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, “it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it.” The Tunisian working masses are today saddled with a “transitional government” headed by a Ben Ali crony with elections suspended for six months, aiming for the emerging bourgeois regime to consolidate its power.

Thus, against the maneuverings of Tunisia’s bourgeois rulers and their UGTT lackeys, we raise the call for immediate elections to convoke a revolutionary constituent assembly, which could give free expression to the will of the population after decades of silence under the heel of Bourguiba and Ben Ali. This basic democratic demand will not be realized through parliamentary bargaining but only through a victorious popular insurrection.

Our call for a revolutionary constituent assembly is counterposed to calls for a constituent assembly raised by the reformists, who in fact envision parliamentary bargaining with the bourgeois authorities with the (illusory) aim of securing a democratic form of bourgeois rule. The Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (PCOT), a group with a Stalinist background that played a militant role in the Gafsa uprising, stands out for having straightforwardly denounced the governmental combinations formed after Ben Ali fled. Its spokesman Hamma Hammami told l’Humanite (17 January), newspaper of the French Communist Party, that the purpose of the provisional government was “to abort the democratic and popular movement,” insisting: “We don’t demand anything impossible, only the institution of a transitional government to form a constituent assembly in order to elaborate a constitution guaranteeing fundamental civil rights, freedom of expression, of association and of the press.” Speaking plainly, PCOT simply wants, including through its call for a constituent assembly, a capitalist government but without those who have a history of collaboration with Ben Ali.

We raise the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly as a bridge between the current, legitimate democratic aspirations of the masses and the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would be based on soviets (workers councils)—i.e., proletarian democracy, a higher form of democracy than a bourgeois-democratic constituent assembly. As Trotsky underlined in the Transitional Program, “Democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.” He added:

“At a certain stage in the mobilization of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, soviets can and should arise. Their historical role in each given period, particularly their relation to the national assembly, will be determined by the political level of the proletariat, the bond between them and the peasantry, and the character of the proletarian party policies. Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois democracy. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion and likewise opening an era of socialist revolution.”

The Working Class Needs Its Own Organs of Power

In periods of acute class struggle, the trade unions, which typically organize the top layers of the proletariat, become too narrow to draw in the broad layers of masses in revolt, including unorganized workers. At the same time, the unions’ bureaucratic misleaders strive to keep on top of the situation in order to derail the struggle. A Marxist party in Tunisia today would put forward a perspective of building organizations that embrace the whole fighting mass: strike committees, factory committees and, finally, soviets.

As Trotsky emphasized, soviets can only arise at the time when the mass movement enters into an openly revolutionary stage. Soviets originally arose amid the 1905 Russian Revolution as workers strike committees. When the soviets arose again during the course of the 1917 Russian Revolution, they embraced not only the workers but also soldiers and the peasantry, becoming organs of dual power. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the working class took power in Russia, with the soviets emerging as the organs of working-class rule.

Following Ben Ali’s departure, local militias sprang up to defend neighborhoods against the rampages of cops and thugs allied with Ben Ali. What is necessary is for the working class to take the lead. This means organizing factory committees, organs of dual power at the point of production, and from there setting up workers militias, drawing in the urban poor and unemployed, for self-defense against the state’s thugs. The workplace committees must, among their elementary demands, fight for jobs for the unemployed and an end to the intimidation and harassment of women workers, fighting for equal wages and benefits for women. Marxists must also fight for the workers to take charge of food distribution and control food prices in the face of shortages and black market corruption. In the Transitional Program, Trotsky underlined how the tasks and demands of such organs of dual power—i.e., proletarian-centered bodies that vie with the bourgeoisie for control of the country—run up against the very nature of the capitalist order:

“These new organs and centers, however, will soon begin to feel their lack of cohesion and their insufficiency. Not one of the transitional demands can be fully met under the conditions of preserving the bourgeois regime. At the same time, the deepening of the social crisis will increase not only the sufferings of the masses but also their impatience, persistence, and pressure. Ever new layers of the oppressed will raise their heads and come forward with their demands. Millions of toilworn ‘little men,’ to whom the reformist leaders never gave a thought, will begin to pound insistently on the doors of the workers’ organizations. The unemployed will join the movement. The agricultural workers, the ruined and semiruined farmers, the oppressed of the cities, the women workers, housewives, proletarianized layers of the intelligentsia—all of these will seek unity and leadership.

“How are the different demands and forms of struggle to be harmonized, even if only within the limits of one city? History has already answered this question: through soviets.”

Stalinist “Two-Stage Revolution” Means Betrayal

Faced with decades of class-collaborationist betrayal by the Stalinist Communist Party (now called Ettajdid, meaning “Renewal”) and other reformist parties, Tunisia’s working and oppressed masses today do not identify their struggles with the fight for socialism. After decades of brutal dictatorship, there are deepgoing illusions in bourgeois democracy and nationalism.

Tunisian left groups have shown that they have learned nothing from their past betrayals, when many of them supported General Ben Ali’s 1987 ascent to power as he deposed the then “president for life” Habib Bourguiba. We wrote at the time: “The Tunisian so-called left is giving the benefit of the doubt, if not their support, to the new Bonaparte, General Ben Ali, hoping for the liberalization of the regime” (Le Bolchévik No. 79, January 1988). Today, these left groups continue to bow before the ruling apparatus. Ettajdid leader Ahmed Ibrahim greeted Ben Ali’s conciliatory speech on the day before his flight, declaring, “It is a good start to turn the page of authoritarianism” (Le Monde, 15 January). Ettajdid went so far as to participate in the government that was formed after the dictator’s ousting.

Historically, Stalinists in the Third World advocated “two-stage revolution,” with a first, democratic stage to be carried out in alliance with a mythical “progressive” and “democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie, which would then be followed in an indeterminate future by a second stage of socialist revolution. Time and again, these pipe dreams have ended with drowning the workers in blood; the second stage never comes. Once the capitalists have stabilized their power with the help of the Stalinists, they unleash a massacre of the Communists and working-class militants, as they did, for example, with the Iraqi revolution of 1958 (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000).

Today, however, groups like PCOT do not even go beyond mentioning the first stage of achieving “democracy”—i.e., reformed bourgeois rule. Most recently, PCOT has joined a class-collaborationist bloc called the “January 14 Front”—named after the day Ben Ali left the country—with a number of small bourgeois formations, including Nasserist and Ba’athist nationalists. The Front’s program is thoroughly bourgeois, including the demand for “a new policy of security based on respect for human rights and the superiority of the law.”

Far from instilling the basic Marxist understanding that the military is part of the capitalist state, PCOT contributes to illusions in the army. In a statement dated January 15, PCOT wrote: “The armed forces, which consists in the main of the sons and daughters of the people, are required to provide safety for the people and the motherland and respect people’s aspirations toward freedom, social justice and national dignity.”

If the officer corps did oust Ben Ali, it was because they realized he was a losing proposition for Tunisian capitalism. In fact, the army was involved in the bloody repression of the Gafsa upheaval in 2008 and it will play a similar role in the future, all the more so as illusions still continue to run deep in its supposed role as the “defender of the people.” On January 20, the army fired live rounds into the air, scattering protesters who had converged on the headquarters of the RCD in Tunis. The military, cops, judges and prison guards constitute the core of the capitalist state, an organ of class oppression to maintain bourgeois rule through violence. As the workers fight for their own state power, they will have to smash the bourgeois state apparatus, including by splitting the army along class lines—the conscripts versus the bourgeois officer corps.

Even at their most radical, the left groups in Tunisia at best demand a “democratic republic.” They have abandoned any pretense of fighting for socialist revolution, reflecting the dramatic retrogression in consciousness that followed the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, a catastrophic defeat for the international working class.

Islamic Fundamentalism and the Fight for Women’s Liberation

The political bankruptcy of Tunisia’s left groups could give an opening to the Islamic fundamentalists. This is a deadly threat to the working class and particularly to women. The Islamic fundamentalists played no visible role in the ousting of Ben Ali, unlike the many women who participated. Most demonstrators have vehemently stressed that they are not for Islamic rule. The mosques were indeed tightly controlled by the regime and supported Ben Ali.

The bourgeoisie internationally, especially in France, had for years supported the bloody Ben Ali regime as a rampart in the “war on terror” and as a vanguard in the fight for “secularism.” In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the U.S. and other imperialists went on to launch or participate in wars of depredation in Afghanistan and Iraq and to increase repression domestically, particularly against minorities with Muslim backgrounds. In France, the former popular-front government of Socialist Party prime minister Lionel Jospin, which included the Communist Party, reinforced the Vigipirate plan of police/army patrols of public transport, which has remained on “red alert” levels since 2005. The Jospin government also passed the “Daily Security Law” that strengthened police powers, which were further increased when Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister and again now that he is president.

While the imperialists have used the “war on terror” to prop up “secular” leaders like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, in reality the imperialists long fostered the growth of Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against Communism and even left bourgeois nationalism. This is no less true of the Arab rulers, who brutally repress the fundamentalists with one hand while promoting them with the other. In a 1994 interview, Ben Ali himself stated that “to some extent fundamentalism was of our own making, and was at one time encouraged in order to combat the threat of communism. Such groups were fostered in the universities and elsewhere at that time in order to offset the communists and to strike a balance” (quoted in Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, edited by Joel Beinin and Joe Stork [1997]).

Tunisian society is relatively secular compared with other countries in North Africa and the Near East. Many women do not wear the veil, abortion has been liberalized, contraception is available and polygamy is banned; “repudiation” (where a man can divorce his wife simply by uttering the phrase, “I divorce you”) was replaced by civil divorce. These rights were mostly obtained under President Bourguiba in the early years after independence and in good part because Tunisia had a workers movement that was relatively independent of the state. However, as we wrote more than 20 years ago in Le Bolchévik No. 79, after Ben Ali seized power, Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status is profoundly inspired by Islamic law, forcing women to be subordinate to their fathers and husbands:

“Unmarried women remain under the authority of their father who must ‘provide for them until marriage.’ The husband must pay a dowry ‘of a substantial amount’ for his future wife, before the marriage is ‘consummated.’... After marriage, women must obey their husbands. Sexual inequality in inheritance has been maintained: a woman inherits half the share of a man. The Tunisian Code of Personal Status, its constitution and legislation were designed as an awkward, fragile and reversible compromise between Islamic law and bourgeois ‘modernity’.”

After 23 years of Ben Ali’s rule, very little has changed in this respect, except that obeying your husband is no longer an obligation enshrined in law. However, importantly, the proportion of women in the workforce has increased to nearly 30 percent from just 5.5 percent in the mid 1960s, underlining their increasing role as a vital component of the proletariat.

Fundamentally, women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family and in class society. It can be eradicated only after a revolutionary workers state has collectivized the economy and laid the material basis for replacing the family through the socialization of child rearing and education (see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006). The reforms gained under Bourguiba and Ben Ali—that is about as far as it can go for women under capitalism in such a neocolonial country. The fight for women’s emancipation will play a vital role in the struggle for socialist revolution in Tunisia.

French Imperialism’s Loyal Social Democrats

In response to the Tunisian upheaval, the social-democratic left in France has sowed illusions in French imperialism. Of course, they all criticized the French foreign minister’s offer to send security forces to help prop up Ben Ali. At bottom, these social democrats have been furious that the Sarkozy government’s grotesque support to the Ben Ali regime is going to weaken the position of French imperialism in a post-Ben Ali Tunisia. This is felt in particular with regard to French imperialism’s U.S. rivals, who had been privately critical of the Ben Ali regime and reportedly gave the green light to General Ammar to order Ben Ali to leave the country. With U.S. imperialism hypocritically offering to help organize “free elections” in Tunisia, French Socialist Party honcho Jean-Marc Ayrault lamented that the French government took “positions that disqualify France in the eyes of the world and Tunisians.”

So now the social-democratic left is calling on the same Sarkozy government to be a force for good in Tunisia. The Left Party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who from 2000 to 2002 was a minister in Jospin’s bourgeois government, distributed a statement in Paris on January 13, the day before Ben Ali’s flight, demanding that “the government of M. Sarkozy as well as the European Union use the many forms of pressure available to them to force Ben Ali to listen to the popular demands and engage without delay in the deep democratic reforms that are essential in the country.” Similarly, the Communist Party demanded that Sarkozy and other EU leaders “condemn the repression and take political, economic and financial sanctions against the Ben Ali regime” (l’Humanite, 14 January). This was printed on the very day that the French government was getting a planeload of tear gas ready for Tunisia! This should be no surprise: The social democrats and Stalinists have steadfastly defended French imperialist interests, from the war against Algerian independence waged by the Socialist Guy Mollet government, with the Communist Party’s support, in the 1950s to the defense of present-day French interests in Africa.

The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of Olivier Besancenot has been slightly more sophisticated in its attempts to pressure the government. While calling on France to give up its “little neocolonial arrangements” in its former colonies of Tunisia and Algeria, the NPA, in a Paris leaflet distributed on January 13, condemned the “French government’s quasi silence” on the Tunisian uprising as “intolerable.” At home the NPA works to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie through class collaboration; similarly in regard to Tunisia it uncritically promotes the “January 14 Front” that includes PCOT and a number of small bourgeois parties.

For Permanent Revolution!

The impact of the Tunisian uprising has already reverberated across North Africa and the Near East (see accompanying article on Egypt). Amid the international economic crisis, the masses in countries like Egypt have been reeling from major increases in basic food and fuel prices, fostered by runaway speculation by international capitalist financiers (see “Imperialism Starves World’s Poor,” WV Nos. 919 and 920, 29 August and 12 September 2008, on the previous speculation-fed food crisis). Egypt is exploding. In Algeria, protests have spread throughout the country against the government of the ailing Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a figurehead for the military, which has dominated Algeria since independence.

A workers revolution in Tunisia would have tremendous impact throughout North Africa and the Near East. Workers uprisings could sweep away all these rotting regimes and begin to address the fundamental demands of the masses for jobs, freedom and justice. Imperialist France, the neocolonial overlord of the whole Maghreb region of North Africa, would be profoundly shaken, especially given the strategic position in the French proletariat of millions of workers of North African origin. What is essential is the forging of revolutionary workers parties like the Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia to power in the 1917 October Revolution—parties committed to the program of permanent revolution, addressing the burning needs of the masses and unalterably leading them to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is the program of the International Communist League. For a socialist federation of North Africa!