February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
The black question as it is called in the Marxist movement, the question of class and race intertwined in the class struggle in America, is central to the strategy for revolutionary. Period. The struggle to find a way to the black masses through the black workers, who have historically been among the most militant sections of the working class, has been long, hard, vexing, and in certain periods fruitless (due to apathy or the predominance of various black nationalist or liberal assimilationist ideolgies. Fraser's work was invaluable as a first step toward sorting things out. Forward!
********
Richard S. Fraser, 1913-1988
Written: 1994 (1990)
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
Richard S. Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist and tenacious fighter for black freedom, died in his sleep on November 27 [1988] at the age of 75. For the last several years Dick fought to overcome many painful and debilitating illnesses, mustering the courage to face endless operations, so that he could continue his research and literary work on the question of the revolutionary struggle for black liberation in America. Comrade Fraser was not only a cherished friend but a theoretical mentor of the Spartacist League. SL National Chairman Jim Robertson has acknowledged his considerable personal political debt to comrade Fraser.
Dick Fraser was a co-reporter on the black question at our founding conference in 1966. His work was published as part of our Marxist Bulletin No. 5, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism,” and he was a close collaborator in our work to establish organizations of labor/black defense. As the Labor Black League for Social Defense in the Bay Area wrote in memoriam: “Richard Fraser was our teacher, the author of ‘For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question’ that lights the road to black freedom through the program of revolutionary integration, the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.”
Fraser joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, recruited on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip by a member of the newly formed Workers Party—the product of a fusion between the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party. For close to 30 years he was an organizer of the Socialist Workers Party on the West Coast in Los Angeles and Seattle; for at least 20 years he was a member of the SWP’s National Committee. In the Pacific Northwest Fraser won several members of the Communist Party in Seattle to Trotskyism following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations. That Seattle was the place where the SWP had its most significant success in cracking the Stalinists is a testament to the persistence and political capabilities of Richard Fraser.
Through his involvement in black freedom struggles and experience in the recruitment and subsequent loss of hundreds of black workers from the SWP following World War II, Dick came to believe that the American communist movement had failed to come to grips with the question of black liberation in this country. Although lacking much formal education, he dedicated himself to the study of the black question. Criticizing the SWP for underestimating the revolutionary challenge to American capitalism posed by the integrationist struggles for black equality, in 1955 he submitted his document “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question.” Here Fraser counterposed revolutionary integration to the SWP’s turn toward a separatist “self-determination” ideology (associated particularly with George Breitman), which would become a theoretical cover for its abstention from the mass civil rights movement in the early 1960s and subsequent full-blown capitulation to black nationalism.
Dick came into disfavor with the SWP leadership when he opposed the party’s adoption of the call for federal troops to protect Southern blacks. In his “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis” Fraser tore apart the SWP’s support to Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops in Little Rock in 1957, powerfully pointing out that the end result had been the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. In the 1960s Fraser along with other SWP spokesmen was propelled out of the party as it plunged from centrism to reformism. As he wrote in a letter to his son: “It was I who initiated the split from the SWP by publicly attacking its Personal Representative, my old friend Asher Harer, whom I had recruited in 1935, for the SWP stand on the Vietnam War, and proclaiming that the way to ‘BRING THE TROOPS HOME’ was for the Viet Cong to drive them into the South China Sea.”
Fraser went on to found the Seattle-based Freedom Socialist Party. Cut off by a split in the FSP, Dick went into the New American Movement hoping that he could influence and educate some of these young New Leftists in the old Leninist school. With the fusion of NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee Fraser was subsequently carried into the Democratic Socialists of America.
Over the years we had our disagreements with Dick. Neither of us tried to hide these, but we were always happy to bend the stick in favor of the areas of profound political agreement between us. In his later years Fraser was handicapped by the loss of his Marxist library, which the SL sought to replenish, and of his personal working papers. In turn Dick’s collaboration was invaluable in elaborating a perspective for rooting the SL among militant black workers and youth. Fraser’s formal membership in other organizations obviously stood in contradiction to his fervent political beliefs, a contradiction which was resolved in his last years. Sharing our outrage over the U.S. bombing of Libya, he distanced himself from the DSA.
Addressing the SL/U.S. Seventh National Conference (1983) on the question of the organization of labor/black leagues, Dick spoke movingly:
“I’ve had some discussions with many comrades, which have been very gratifying, and I am humbled by the knowledge that things that I wrote 30 years ago, which were so scorned by the old party, have had some important impact, finally.”
Dick’s last political act before his death was his endorsement of the November 5 Mobilization that stopped the Klan in Philadelphia. That satisfying mobilization of the power of integrated labor was a testament to our comrade Richard Fraser who in endorsing identified himself as a “historic American Trotskyist.” That he was, and his loss will be keenly felt.
Adapted from Workers Vanguard
No. 466, 2 December 1988
**********
Introductory Note by the Prometheus Research Library
Revolutionary Integration:Program for Black Liberation
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
When, as a young Trotskyist activist, Dick Fraser became convinced that American Marxism had not come to terms with the question of black liberation, he made a life-long commitment to study of the question. Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression. Fraser turned to the writings of the militant fighters for black equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction and to the pioneering studies by black academics such as E. Franklin Frazier and Oliver Cromwell Cox. To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle.
With the publication of this bulletin we are honoring Fraser’s fighting scholarship. In the past few years Trotskyism has lost three scholar-militants from the generation brought to revolutionary consciousness by the combative class struggles of the 1930s. George Breitman, who died in April 1986, was as a proponent of black “self-determination” Fraser’s main political opponent within the SWP on the black question. He was also the Pathfinder Press editor responsible for the publication of the works of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. And in July 1990 the Trotsky scholar Louis Sinclair died. As the author of Leon Trotsky: A Bibliography (Hoover Institution Press, 1972), Sinclair performed an invaluable service to the revolutionary movement in documenting and collecting Trotsky’s writings in many languages. Now the tradition of revolutionary scholarship so honorably exemplified by Richard Fraser, George Breitman and Louis Sinclair must be carried on by a new generation of Marxists.
The U.S. capitalist class and its minions would like to forget this country’s modern origins in the Second American Revolution that was the Civil War. To understand the Civil War is to understand the character of U.S. society and its fatal flaw of racism. As Dave Dreiser, Fraser’s long-time collaborator and friend, writes in his 16 April 1990 letter to Jim Robertson (see below), for decades the academic racists of the William Dunning school of U.S. history legitimized the racist status quo. Their “interpretation” was popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
The outbreak of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the struggle for black equality inspired a new generation of historians, who began to reexamine central issues of American history, in particular the Civil War and Reconstruction. The distinguished James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era and The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, is only one of the many scholars who have documented the heroic struggles of this revolutionary period. Eminent scholars who have studied southern slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction also include Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner.
Today the empiricist/racist brand of “scholarship” represented by Harvard historian Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, is the academic reflection of the American ruling class’s renewed war on the black population. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he outrageously argued that the “fundamental problem...of family structure” was responsible for the intensification of poverty, joblessness, segregation in housing and lack of education suffered by the masses in the big city ghettoes. Bourgeois-empirical sociology (accompanied by pages of charts and graphs) served to provide a pseudo-scientific cover for the old “blame the victim” lies. In 1970 Moynihan coined the term “benign neglect” to describe the federal policy signalling the rollback of the token gains of the civil rights movement. Federal funding for poverty programs dried up; the government under Nixon, Carter and Reagan dismantled civil rights legislation and destroyed even the minimal plans for busing to achieve school integration.
Dick Fraser’s Marxist scholarship utterly rejected the manipulation of history to justify the racist status quo. At the time of his death in 1988 Fraser, with Dave Dreiser, was actively working on notes and abstracts for a book, The Rise of the Slave Power, the result of over 40 years of study. The book was to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of the southern slavocracy, the class antagonisms which exploded in the 1861-1865 Civil War between the capitalist North and the slave South and the leading role of the militant abolitionists in the destruction of black chattel slavery.
While his primary area of study was the black question, Dick Fraser was active in many arenas of struggle. In selecting the documents for this bulletin we have sought to show the breadth of his work. Of documents omitted from this collection there are two worthy of special note: “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” is not published here only because it is readily available in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 5R, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.”
The 1958 “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis,” in which Fraser sharply exposes the SWP policy of calling for federal troops to intervene in the Little Rock, Arkansas school integration crisis, is also omitted. Fraser’s position is well represented in two other, shorter documents which we have included, “Contribution to the Discussion on the Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’ ” and a letter, “On Federal Troops in Little Rock.”
Those who would like to read further are directed to the bibliography of Fraser’s writings included here as an appendix. All of these materials are available at the Prometheus Research Library.
Editorial Note: As a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Freedom Socialist Party Dick Fraser often used the name Richard Kirk. The bibliography distinguishes all documents written under the name Kirk with an asterisk. Our introductions give the source and some background for the documents, which have been edited to correct minor errors and inconsistencies. Some purely personal material in the letters has been cut out. The PRL has added brief explanations to clarify references when necessary; these appear in brackets. All footnotes and parenthetical material are by Dick Fraser.
Prometheus Research Library
July 1990
********
Fraser and American Scholarship
on the Black Question
by David Dreiser
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Academic scholarship regarding U.S. history has gone through several phases. After the failure of Reconstruction, scholarship went through a very reactionary period. Beginning in the 1890’s, William Dunning of Columbia and a host of his students spread the view that Reconstruction was the shame of U.S. history and represented military despotism, the evil of “Africanization,” and unrestrained corruption against which a noble but defeated South tried to defend itself. Claude Bowers’ The Tragic Era (1929) was the most influential work of this ilk.
Ulrich Phillips presented a view of slavery as relatively benign. Slaves were well treated and well fed, and the system was productive. Justin Smith presented a view of the Mexican War in which the arrogant Mexicans were totally to blame. These reactionary and pro-Southern views of U.S. history dominated the academies and formed the basis for the teaching of U.S. history in high schools and universities for decades following.
The Civil War was regarded as some terrible mistake in which the issue of slavery was minor. Abolitionists had been self-seeking rabble-rousers whose comments on slavery and the politics of their day can be ignored. The defamation of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, etc., as power mad psychotics became a cottage industry.
Even in those days there were other voices. In 1913 John R. Lynch, former slave and later congressman from Mississippi, wrote The Facts of Reconstruction in which he tried to tell some truth, but his excellent work was lost in a sea of racist “scholarship.” A few words from the introduction to a reprint of his book are instructive:
“These scholars contended that the Reconstruction governments in the South were controlled by base, power-hungry carpetbaggers and scalawags who cynically used the newly enfranchised blacks to gain power and to sustain their debauchery in office. Without the votes of naive and illiterate Negroes, who were easily led to the polls to vote the Radical ticket, these scoundrels would never have had an opportunity in any of the states to plunder the public treasuries and incite blacks against whites, according to the Dunning-school historians.
“Therefore the fundamental mistake in the Radical or congressional plan of Reconstruction was the enfranchisement of the freedmen. Happily, however, according to the established version of the story, during the mid-1870’s decent whites in both sections of the nation rose in indignation over the spoliation of the Southern states, and through the heroic efforts of local Democrats the Radical Republican regimes were overthrown and good government restored.”
After 1960 a new wind blew in the colleges and a number of honest scholars began to chip away at the mountain of pro-Southern reactionary propaganda that still dominated. C. Vann Woodward, Eugene D. Genovese and James M. McPherson are prominent. Other outstanding names are Kenneth Stampp, George Fredrickson and Herbert Gutman, not to mention John Hope Franklin, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Henrietta Buckmaster, and other black scholars.
So what is missing? Hasn’t everything been straightened out? I don’t believe so. Let’s take the issue of the nature of slavery. In 1974 a Harvard scholar, Robert Fogel, wrote Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a study of slavery based on “cliometrics” which is a computerized technique of examining statistical data. Fogel concluded that slave labor was more efficient than free labor and hence more productive. The slaves were well off and better fed than free workers in the North. Fogel has written a new work in 1989 expanding on this theme. C. Vann Woodward has reviewed Fogel’s new book and seems at a loss to know how to criticize it even if he seems uncomfortable with Fogel’s conclusions.
In the meantime, Fogel and his new toy, cliometrics, are the rage in academic circles and a new generation of scholars using the technique are collecting their PhDs at Harvard and are fanning out around the country. I asked a Harvard history student if the slaves’ own view of slavery might not paint a different picture of how well off they were. Patiently he explained to me that the slaves’ stories were largely taken down by abolitionists, and of course nothing they wrote can be believed! How, one might ask, could the words of slaves hold up to data manipulated by a computer? One might also ask in studying the Holocaust if it would be permissible to consider the recollections of the survivors, whose views would obviously be biased, or only the views of the guards and administrators who ran the camps?
Thirty years of new scholarship haven’t had much effect on the views of history taught in our schools, although there has been some correction. For instance, students of Mexican history at Stanford U. are now taught that the Mexican War was started with an unprovoked attack by U.S. forces ordered by President Polk. Well, that’s true, but it is not enough. What were the class forces that caused the Mexican War? The new scholars not only fail to answer such questions, but consider such a question improper.
The best academic scholars are committed to a view of history that regards any kind of economic determinism as quaint. History is regarded basically as narrative. There was no bourgeois revolution in England. The French Revolution had many causes, but it was not a clash between class forces. The view that struggles between classes is a determining factor in history is Marxist fantasy. In fact in the sense that Marx meant, there are no classes.
This crass empiricism did not always dominate U.S. scholarship. There used to be at least a counter-current of materialism that had legitimacy as in Charles Beard’s day. But, if anything, methodology has deteriorated since then. For instance, Kenneth Stampp has written The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965) as a total revision of the Dunning school. His work is excellent in many ways, but he says, “DuBois’s attempt at a full-scale revisionist study, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), is disappointing. Though rich in empirical detail, the book presents a Marxian interpretation of southern reconstruction as a proletarian movement that is at best naive. The Marxist historian James S. Allen in Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York, 1937) offers an interpretation that is more credible but equally schematic.”
It is no longer necessary to refute Marxism which is simply dismissed as naive, quaint and schematic. In spite of this I believe a thorough class analysis has been written regarding Reconstruction by Eric Foner. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (1988) is Marxist in content if not in name and meets the most strict demands of scholarship.
Who has spoken in like voice for the antebellum period? Dick felt no one has, that is no one lately. Charles Beard was accused of being a Marxist in his economic interpretation of the Constitution, but he replied that if so, then so was James Madison from whom he drew much of his “economic” view. In like manner Dick’s and my view of the period between say 1776 and 1860 is drawn very largely from Horace Greeley, Charles Sumner, John A. Logan (The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History [1885]), Henry Wilson, Benjamin Lundy (The War in Texas [1836]) and other radical Republicans and abolitionists. I submit that their penetrating analyses of the events of their day have never been refuted, but have been dismissed and forgotten.
Even today the abolitionists are regarded in scholarly circles with great suspicion. People committed to a cause cannot be objective observers or commentators, it is said. Black scholars have largely tackled the issue of restoring the role of slaves and black leaders to proper perspective. A class analysis has largely been absent. In a sense Dick wanted to restore the views and scholarship of the radicals of those days. That is not an unworthy purpose.
A brief word about “revisionism” may be needed. Kenneth Stampp regards himself and other post-1960 liberal scholars as revisionists, that is compared with the Dunning school. But, Dunning a generation before had considered himself a revisionist of the views of the mid-19th century. Robert Fogel might be called a new revisionist of the revisionists of the revisionists. I think it is better not to use the term.
I know that a lot of “Marxists” in our movement have tended to take scholarship lightly. Substituting theory for research, they generalize at the drop of a hat. However, it is not always necessary for research to be original to be used in a valid general analysis. For instance Edward Diener is a U. of Illinois scholar who wrote a commentary on U.S. history (Reinterpreting U.S. History [1975]). The book is not annotated and makes no pretense of original scholarship. His book just expresses a point of view which is an altogether legitimate practice. His view happens to be fairly conservative. Dick wanted to make reasonable use of available scholarship to express a point of view about U.S. history.
Briefly, Dick’s view was that after the invention of the cotton gin the slave system took on new life and the compromise between the planters and the merchant capitalists in the North and expressed in the U.S. Constitution fell apart. The planters wanted state power for themselves, and effectively won it with the election of Andrew Jackson. In the main, they controlled the presidency and Congress from then until 1860. Their power was based on a class alliance between themselves and the free farmers of the North who had similar interests on some questions such as soft money and low tariffs.
This alliance operated to stunt the growth of capitalism. The power of the planters was expressed through their control of the Democratic Party. The Whig “opposition” was about as effective as the Democratic opposition to the Republicans today. The subservience of the Whigs gave the planters effective state power.
When the abolitionists spoke of the Slave Power they were not being inflammatory but analytical.
The Republican Party was a revolutionary party which led the nation through the Civil War to an overthrow of planter power and the ascendency of the capitalist state. The failure of that social revolution to proceed through Reconstruction to a resolution of the land question in the South by giving land and the franchise to the freedmen set the stage for the racist nation we have inherited.
Dick would have wanted to cover a broad sweep going on to the aftermath of Reconstruction, but that is all over with his passing. But, certainly it is appropriate to finish his beginning treatment covering the ascendency of the Slave Power.
I further believe that the best of current academic scholars have not told Dick’s story. They have made a major effort to reduce the blatant racism that dominated the academies for 80 years, but in method, empiricism is today more dominant in the study of history than ever before.
David Dreiser
16 April 1990
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Obama- Hands Of The Minneapolis And Chicago Anti-war, Anti-Imperialist Protesters-A Profile Of An FBI Fink
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia Web site entry for a profile of an FBI informant who infiltrated the Minneapolis political milieu and helped the FBI with "information" which led to indictments of many Midwestern anti-war, anti-imperialist activists.
Markin comment:
Part of the business of doing revolutionary, radical, hell, on some days just plain liberal politics (think of the late, unlamented Nixon's "hit" lists with nothing but run of the mill democrats on them )is knowing, knowing without knowing, that someone is watching you, or wants to. Either succumb to paranoia, walk away from such heavy-duty business, or just go about your political business as best you can, as long as you can. Still it is nice, every once in a while, to know they really are out to get us if for no other reason that to jerk back from that notion that we are dealing with rationale opponents. And, as here, to just flat out expose a fink, a living breathing fink before she (in this case) crawls back in her hole.
Markin comment:
Part of the business of doing revolutionary, radical, hell, on some days just plain liberal politics (think of the late, unlamented Nixon's "hit" lists with nothing but run of the mill democrats on them )is knowing, knowing without knowing, that someone is watching you, or wants to. Either succumb to paranoia, walk away from such heavy-duty business, or just go about your political business as best you can, as long as you can. Still it is nice, every once in a while, to know they really are out to get us if for no other reason that to jerk back from that notion that we are dealing with rationale opponents. And, as here, to just flat out expose a fink, a living breathing fink before she (in this case) crawls back in her hole.
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network- Free Private Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest news in his case.
Markin comment:
This apparently is the day for easy political slogans. Some days are tough ones for such work. This one however is a no-brainer. Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Markin comment:
This apparently is the day for easy political slogans. Some days are tough ones for such work. This one however is a no-brainer. Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Justice For Lynne Stewart- Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee Web site for the latest letter from Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, Attorney, the hell with legal disbarment rules, Ms. Stewart is still the zealous advocate for the cause and that is what an attorney is all about).
Markin comment:
Sometimes thinking through political slogans is tough. Sometimes it is a no-brainer. This is the latter. Free Attorney Lynne Stewart Now! Let Grandma Go Home!
Markin comment:
Sometimes thinking through political slogans is tough. Sometimes it is a no-brainer. This is the latter. Free Attorney Lynne Stewart Now! Let Grandma Go Home!
*Victory To The Egyptian Workers' Strikes- Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For Workers And Peasants Government!
Click on the headline to link to an Associated Press online article detailing the latest happenings in Egypt (as of February 9, 2011).
Markin comment:
The fast moving events in Egypt (and across the Middle East) cry out, cry out desperately, for the formation of a revolutionary workers party basing itself on democratic and socialist demands (the Transitional Program demands outlined by Leon Trotsky in the late 1930s, yes 1930s, as applicable to belated developed countries-the key immediate demand being the fight for a revolutionary constituent assembly) to gather around it workers, peasants and other allies to fight to the finish for a workers and peasants government. Can anything less be on the order of the day? I think not. Such situations, as the 30 plus years survival of the Mubarak regime testify to, show how rare such opportunities are and one better take maximum advantage, if not for the immediate struggle for power, then for the ability to fight later with the masses readily behind you.
Markin comment:
The fast moving events in Egypt (and across the Middle East) cry out, cry out desperately, for the formation of a revolutionary workers party basing itself on democratic and socialist demands (the Transitional Program demands outlined by Leon Trotsky in the late 1930s, yes 1930s, as applicable to belated developed countries-the key immediate demand being the fight for a revolutionary constituent assembly) to gather around it workers, peasants and other allies to fight to the finish for a workers and peasants government. Can anything less be on the order of the day? I think not. Such situations, as the 30 plus years survival of the Mubarak regime testify to, show how rare such opportunities are and one better take maximum advantage, if not for the immediate struggle for power, then for the ability to fight later with the masses readily behind you.
***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Out In The Jukebox Saturday Night - A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Platters performing the juke-box Saturday night classic, Only You.
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The 50’s: Keep On Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor jukebox coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, natch. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.
Needless to say you know more about middle school and high school dance stuff, including hot tip “ inside” stuff about manly preparations for those civil wars out in the working class neighborhood night, than you could ever possibly want to know, and, hell, you were there anyway (or at ones like them). Moreover, I clued you in, and keep this quiet, about sex, or rather I should say doin’ the do in case the kids are around, and about the local “custom” (for any anthropologists present) of ocean-waved Atlantic “watching the submarine races.”
Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back indoors again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores (drugstores with soda fountains- why else would healthy, young, sex-charged high school students go to such an old-timer-got-to-get medicine-for-the-arthritis place. Why indeed, although there are secrets in such places that I will tell you about some other time when I’m not jazzed up to go be-bop juke-boxing around the town.), pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and so on. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.
A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows dreamy girls waiting for their platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. There is your chance, boy, grab it. Just hanging around the machine with some cashmere-sweater-ed, beehive-haired (or bobbed, kind of), well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days) chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.
But here is where the real skill came in. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking to her friends as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next. Then you made your move-“Have you heard Only You. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to … for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the songs on the compilation on this CD: Here are the stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” mentioned above on tough nights):
Oh Julie, The Crescendos (a great one if you knew, or thought you knew, or wanted to believe that girl at the jukebox’s name was Julie); Lavender Blue, Sammy Turner (good talk song especially on the word play); Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Chuck Berry (discussed above, and worthy of consideration if your tastes ran to those heart-breaking little rock and rollers. I will tell you about the ONE time it came in handy sometime); You Were Mine, The Fireflies; Susie Darlin’, Robin Luke (ditto the Julie thing above); Only You, The Platters (keep this one a secret, okay, unless you really are a sensitive guy).
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The 50’s: Keep On Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor jukebox coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, natch. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.
Needless to say you know more about middle school and high school dance stuff, including hot tip “ inside” stuff about manly preparations for those civil wars out in the working class neighborhood night, than you could ever possibly want to know, and, hell, you were there anyway (or at ones like them). Moreover, I clued you in, and keep this quiet, about sex, or rather I should say doin’ the do in case the kids are around, and about the local “custom” (for any anthropologists present) of ocean-waved Atlantic “watching the submarine races.”
Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back indoors again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores (drugstores with soda fountains- why else would healthy, young, sex-charged high school students go to such an old-timer-got-to-get medicine-for-the-arthritis place. Why indeed, although there are secrets in such places that I will tell you about some other time when I’m not jazzed up to go be-bop juke-boxing around the town.), pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and so on. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.
A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows dreamy girls waiting for their platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. There is your chance, boy, grab it. Just hanging around the machine with some cashmere-sweater-ed, beehive-haired (or bobbed, kind of), well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days) chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.
But here is where the real skill came in. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking to her friends as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next. Then you made your move-“Have you heard Only You. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to … for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the songs on the compilation on this CD: Here are the stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” mentioned above on tough nights):
Oh Julie, The Crescendos (a great one if you knew, or thought you knew, or wanted to believe that girl at the jukebox’s name was Julie); Lavender Blue, Sammy Turner (good talk song especially on the word play); Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Chuck Berry (discussed above, and worthy of consideration if your tastes ran to those heart-breaking little rock and rollers. I will tell you about the ONE time it came in handy sometime); You Were Mine, The Fireflies; Susie Darlin’, Robin Luke (ditto the Julie thing above); Only You, The Platters (keep this one a secret, okay, unless you really are a sensitive guy).
*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-The Stono Rebels
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Monday, February 07, 2011
*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Gabriel
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Gabriel
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Sunday, February 06, 2011
*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Denmark Vesey
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Denmark Vesey
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
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
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
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)