Lessons from the Egyptian
Revolution
John Molyneux
From Irish Marxist Review 13
‘Those who make a revolution halfway, dig
their own graves!’. St.Just
The Egyptian
Revolution of January 25 to February
11 2011 has been the greatest revolutionary struggle of the 21st
century to date.
This is
true first in terms of the level of mass mobilisation involved. For Trotsky,
‘the direct interference of the masses in historic events’ was ‘the most
indubitable feature of a revolution’
and as Mostafa Ali wrote at the time, ‘The sheer
numbers of those who participated in the uprising as well as their percentage
compared to the total population is unprecedented and astonishing.’
It is estimated that between
January 25, when the demonstrations started, and February 11, when the dictator
Hosni Mubarak was toppled, at least 15 million people out of a population of 80
million--that is more than 20 percent of the population--took part in the mass
mobilizations.
A friend of mine in Cairo reminded me--and he was probably bragging a little
bit--that 15 million protesters exceeds the total number of people who
participated in all the protests that took place in all the countries of Eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989.
It is true that young people led
the charge on January 25, and that most of the 400 martyrs who were killed
during the uprising were under the age of 30. But young people were not alone
in the streets. From day one, the Egyptian uprising was a popular revolution.
From day one, millions of workers, poor peasants, poor housewives and all
sectors of society took part in the mobilizations across the country.
Second, it was immense in terms of its immediate and
concrete achievement. In just eighteen days of mass revolutionary struggle it
secured the downfall of a hugely powerful dictator, previously seen as the
unassailable strongman of the region.. As I wrote at the time, the fall of
Mubarak
was nothing
short of miraculous. Hosni Mubarak had ruled Egypt for thirty years, during
which time he had been the world’s second biggest receiver of US aid (after
Israel, of course) and had built the most formidable apparatus of power and
repression. No one seems to be quite sure of the size of the Egyptian State
Security, but, as everyone who has visited the town knows, Cairo on an ordinary day seemed to have cops
on every street corner. Cairo,
when anything untoward was afoot – an oppositional conference or a protest of
some kind – resembled a city under military occupation. Moreover what every
Caireen and, probably, every Egyptian knew was that these cops, these
numberless State Security men, were systematic abusers and
torturers.[See Aida Seif El Dawla ‘Torture: a state policy’ in Rabab El-Mahdi
&Philip Marfleet, Egypt: The
Moment of Change, London 2009} And yet this formidable apparatus of power
and oppression was smashed, beaten in open combat by an unarmed people
fighting, more or less with their bare hands.
Third, it was outstanding in terms of its
inspirational effect internationally. Of course, the Egyptian Revolution was
itself inspired by the Tunisian Revolution which secured the overthrow of Zinedine
Ben Ali, just 11 days earlier, but it was events in Egypt that really set light to the
Arab Spring. Egypt
lacks oil but in other respects is the most important Arab country. With the
largest population, the biggest cities (Cairo
and Alexandria) and largest working class Egypt was, and remains, the key to change in the
whole Middle East region, including change in Palestine. As Tony Cliff pointed out long ago
‘The road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo’.
Yet the fact is, and this needs to squarely
faced, the Egyptian Revolution has been defeated. – from Alexandria
to Aswan the
old regime is back in power. On 25
January 2011 hundreds of thousands came on to the streets and defeated
the police. On 24 January 2015, the eve of the anniversary, Socialist Popular
Alliance Party activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh was taking part in a tiny
demonstration of about 25 people to commemorate the martyrs of 2011 when was
she was shot and killed. The next day – the actual anniversary – saw about 20
people killed, most of them in Matariya, one of the few places there is still
regular resistance. The contrast could hardly be more stark.
And precisely this stark and bitter
contrast obliges Marxists to reflect on the experience, draw up a balance
sheet, and see what lessons can be learnt.
What not to learn
After every serious defeat there are always
those who fall into despair. The rise of the revolution radicalizes people like
wildfire because it raises their confidence in their own power and widens their
horizons. The victory of counter revolution, inevitably, has the reverse effect
driving people back into the isolation and alienation of their individual
private lives. To many, especially those newly radicalized, it seems that their
revolutionary hopes were just a passing illusion. They fall back into the
received wisdom of what Gramsci called ‘common sense’, i.e. that mixture of
nostrums, prejudices, partial truths, superstitions and impressions handed down
to them through a multiplicity of channels from the ruling class, the most
important and most deadly of which is ‘that nothing will ever change’ or, more precisely ‘You, the masses, can’t
change anything’.
Even the relatively small minority who engage
in theoretical debate are prone to this and in periods of reaction or counter-revolution
all sorts of erstwhile revolutionaries search for ‘new’ ideas to justify their
own collapse. ‘The bourgeoisie has
changed/ the working class has changed – they are now too strong/ we are now
too weak.’ ‘There is something wrong with the national character of the
Russians/ the Germans/ the British/ the Arabs/ the Irish or whoever’.
‘Revolutions always fail’.
In the face of the inevitability of such
responses both in Egypt
and internationally it is necessary, first, to insist on some historical
perspective.
The fact that, 167 years after Marx and
Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto,
capitalism rules the world means that the history of the revolutionary
socialist movement is first and foremost a history of defeats – of defeats
punctuated by victories as Tony Cliff used to say of the class struggle in the
eighties. But there are defeats and defeats. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions
in Europe, to which the Arab Spring was sometimes compared, formed the foundation for a period of major
capitalist expansion which ruled out revolution in the near future as Marx was
obliged (by 1850) to recognize.
Given this
general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society are
developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois
relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is
possible only in periods when both of these factors — the modern
forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production — come
into opposition with each other….. A new revolution is only a
consequence of a new crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the other.
Consequently the International Communist League, for which
Marx had written the Manifesto, was
dissolved and he withdrew from virtually all direct political activity to
concentrate on his economic researches until the revival of the movement and
the foundation of the First International in 1864. But this is not the current
situation. Neither global nor Egyptian capitalism is poised for a new golden age
and, although it has recovered some what from the depths of 2008-10, the system
is staggering along with generally low and faltering growth rates and with the
underlying cause of the crisis, the falling rate of profit, unresolved.
Nor is the defeat of the Egyptian Revolution and the Arab
Spring comparable in scale or depth to the succession of defeats suffered by
the international working class in the 1920s and 30s. One has only to list the principle
catastrophes of those years to see this: the defeat of the Hungarian
Revolution, the failure of the German Revolution, the defeat of the Italian Red
Years and the triumph of Mussolini, the crushing of the Chinese Revolution
(1925-27), the betrayal of the British General Strike and crucially, as a
consequence of these, the isolation of the Russian Revolution and the victory
of the Stalinist counterrevolution which in turn fed into victory of Hitler in
1933 and Franco in Spain.
The cumulative effect of these defeats was to wipe out
(literally) many of the advanced layers of the international workers’ movement
and to drive authentic Marxism represented above all by Trotsky, to the
absolute margins of the working class and society, thus postponing for decades
the possibility of building genuine mass revolutionary parties. The defeat in Egypt,
grievous as it is, does not have this definitive character, either nationally
or internationally.
A more accurate parallel in my view is with the victory of
the counter revolution over the Russian Revolution of 1905 through the Stolypin
Coup of June 1907. Obviously the comparison is not, and cannot be, exact but it
does at least give us an appropriate sense of historical scale.
The Stolypin Coup restored the Tsarist autocracy to full
power after the concessions that had
been wrung from it in 1905 and inaugurated a period of dreadful reaction. The
number of workers taking strike action fell from 2.8 million in 1905, to
740,000 in 1907, 176,000 in 1908 and just 47,000 in 1910. There was ferocious
repression.
During the
dictatorship of Stolypin over 5,000 death sentences were passed and over 3,500
persons were actually executed – this was at least three times as many as
during the whole period of the mass movement (not including of course shootings
without trial, after the suppression of the armed insurrection).
The Bolshevik Party was also severely damaged,
membership in Moscow falling from over 5000 in 1906 to 150 by late 1908.
Nevertheless, despite immense difficulties the
revolutionary continuity was not broken and the party survived. In 1910 the
movement began to revive with student demonstrations followed by the beginning
of a strike wave in 1911 and then, in response to the massacre of gold miners
in Lena, revolutionary mass strikes in 1912 –
the beginning of a movement that culminated in the Revolution of 1917.
Returning from the past to the current
situation it is clear that the repression has been horrendous. On the 14 August 2013, the bloodiest
single day, when Sisi’s armed forces attacked two Muslim Brotherhood protest
camps in Cairo,
at the very least i.e. on the government’s own reckoning 638 people were killed
and 3,994 were injured but the figures given by the Muslim Brotherhood are, and
with good reason, much higher with the claim that about 2,600 were killed at
the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque sit-in alone. When it comes to arrests estimates
range from about 16,000 to about 40,000 being held in prison. This has been
accompanied by the grisly spectacle of mass death sentences being handed down
by the courts such as the 683 sentenced to death in April 2014. So far these
have not been carried out but the fear this generates is obvious.
However, for all its horror, the level of
repression has not been such as to completely crush all resistance or to
destroy and wipe out all the left. The main victims have been the Muslim
Brotherhood but they have been able to mount regular protests, albeit at great
cost, in their stronghold of Matariya in North Eastern Cairo. Other small scale
demonstrations and protests continue to take place, including on some campuses
and, most importantly the regime has not actually taken on and smashed the core
of the working class. There continue to be significant strikes such as the
1,000 plus workers who went on strike at the Ain Sokhna port on 25 March
demanding late share profits and allowances.
Viewed dispassionately, this is
counterrevolutionary violence of a significantly lesser order than not only the
great counterrevolutions of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin,
Franco – but also Indonesia in 1965 (500,000 massacred) or Chile in 1973
(probably 30,000 killed) or Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in 1974-83 (10-30,000
killed and disappeared). In other words, like 1907, it is atrocious but
recoverable from in the not too distant future.
Also important is the international situation.
As we have already noted (and I shall return to this point) the Egyptian
Revolution was part of an international wave of struggle and that wave, known
as the Arab Spring, was contained and defeated not only in Egypt but also in Bahrain,
Libya, Yemen and Syria,
producing other dreadful consequences such as ISIS.
But this is not the whole of the Arab world. In Tunisia the democratic gains of
the revolution remain partially intact(despite many of ‘the left’ collaborating
with and helping to rehabilitate the old ruling part) y
intact and 2014 saw a political victory for Palestine over the Israeli
aggression with Operation Positive Edge – solidarity with Palestine and the BDS
campaign continues to grow despite the tsunami of Islamophobia.
Moreover, the Middle East
is not the world. Marx pointed out in 1848 that ‘In proportion as the
bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat,
the modern working class, developed’ and the immense globalised development of
capitalism in recent decades has produced an immense international development
of the working class. In today’s world every significant country possesses a
proletariat which is a far larger proportion of the population than was the
case in Russia
in 1917 and in many cases is a majority.
Particularly striking is the degree of urbanization (not identical to
proletarianisation, but clearly related to it): urbanization in Argentina is
over 92%, Brazil 90.6%, Chile 89%, USA 84.5%,
Cuba, 75.5%, Iran 69%, Turkey 71%, South Africa 62%, and China 53.7%
with the world figure standing at 52%.
This constitutes an immense reserve of
potential power distributed across all five continents. It means that it is
eminently possible to bounce back from terrible defeats in one country or zone
(eg the Middle East) in another zone eg East Asia.
Morover it is clear that the defeat in Egypt, and of the Arab Spring overall,
did not halt or throw back the struggle in Southern Europe which it had helped
to inspire. This article began by contrasting Cairo
on the 25 January 2011
with Cairo on the 25 January 2015 but the 25 January 2015 was also the date of Syriza’s
victory in Greece.
It is also more than possible that just as the overthrow of Mubarak fed into
the struggle in Spain and
elsewhere so struggles and victories elsewhere can feed back into Egypt and the Middle East.
Of special importance in this context is China
which has by far the largest proletariat in the world, numbering maybe 500
million or more. This immense social force the like of which has never before
existed in world history is far from quiescent; it engages in strikes,
demonstrations and riots on regular basis but so far they remain largely
localized and the Chinese ruling class does its utmost, through a combination
of concessions and repression, to keep them that way. But the moment the
Chinese proletariat generalizes and starts to move on a nationwide scale it
will be truly awesome in its power and will rock the world. Nor is the Chinese
working class the only one capable of playing this role, merely the biggest.
This huge growth in urban wage labour and thus
in the objective social power of the global working class is, in itself, reason
not to abandon the revolutionary project but the moment we look to the future,
and I mean not the next year or two but the next decade or or two it becomes
clear that the objective conditions for international workers revolution will
dramatically mature.
The combination of ongoing economic crises and
turbulence shaped fundamentally by the underlying decline in the rate of profit
and the rapidly worsening environmental crisis, of which climate change is the
extreme but by no means the only expression, will lead humanity into a
succession of social and political disasters and cataclysms resolvable only by
socialist revolution or fascist barbarism. Even if capitalism were able to
solve its economic crisis it will do so by means, namely restored economic
growth, which will exacerbate climate change. Meanwhile the decline in the rate
of profit inhibits capitalism, even if it were so inclined, from doing anything
serious to halt runaway climate change.
To return to Egypt it does not require any
special powers of foresight, rather it is necessary only to pose the question,
to grasp the terrible impact of future climate change on a country which is
mostly desert and utterly dependent on one great river which rises 3000 miles
south of its southern border.
This combination of the tremendous forces for
revolution and terrible price to be paid for failing to achieve it compel us to
address the lessons of the Egyptian Revolution in a spirit of revolutionary
optimism, clear that those lessons need to be learned so as to help win next
time – for there will be another day.
The
Main Lesson
The main overall lesson of the Egyptian
Revolution is encapsulated in the quotation from St .Just at the head of this
article: ‘Those who make a revolution half way dig their own graves’. The fact
that this is a quote from St. Just signifies that this is hardly a new lesson.
Tony Cliff observed
All revolutions start as half
revolutions. The new co-exists with the old. Thus the February 1917 revolution
got rid of the Tsar, got rid of the police, established the soviets, workers’
committees in the factories – all this was new. But the old survived: the
generals remained in the army, the capitalists continued to own the factories,
the landlords the land, and the imperialist war continued…
Since 1917 there have been many
revolutions that went only half way and therefore ended with a
counter-revolution.
There are fundamental reasons why this should
be so and they applied in full measure to Egypt.From the point of view of the
bourgeoisie, capitalism cannot tolerate a risen people for any great length of
time. The ‘normal’, i.e. successful, functioning of the system is incompatible
with large numbers continually on the streets (they interfere with business!),
regular mass strikes, workplace occupations, demands for participatory
democracy etc. These things can, and will, be accepted for a time but only to
gain time, so as to later to ‘restore order’ by returning the masses to
passivity. Moreover, the ruling class will want, if it can, to take revenge on
the revolution and punish the masses for ever having had the temerity to rebel
and threaten ‘society as we know it’.
From the point of the revolutionary movement,
mass revolutionary consciousness develops only in the course of revolutionary
struggle. It is an illusion to believe that the majority, as opposed to a
significant minority (the so-called ‘vanguard’) can first be won to
revolutionary ideas, through propaganda and education, and then the revolution
can be launched.. The dominance of bourgeois ideology, capitalist control of
the media and education, and of innumerable institutions of civil society that
monitor and manage people’s daily lives makes this impossible. But this means
that if the level of struggle is not maintained, if the masses become either
exhausted or complacent, their level of consciousness will also decline and
start to fall back towards its ‘normal’ state.
This is why the momentum of revolutionary
struggle has to be maintained and why revolutions that do not go forward are
thrown back.
The Muslim Brotherhood, who were the main
initial political beneficiaries of the Revolution*, did not have a clue about
this. Like the most naïve and historically uninformed reformists they believed
they could simply win the elections, take control of Egypt and run the country as a
‘normal’ bourgeois democracy on the basis of neo-liberal economics and in
cooperation with the military and the rest of the state apparatus inherited
from the Mubarak years, accompanied by a veneer of Islamism.
Immediately after the fall of Mubarak when
SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) took over and revolutionary
enthusiasm was at its height the Brotherhood opposed popular mobilization on
the streets and worked with the army to pacify the situation. It set its face
against any attempt to cleanse the state apparatus of its many mini-Mubaraks.
After their victory in the election the Morsi
government continued this collaboration, while extending it to the
international sphere: they pledged to ‘honour all Egypt’s
international obligations’, which meant maintaining the treaties supporting Israel.
They also hoped to keep ‘the international community’ sweet with orthodox
neo-liberal economic policies which inevitably alienated their support among
the working class and the poor. At the same time non-cooperation and sabotage
by elements in the state apparatus and government departments made the Morsi
government appear completely incompetent as basic services ceased working. Their
only significant responses to were a Presidential decree in November 2012
(rescinded in the face of protests) and a Constitutional Referendum in December
(narrowly passed on a very low turnout): moves that were probably designed to
strengthen the hand of Morsi and his government vis-a-vis the military but were
widely interpreted as a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist power grab, thus further
antagonizing wide strata of the people. In this way the Muslim Brotherhood
systematically prepared their own downfall.
To say the revolution must not stop half way
means that revolutionaries must adopt as their strategic goal and orientation
the establishment of workers’ power and the overthrow of capitalism as a first
step towards international socialist revolution. In other words it is to adopt
the perspective of permanent revolution first articulated by Marx in 1850, then
elaborated by Trotsky in relation to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and later,
to what became called the Third World in 1928.
Only from a political standpoint that refuses to accept the limits of
capitalist economic and social relations and rejects the logic of competitive
capital accumulation is it possible to maintain the necessary momentum of the
revolution.
In this context it is worth saying that the
role played by the Muslim Brotherhood, despite its ideological peculiarities
(i.e. its Islamism and consequently its lack of any socialist rhetoric or
aspiration) was not fundamentally
different from the role played by many other political parties and formations adhering
to what is known as a ‘stages theory’ of social revolution. This is the idea
that the strategy of the left should be first to achieve a democratic (or
bourgeois democratic or anti-imperialist or national) revolution and the
struggle for workers power and socialism should be put on hold till after this
first stage has been consolidated. All those who accept this framework –
whether they call themselves Marxists, communists, socialists, anarchists, nationalists
or Islamists, whether they are Allende’s Popular Unity, the ANC in South Africa
– are caught in what is essentially the same trap of demobilizing the very
movement that brought them to power and imposing the logic and requirements of
capitalism on their own social base.
The
International Dimension
To invoke the perspective of permanent
revolution is also to stress the international nature of the revolution. Marx
and Engels grasped the fundamental international character of the working class
movement and the socialist revolution as early as 1845 but the Egyptian
Revolution was a spectacular demonstration of the fact that this basic
principle is now more relevant and more true than ever before.
In the first place, both the underlying and
the immediate causes of the Revolution were international in nature. The crisis
of the Mubarak regime which developed over more than a decade was rooted in its
neo-liberal economic policies
[These] further integrated the Egyptian
economy in an uneven way into the world capitalist economy and internally
impoverished the vast majority of the population …The great recession that
shook the globe in 2008 accelerated the crisis in Egypt… Egypt
is highly dependent on exports to Europe and these fell rapidly due to the drop
in demand that followed contraction…the situation was worsened by the advent of
the draconian austerity policies in Europe.
Remittances from emigrants fell by 17 percent … tourism revenues also went from
a rise of 24 percent in 2008 to a fall of 1.1percent and the Suez
Canal revenues fell by 7.2 percent compared to 2008.
A third factor
[was] the sharp rises in the costs of basic foods. Egypt’s dependence on imported
food, particularly wheat, makes it difficult for the government to shield the
economy from the effect of global food prices
In terms of the development of resistance to
the Mubarak regime the second Palestinian Intifada of September 2000 played an
important mobilizing role as did the Iraq War of 2003 when 40,000 protested and
Tahrir Square was occupied for 24 hours in what Naguib describes as a
‘rehearsal for the 2011 revolutionary occupation’
Then, of course it was the Tunisian Revolution that provided the final spark.
However it was the speed of the response to
the victory in Egypt
i.e. the overthrow of Mubarak, that was really astonishing. On the day Mubarak
fell, 11 February, I was outside the Egyptian Embassy with members of Egyptian
community in Dublin.
When the news came through they danced and sang in the street and one guy,
evidently a Libyan, got out a picture of Colonel Gaddafi and held it up to the
crowd. ‘Him next’, he said. And sure enough on the 17 February, six days later
the Libyan Revolution began. But by then there was also already a revolt in Bahrain
on the Pearl Roundabout ( starting 15 February). In Yemen
protests in the capital, Sana’a, began on 27 January – two days after the
beginning in Egypt – and by
the 18 February and 11 March there were tens of thousands on the streets of Yemen’s
main cities.
The Syrian Revolution was ‘slower’ to start. It
did not begin until the 6 March when 12 teenagers in Daraa were arrested for
writing on the walls of the city ‘The people demand the fall of the regime!’ –
the great slogan from Tunisia
and Egypt.
By the 15 May the spirit of the Arab Spring had leapt across the Mediterranean to Spain with the occupation of Puerta del Sol and
other cities by the Indignados and by 25 May there were similar mass protests
in Syntagma Square
in Athens.
The revolutionary wave that followed the
Russian Revolution of 1917 was far stronger and deeper than that in 2011 but
the pace at which it spread was slower. The German Revolution did not break out
till November 1918 – a whole year later. The Italian Red Years and the peak of
the wave did not come till 1919-20.
What lies behind this increased pace is, of
course, the development of the forces of production which has brought about
greatly increased international economic and, consequently, cultural
integration so that the same multinational corporations operate in downtown
Cairo, in Istanbul, Madrid and London. On one side of Tahrir Square stands the Nile Hilton, on
the other there is McDonalds. It is a fulfillment of Marx’s immensely prescient
insight in the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world
market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every
country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet
of industry the national ground on which it stood... In place of the old local
and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
One part
of this development is the enormous advance that has occurred in all forms of
communication ranging from transport to social media. The role of social media
has, of course, been the subject of much hype and the Egyptian Revolution has
been depicted as if were a ‘twitter’ revolution, driven by mobile phones and
the internet. This was clearly a massive exaggeration. When Mubarak shut down
the internet in Egypt
it did not halt the revolution but then neither did the use of social media
prevent the triumph of the counter revolution. Nevertheless when it comes to
spreading news and ideas internationally contemporary means of communication
undoubtedly facilitate the process. When the revolutionary journalist John
Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the
World, traveled from America
to Russia in 1917 the
journey took him over one month and then another two months to return to America
in early 1918. Antonio Gramsci was not able to read the writings of Lenin until
1919 or later. By contrast the great street battles of the Egyptian Revolution
were live streamed round the world on Al Jazeera and the revolutionary, Hossam
el-Hamalawy, had tens of thousands of Twitter followers world wide.
Another
corollary of this intense internationalization of the revolution, confirmed by
the Egyptian experience is the bankruptcy of nationalism. Arab nationalism is
haunted by the spectre of its greatest representative, Gamal Abdel Nasser but
it is no accident that the half century since Nasser’s heyday has seen no
comparable figure emerge in the Arab world, only grotesque caricatures such as
Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al-Assad, who shared Nasser’s ability to repress the
left but not his resistance to imperialism. Egypt’s leading Nasserist of recent
years has been Hamdeen Sabahi, erstwhile leader of the Karama Party and then
member of the National Salvation Front. During the Mubarak years Sabahi played
an honourable role being arrested 17 times. He opposed the Iraq War and during those
years he could be seen at the Cairo Conferences in the company of the likes of
John Rees and John Rose. He supported
the 2011 Revolution and stood, more or less as the candidate of the left, in
the 2012 Presidential Elections where he finished in third place with 21.5% of
the vote, 700,000 behind the second place candidate, the military’s Ahmad Shafiq. Then ,in the course
of 2012-3 he moved rapidly rightwards becoming a supporter of Al-Sisi and the
military in their repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, thus becoming
completely complicit in the counter revolution.
Lenin
insisted a distinction be made between the nationalism of the oppressors and
that of the oppressed. The former was wholly reactionary, the latter was
progressive or rather contained a significant progressive element. The
distinction was correct at the time and retains much relevance today. To see
its importance one has only to compare the different political and ideological
character of British and Irish nationalism. British nationalism, as it becomes
more militant and emphatic leads from the Tory Party through UKIP to the EDL
and BNP. Irish nationalism leads from Fianna Fail via Sinn Fein to republican
socialism and James Connolly. **
** It
should be noted that Ireland
today is no longer a neo-colony or subordinate to British rule except in the Six Counties
and this seriously modifies the role and nature of Irish nationalism but the
fact that the whole nationalist/republican tradition was formed in struggle
against British imperialism has significantly shaped its ideological formation.
Nationalism,
because of its fundamentally bourgeois nature, has always had a propensity to
collaborate with imperialism as Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang demonstrated
in 1927, but the expansion and globalization of multinational capitalism has
reduced the economic and political space for radical or anti-imperialist
nationalism. It has also led to the emergence of a number of centres of
independent capital accumulation and sub-imperialisms occupying intermediate
positions usually in alliance with US or other major imperialist powers. This
makes it very easy for nationalist political forces to turn into conservative
or even reactionary formations, especially when they ally themselves with the
military. Kemalism in Turkey
is a prime example of this, as is Ba’athism in Iraq
and Syria and the trajectory
of Nasserism in Egypt,
as personified by Sabahi, also reflects this.
The
bankruptcy and failure of nationalism has also been a major factor in the
emergence of Islamism as such a potent political force in the region in recent
decades.
Strategy
and Tactics
The necessity of the perspective of permanent
revolution, ie of the strategic goal of workers’ power and international revolution
does not mean, however, that applying this perspective in practice is simple
matter of marching boldly forwards without regard for tactics, manoeuvres, and
even compromises, sometimes of a difficult nature. The experience of the
Egyptian Revolution demonstrated this again and again and it is an experience
which has to be assimilated and learned from by both Egyptian revolutionaries
and by the wider international movement. What follows here are a few examples.
The first is what I would call the danger of revolutionary intoxication. Revolutions,
festivals of the oppressed, are exceptionally exhilarating experiences. We –
the working class, the left, the oppressed, and the revolutionary activists –
spend most of our time either being ground down by daily exploitation and
drudgery or ‘banging our heads against a brick wall’ in frustrating, often
unsuccessful, attempts to build resistance. When the masses come onto the
streets in their millions and score victories over the forces of reaction and
the state this is, of course, extraordinarily exciting. Anyone who watched,
never mind actually participated in, events such as the battles of 25 January,
the 28 January and the Battle
of the Camel, and was not moved to the core by the experience is not a
revolutionary. But this necessarily leads to certain illusions.
One of these was that revolution is primarily
a matter of heroism and will power on the part of the revolutionaries: that the
revolution in Egypt could and would be brought to a successful conclusion
simply by occupying and defending Tahrir Square against all comers and
repeating this in other cities until both the regime collapsed and all other
evils were defeated. Heroism and will power are essential elements in any
revolution but by themselves they are not enough.
It was necessary to recognize that the
revolution was up against an extremely powerful and determined enemy: not just
Mubarak and his immediate supporters, nor just the generals but an entire state
and ruling class backed by international capital who would fight back again and
again with both intelligence and utter ruthlessness. Defeating that enemy would
require the revolutionaries - the
demonstrators and street fighters of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez – to be able to
lead and win the support of millions of other workers and peasants in the
workplaces, small towns and villages of Egypt as a whole, and therefore to
learn how to reach them and lead them.
This is no easy matter. It is not easy for
older ‘political’ people who, unavoidably, have spent years talking primarily
to each other and it is not easy for the newly politically awakened intoxicated
with their triumphs on the streets to even recognize that this needs to be
done. One million people in a square or four million people marching through a
town is an awesome phenomenon: in the midst of such a throng it is hard to
remember that in a society of nearly 90 million there are many millions more
sitting at home, some sympathetic, some not, observing the battles on the
streets considering whether or not to throw in their lot with the revolution or
stick with the traditional order of things. And in the Egyptian Revolution this was
particularly difficult for the many thousands of young street fighters for whom
the revolution was their first and only political experience and who, inevitably,
knew nothing of the history of previous revolutions and struggles.
To refer to the ‘youth’ of these
revolutionaries is absolutely not to patronize or dismiss them. On the contrary
they were the heroes of the revolution and its most precious asset. But if
their youth and courage were priceless their lack of historical knowledge was a
weakness and their necessity for the revolution’s future created a problem for
more experienced revolutionaries who had to try to steer a path between
alienating such invaluable people and simply tail-ending their impetuous
voluntarism and adventurism.
Nevertheless it was necessary to insist on the
need to put forward demands and develop a political practice that related to
workers in the factories and peasants in the villages. Also essential was an
electoral engagement Of course this cut
against the grain of many of the most ardent revolutionaries but the truth is
that all the old arguments going back, at least, to Lenin and Left Wing Communism continued to apply.
Not to contest elections was not to undermine the system but simply to leave
that field open to the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Naturally an
effective electoral intervention involved compromise - the Revolutionary Socialists for example were
too weak to mount such an intervention on its own – but it is possible that
there could have been an effective mobilization by the far left around Hamdeen
Sabahi’s presidential bid. Objections that Sabahi was ‘unprincipled’ or ‘an
opportunist’ are true but miss the point that revolutionaries have to base
their position not on an assessment of the individual’s character or integrity
but on the objective significance of the candidate’s programme and campaign. In
2012 of the possible candidates Sabahi’s
campaign probably represented the most progressive development.
It was also necessary to vote in the final
round of the Presidential election in 2012 for rhe Muslim Brotherhood candidate
Mohammed Morsi against the candidate of the military, Ahmed Shafiq. No matter how
unpalatable this may have seemed that facts were that Shafiq was the last prime
minister under Mubarak and his victory would have been a triumph for the
counterrevolution and an invitation to cut the revolution’s throat, as Shafiq
made clear at the time. As we know the whole idea of voting – in any
circumstances – for the Muslim Brotherhood was anathema to many on the left
both in Egypt and internationally, which raises not only the arguments about
tactics and against ultra-leftism in general but also, and once again the
nature of Islamism and specifically of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Problem
of Islamism
There are few problems that have caused so
much confusion and disorientation on the left over the last twenty years both
in the Middle East and globally as the question of Islamism (otherwise known as
Political Islam or, erroneously, as Islamic Fundamentalism).
One reason for this disorientation is the
pressure created by the fact that since the ‘collapse of communism’ in 1989-91,
and especially since 9/11 and ‘the War on Terror’ the US and and its
allies have made Islamism their principle ideological target and Islamophobia
the main contemporary form of racism. This has combined with the commitment of
many on the left to a form of enlightenment secularism that is blind to its own
class character and to its usefulness to imperialism, whether it is on the
question of the veil in France or justifying war on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Another contributing factor is the merger in
much of Global South of the Stalinist Communist tradition with middle class
nationalism and anti-imperialism, usually under the banner of the stages theory
of revolution. As a result of this there emerged a ‘left’ in many undeveloped
countries which was based among the intelligentsia and quite separated from the
working class maases whom it tended to view as ‘backward’ and ‘religious’. And
for this left the project of change and socialism was very much a project of
state capitalist economic development and modernization. This in turn led to a
view of Islamism as even more of an enemy than the capitalist state and its
armed forces.
All of this applied to a considerable extent
to many on the Egyptian left both before and after the Revolution. At the same
time the experience of the Egyptian Revolution demonstrates very clearly the
necessity of a Marxist understanding of the whole phenomenon of Islamism and
specifically of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.. Much of the theoretical
work for this has been done, the key text being Chris Harman’s path breaking
analysis of 1995, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’. Here I will simply
summarise in bullet point form what seem to me to be key points.
1.
It is necessary to make an
historical materialist analysis of all religious movements including Islamism.
This means starting not from their professed doctrine but from the social
forces which they express and represent.
2.
Contemporary Islamism is in
general not a throw back to the 8th century or the middle ages or
even an attempt to revert to such times. Rather it is a modern response to the
modern phenomenon of imperialism, conditioned by the inadequacy of the
nationalist and Stalinist responses.
3.
Just as there are many
different political tendencies with a Christian colouration, ranging from
Protestant Unionism in Northern Ireland
to the Theology of Liberation in Latin America,
so there are many different Islamisms of very different political character
depending on their specific economic, social and political circumstances. Hamas
is not at all ‘the same’ as ISIS and neither
are ‘the same’ as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. A concrete analysis has to
be made.
4.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was a
cross class phenomenon. Its leadership was middle class and committed to
capitalism but it was not the main party of the Egyptian bourgeoisie or even
its second choice. It had developed a serious mass base among the lower middle
class, the poor and even sections of the working class. It built this in large
part by moving into the ‘welfare’ space vacated by the retreating neo-liberal
state and became a substantial provider of services to the poor. Indeed it was both
under Mubarak and after his fall the only real mass political organization in
the country, dwarfing all others.
5.
The Muslim Brotherhood was seen
by the masses the main opposition to the Mubarak regime. It was subject to
sustained repression under that regime and although it was slow to support or
join the 25 January Revolution its members, especially its youth, fought
heroically in the Battle
of the Camel and on other occasions.
6.
The MB had some of the features
of a socially conservative religious/ nationalist organization, like Sinn Fein
or Fianna Fail in the past. It also, because of its social base had some
features of a reformist organization. It is a mistake to think that reformism
only takes a shape that copies or resembles classic social democracy. Reformism
derives from the contradiction in the consciousness of the working class between
wanting a better society but lacking the confidence to create it themselves. It
can therefore find expression in a wide variety of political formations ranging
from the SNP to Syriza and the Muslim Brotherhood. These formations are not, of
course, ‘the same’ – there is a spectrum with the Muslim Brotherhood at the
conservative end of it and Syriza at the left (‘Marxist’) end but what unites
them is that they all promise a better
world, a new beginning, real democracy etc, etc, but they all propose to
deliver these good things while running capitalism.
Failure on the part of many on the left to
grasp these points had very serious consequences. It led to an exaggerated fear
that the Brotherhood was about to establish a theocratic dictatorship and to
the radically false concept of Islamic fascism. It led to the terrible failings
of the Muslim Brotherhood government which derived from its refusal to
challenge the system or the state being attributed specifically to the
Brotherhood. And it led to the disastrous conclusion by some that Al-Sisi and
the military were a ‘lesser evil’ than the Brotherhood. All of this culminated
in the events of 30 June – 3 July 2013.
The
Coup
The events leading up to and surrounding the 3
July military coup posed what in my opinion were exceptionally difficult
political and tactical problems for revolutionaries. It should be said at the
outset that virtually everyone on the left, in Egypt and internationally (and I
include myself in this) failed to grasp correctly what was happening in those
days. Before trying to analyze this let’s briefly recap the main events.
In April 2013 a small group of activists led
by Mahmoud Badr established an organization called Tamarod (Rebellion) which
launched a petition of no confidence in President Morsi and demanded early
elections. They said their aim was to collect 15 million signatures i.e. more
than the 13 million votes with which Morsi had won the election. The petition
gained massive popular support. Eventually Tamarod claimed, though the claim
has not been verified, over 22 million signatures. On the basis of this Tamarod
called on the Egyptian to come onto the streets in a huge demonstration on 30
June.
The 30 June demonstration in Cairo,
and elsewhere in Egypt,
was indeed huge. There are claims that with 14 million or more on the streets
it was the largest demonstration in world history. Whether or not this figure
is accurate or the claim true it is absolutely beyond question that the
mobilization was utterly immense. The helicopter video footage leaves no room
for doubt. The next day a million people occupied Tahrir Square .
Then on the 3 July, after continuing protests,
the army, led by General Al-Sisi, intervened to arrest Morsi and other
Brotherhood leaders and to depose the government. This was met with acclaim by many of those on
the streets. The Brotherhood responded by insisting on the ‘legitimacy’ of the
Morsi presidency and their government and by organizing their own continuous street protests. They established two street
sit-ins, one near Cairo University in Giza and
a larger one at Rab’aa in Nasr
City. After nearly six
weeks of ongoing protest on the 14 August the Al-Sisi regime dispersed the
sit-ins by means of brutal massacres killing at the very least, i.e. by their
own admission, 638 MB supporters and injuring and arresting thousands more.
The counter revolutionary coup was now firmly in place and sealed in blood.
The problem that has to be acknowledged and
confronted is that the revolutionaries and the left, including the
Revolutionary Socialists (clearly the most serious and principled socialist organization
in Egypt)
had supported and participated in the Tamarod campaign, and hailed the 30 June
demonstrations as a ‘revolutionary wave’.. Also when the military intervened on
3 July the Revolutionary Socialists did not support this but did believe that
it would prove a kind of ‘soft coup’ which would not seriously derail or halt
the onward march of the Revolution.
So was it a mistake ever to have supported the
Tamarod petition and movement? This question has particular force since it has
subsequently come out that Mahmoud
Badr and the Tamarod leaders were in league with the military from the outset
and after the coup they backed all the repression including the 14 August
massacre. Nevertheless I would not make this criticism. I think it was
impossible not to support Tamarod at the beginning. It appeared to have
developed out of the revolution and it couched its demands in the language of
the revolution and in terms of developing the revolution. Moreover it was
backed by the April 6 Youth Movement, the main organization of revolutionary
youth, and there is no doubt that it articulated genuine grievances felt by the
Egyptian masses.
When
it became clear that Tamarod was aligning itself with the military, as for
example when it was endorsed by Ahmed Shafiq and the endorsement was accepted, it was
necessary for revolutionaries to break with it and the Revolutionary Socialists
did so albeit only at the last moment. But it
was still necessary to participate in the 30 June mass demonstrations. This was
a real revolt from below, a real upsurge of the masses on the basis of issues –
economic hardship and democracy – that socialists support. Socialists could not
sit at home with folded arms saying we don’t like the leaders, we’re having
nothing to do with it . Unfortunately
there was also a real mass mobilization of the counter revolution on the
streets in the same place, at the same time. Revolutionaries had to
take part with the aim of winning the masses to a revolutionary perspective. The
problem was that the consciousness of the masses was hugely uneven and the
military were able to exploit this to intervene, ostensibly on behalf of the
masses, in reality to establish their own dictatorship.
Our weakness was our inability to stop this
happening or to rally the masses against it. This weakness was a product of the
balance of forces – the fact that socialist ideas still had relatively little
traction and that massive illusions in the army were still prevalent, even
among many would be revolutionaries. (It must be remembered that the army had not been used publicly and in a mass
way against the 2011 revolution). If all
the so-called progressive forces, the liberals, the left and so on – the El
Baradei’s and Hamdeen Sabahi’s etc – who claimed to embody the spirit of the
Revolution had raised their voices against the military such a rallying of the
masses might have been possible. But they did not; overwhelmingly they backed
the military.
In
these circumstances our mistake was
to be too slow to see what was happening. It is in general right and essential
for revolutionaries to be inspired by the masses on the streets but in this
instance we allowed ourselves to be somewhat mesmerized and intoxicated by the
sheer numbers and thus not were clear enough about the imminent danger. We
simply assumed that the risen people would be able to sweep the generals aside
or at least prevent the consolidation of their power. We underestimated the
unevenness in their consciousness. 14 August came as a rude and terrible
awakening.
This
was a mistake but an understandable one and in the wider scheme of things
relatively minor. But it
is worth learning the lesson. It is worth remembering that there are moments
when the right and the counterrevolution can also mobilize masses on the
streets, particularly when those masses face desperate circumstances and do not
see a progressive alternative.
Sameh
Naguib of the Revolutionary Socialists has made this point in a very insightful
interview which I have listened to but do not have a transcript of. He also
explains the astute way in which Al-Sisi and the generals were able to build
mass support by playing on a raft of people’s concerns. These included the fear
of the Coptic Christians (10% of the population) that they would be persecuted
by the Morsi Government and Islamism, public concern about the breakdown of
‘security’ and ‘order’ which became a real worry in circumstances in which the
state apparatus was barely functioning ( in order to sabotage the Brotherhood).
All of which reinforces, as he says, the need of revolutionaries to take these
questions of oppression very seriously.
Preparing for the Future
In Egypt, and across the Middle
East, there are now millions of people who have participated
directly in revolution. They are currently dispersed, cowed and demoralized.
But, as we argued in the first part of this article, the time will come when that will change and
when it does those people will remember and learn from the experiences of
2011-13, just as in 1917 the workers of Petrograd remembered and learned from
the revolution of 1905. In the meantime everything in this article is written
with a view to preparing for this future in Egypt and internationally. All
revolutions have their national peculiarities but they also have a huge amount
in common, numerous features that derive not from their location but their
character as revolutions.
These
are arguments are not addressed to thin air. They are written for those
actively engaged in the difficult work of building for the next revolutionary upsurge,
the most important element of which is the building of a revolutionary party.
The revolutionary is the memory of the working class, the means by which these
collective experiences of struggle which both the counter revolution and the
reformists will try to expunge from history can be analysed and transmitted to
the next generation.
If we
examine the key arguments advanced in this article and the key turning points
in the Revolution they all point to the necessity of building the revolutionary
party. The problem of fighting for the strategy of permanent revolution against
all versions of stages theory; the problem of avoiding revolutionary
intoxication and reaching out to the masses beyond the squares; the problem of
ultraleftism based on inexperience; the problems of tactics and correctly
estimating complex and contradictory situations: all of these require a
revolutionary party and one with real roots in the working class. As Lenin put
it it:
It is, in fact, one of the
functions of a party organisation and of party leaders worthy of the name, to
acquire, through the prolonged, persistent, variegated and comprehensive
efforts of all thinking representatives of a given class, the knowledge, experience and—in
addition to knowledge and experience—the political flair necessary for the
speedy and correct solution of complex political problems.
Many
thanks are due to Anne Alexander and Wassim Wagdy for reading the draft of this
article and for their helpful comments. Needless to say any errors in the article
and its main political judgments are entirely my responsibility.