Violence and the System

Violence and the System

Written for Irish Socialist Worker, 01.09.11

Ask any establishment politician about violence and they will condemn it ‘absolutely’, ‘unequivocally’ and so on. The same is true of the editors and leader writers of all our main newspapers. Not only do they condemn violence, they condemn the perpetrators of violence and in even more ‘unequivocal’ terms. They are ‘animals’, ‘thugs’,’ criminals’, ‘monsters’ and ‘pure evil’.

The violence and the perpetrators of violence thus condemned can be a wide variety of people -rioters, looters, ‘terrorists’ (either Republican dissidents or ‘Muslim’), demonstrators, striking or picketing workers, or student protestors – but they all have one thing in common, they are people taking action in some way or other against the existing authorities, the existing power structure, the existing system

What the politicians and editors never condemn is violence by the authorities, the power structure, and the system. Indeed they never even acknowledge its existence because it is always called something else: ‘maintaining law and order’, ‘peace keeping’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘robust policing’, even ‘liberation’ or ‘defence’.

Thus the rioters in London were obviously extremely violent, the police who killed Mark Duggan may, just possibly, have been over zealous, but they were certainly not ‘violent’. Gaddafi was violent but not the bombing of Libya by Nato. Hamas should ‘renounce violence’ but Israel must ‘retain the right of self-defence’. Muslims have a tendency to terrorism but Americans have ‘the right to bear arms’.

However, the moment we move beyond these loaded categories and stereotypes and ask who actually is responsible for the bulk of violence (i.e. use of destructive force) in the world the answer is as clear as day- it is the world’s governments and states, beginning with the government of the United States.

On 11th September 2001 (9/11) The attack of 9/11 killed just under 3000. The US government responded with its ‘war on Terror’ which has so far claimed over 250,000 lives, including 6000 US troops, 100-150,000 Iraqi civilians, 26,000 Iraqi insurgents, about 60,000 Afghans) insurgents, and 20,000 in North West Pakistan. Morover the Irish government has been complicit in this by allowing two million Us troops to use Shannon.

If we broaden the time frame the disparity becomes even more striking: the death toll in the Vietnam War came to 58,000 US troops, and 1.2 million Vietnamese; add deaths in Laos and Cambodia and the total reaches between 2-4 million; the Korean War killed about 2.5 million.

Of course many other countries have conducted and are conducting deadly wars – Russia in Afghanistan ,Georgia and Chechenia, France in Algeria, , the Chinese in Tibet, the Civil War in the Congo and so on. But the US certainly stands out in the post Second World War period in terms of range of wars engaged in its troops have seen action in 29 different countries since 1990 alone) as it does in military expenditure: annual US military spending in 2010 - $696 billion, out of global spending of $1600 billion; expenditure on the ‘War on Terror’ so far – at least $1.24 trillion (Brown University estimates $4 trillion).

However, all this pales in comparison with the ‘great wars’ of the 20th century fought between the major imperial powers for the control of the world. The First World War claimed between 10 and 16 million lives, the Second over 60 million which included the 11 million murdered in the Holocaust; the 20 million or more killed on the Russian front; the bombing, by the Allies of Dresden (at least 25,000 dead), Hamburg (42,000), and Tokyo (100,000) and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (90 – 160,000) and Nagasaki (60-80,000).

Other statistics, though on a much smaller scale, nevertheless point to a reality never highlighted by politicians or the media. For example, in the UK since 1998 67 people have died in terrorist attacks (56 in the bombs of 7/7/ 2005); in the same period 333 have died in police custody without the conviction of single police officer. In the US there have been only twenty terrorist incidents since 9/11, six of which were perpetrated by Islamists (killing 27).The US police killed 406 people in 2009. The Rio de Janeiro police kill about 1,000 a year, mostly in the form of street executions.
Then there is the violence of the lives lost in industrial accidents, such as the 11,000 (3000 immediately, 8000 later) who died at Bhopal, or the thousands at Chernobyl, or the innumerable deaths on construction sites, mining accidents and the like, where safety is so often sacrificed to profit.

And there is the violence of putting people in prison. As the great socialist, Rosa Luxemburg, said:

'If one “free citizen” is taken by another against his will and confined in close and uncomfortable quarters for a while, everyone realises immediately that an act of violence has been committed. However, as soon as the process takes place in accordance with the the penal code, the whole affair immediately becomes peaceable and legal.'

Again it is the US which takes the lead in this ‘peaceable and legal’ violence. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. According to the Bureau of Justice 2,292,133 were in U.S. prisons at year-end 2009 — about 1% of adults in the U.S. population. Next came China with approximately 1.5 million from a much larger population.

But BY FAR the worst and most damage to people’s lives is done not by direct violence but by the poverty, starvation, exploitation and economic deprivation on which capitalism rests. According to the United Nations, one billion people suffer from acute poverty and malnutrition. That means they die young from easily treatable and preventable diseases and their children die in infancy and childhood in massive numbers.

In the famine in Somalia 11 million people are in need of urgent food assistance and over 600,000 children under 5 are suffering acute malnourishment, i.e. likely to die imminently. And this is only one famine out of an estimated 57 famines in the world since 1900, which include the Russian famine of 1921 (5 million dead), the Bengal famine of 1943 (4 million dead) and the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5 (1 million dead).

What needs to be stressed is that this extreme suffering is occurring in a world where there is more than enough food to go round, where people starve not because there is no food but because they cannot afford to buy it. In other words it is caused by the huge inequality which capitalism generates; inequality which both generates direct violence and can only be maintained by violence or the threat of it.
But wouldn’t getting rid of capitalism, its overthrow by revolution, just involve further violence? Unfortunately it is unlikely that the ultra-rich will give up without a fight. But the stronger and more united the mass of working people are in the revolution the less actual violence will be needed.

As was seen in Egypt earlier this year, no police force can contain a genuinely risen people. Also the rank and file of the army in any society are from the working class and can be won over to the side of the people.

History proves that mass revolutions involve relatively little violence compared to that perpetrated by counter revolutions. The uprising of 18 March that established the Paris Commune, the first workers’ revolution, killed two people (both generals). The suppression of the Commune killed 25,000 on the streets of Paris in one week. The Russian Revolution of February1917 which overthrew the Tsar suffered losses of about 1,700. The October Revolution in Petrograd was almost bloodless. The Civil War which followed, launched by Tsarist generals, claimed about 3 million. The mass murders by Hitler, Stalin and Franco were all, in different forms, counter revolutionary violence to suppress the working class.

The denunciations of violence by our rulers and the defenders of capitalism are thus deeply hypocritical. Only the working class action to abolish capitalism internationally can really free us from the cycle of poverty, war and violence endlessly generated by a system that always sacrifices people for profit.

John Molyneux
24.08.2011

The Murdoch Scandal - Their Media and Ours

THE MURDOCH SCANDAL – THEIR MEDIA AND OURS

This article was published in Irish Socialist Worker, August 2011.


There are a moments when a single event, like a flash of lightning, illuminates the sky and reveals the whole landscape below which previously remained hidden in the dark. Such is the News of the World phone hacking scandal which has engulfed Rupert Murdoch and his whole News Corporation media empire. And what a landscape it has revealed!

Across the world we live in societies dominated and run by a small minority of their population. This ruling minority is not a tiny handful, some secret conspiratorial committee, but a definite social class consisting of the very rich, the industrialists, the bankers, the financiers, the generals, the judges, the police chiefs and so on – together they make up maybe one, at most two, per cent of the population.

This class, which has a common interest in boosting profits, exploiting working people and defending capitalism, masks it domination through a division of labour. It spreads its members out through a variety of institutions which are claimed to be independent of each other.

The judges are independent. The police are independent. The politicians are independent. The state broadcasting corporation ( BBC or RTE) are independent. The civil service is independent. The editors of newspapers are independent. The Committees of Inquiry, headed by independent judges, are independent. And they are all non-political except the politicians.

Moreover they all check and balance each other so that no one individual group or faction gets too much power, and everything is fair and democratic.

What the phone hacking scandal lit up was the murky world of the interconnections that, in practice, link all these institutions together. And what a murky world it is – key establishment figures left with hardly a fig leaf to cover their shame. ‘Tyrants, hypocrites, liars!’ at Patrick Pearse described a previous generation of the British ruling class.

As the Timeline shows below , the core of the scandal is simply that journalists working for Rupert Murdoch routinely illegally tapped peoples phones. The scandal started to come out when they were caught hacking the phone of a member of the Royal Family. It exploded when it emerged they had hacked the phone of child murder victim, Milly Dowler – that was too horrible to spin or sweep under the carpet.

As the scandal unravelled, however, it became clear that they were all in it together – Britain’s top politicians, top police and top media producer. They were all politically and socially connected. Cameron had numerous private meetings with Murdoch and was a neighbour and friend, and they all protected each other, much the same as America protects its puppet dictators like Hosni Mubarak, until the last possible moment, quite regardless of any considerations of morality or decency.
We need to understand there is nothing unusual about this. It is how the system works.

In Ireland Charley Haughey resigned over a phone tapping scandal , and was corruptly linked to Ben Dunne and AIB . Bertie Aherne was up to his neck in it with Haughey, like Brian Cowan with Seanie Fitzpatrick and Michael Lowry with Denis O’Brien, who with Tony O’Reilly controls most of this country’s media.

Some commentators, like David McWilliams,have said this is ‘crony capitalism’ not ‘real’ capitalism. It’s not, it is how capitalism operates in the real world from Texas to Beijing. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were also linked to Murdoch, George Bush and Dick Cheney were linked to the oil industry.

Capitalism oozes corruption like an athlete oozes sweat, for the simple reason that it is a system driven, first and last, by profit and ruled, not just by rotten individuals, but by a class which owns and controls the means of production and, on that basis, dominates economically, politically and ideologically.

At the same time the scandal also shows that our rulers are not all powerful. They are beset by contradictions and rivalries among themselves and they fear the people. Faced with exposure and potential revolt they retreat and discard subordinates , Coulson here and Brooks there, to preserve those at the top. Faced with serious revolt or revolution, as in Egypt, they will even sacrifice those at the very top to save the system. But they can be beaten.

While every corrupt scalp taken is a step forward it is the system itself, capitalism, that has to be uprooted. And for this working people and socialists need our own media.

This is because the mainstream media is not only self-serving, dishonest and corrupt but also systematically promotes a pro- capitalist view of the world – a view which absolutely takes it for granted that production has to be organised for profit, that ‘the markets’ have to be kept happy, and that ‘entrepreneurs’ i.e. capitalists are the real wealth creators.

We need a newspaper, like Socialist Worker, which reports on and reflects the struggles of working people – their strikes, demonstrations, campaigns and uprisings, here and in other countries – in a way RTE and the Evening Herald will never do.

But the paper has to do more than just record what is happening; it has also to develop and communicate an alternative anti-capitalist, socialist world view. It has to expose the evils of capitalism but also explain how the system works. It has to fight against reactionary ideas that can divide the workers’ movement, like racism, sexism and homophobia and champion the oppressed such as travellers and refugees, who the capitalist media like to scapegoat.

It has to serve as the memory of the working class, preserving the history of our class’s past struggles such as the Paris Commune, the Dublin Lock-Out, the Russian Revolution , and the workers’ councils in Ireland during the War of Independence – a history which would otherwise be ignored and forgotten. It has to arm its readers with the political arguments to counter the propaganda of the politicians and make the case for a socialist alternative.

It also has to act as an organiser of the workers’ movement, bringing groups of workers together, building solidarity and resistance to the system on every front.Finally it has to serve as a kind of scaffolding, within which a workers’ socialist organisation, a party of the working class, is constructed and grows.
Of course other media – Facebook, Twitter , You Tube, film etc – all can and should be used for these purposes too, but the paper remains key because of the way selling it enables socialists to interact with the workers movement and other working people on a face-to-face basis.


TIMELINE OF THE SCANDAL

2000 – News of the World (NoW) editor, Rebekah Brooks , launches campaigns against paedophiles and for public access to the Sex Offenders Register (known as Sarah’s Law after murdered 8 year old, Sarah Payne).

2002 – Schoolgirl Milly Dowler murdered.

2003 - Brooks moves to The Sun . Andy Coulson becomes editor of NoW. Brooks admits to a parliamentary committee that she paid the police for information. News International says this is ‘not company practice’.

2005 –NoW runs story about Prince William’s injured knee, based on intercepted phone messages.Royal officials complain and the police investigate.

2006-7 - NoW Royal Editor, Clive Goodman and private investigator , Glen Mulcaire are arrested for hacking royal phones and, after guilty pleas, are jailed for four and six months respectively. Andy Coulson resigns as editor but says he knew nothing.

May 2007 - Coulson becomes Conservative Party Director of Communications under David Cameron.

2008 - News International pais Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association £700,000 to settle phone hacking claim,

2009 - Brooks becames CEO of News International . It emerges that NoW reporters, with knowledge of senior staff, hacked the phones of celebrities and politicians while Coulson was editor from 2003 to 2007 and that the company had paid out more than £1 million to settle phone hacking cases. Scotland Yard announced it would NOT be carrying out a new investigation into the allegations.
NoW editor Colin Myler, Coulson (again) and Les Hinton (Chair of Dow Jones and Murdoch’s right hand man) all deny evidence of phone hacking beyond the one case that had come to court. The Press Complaints Commission accepts this.

2010 - In January House of Commons Media Committee says it was inconceivable that the NoW management didn’t know about phone hacking, but in May Coulson becomes Director of Communications for new Con-Dem government .
Accusations of hacking pile up, from actress Sienna Miller (who wins a settlement of £100,000), MP George Galloway, Union leader Bob Crow, former Deputy PM John Prescott, MP Chris Bryant, footballer Ryan Giggs and journalist Brendan Montague.

December 2010 - Crown Prosecution Service says there will be no more prosecutions and Cameron continues to defend Coulson despite calls for his resignation by Prescott and others

Basic Ideas of Marxism

BASIC IDEAS OF MARXISM

I tried to summarise the core ideas of Marxism as briefly and simply as possible – this is what I came up with:

1. CAPITALISM IS ANTI-HUMAN: it systematically destroys and distorts human life; the only future it offers humanity is economic crisis, war and global warming i.e. barbarism; it has to be got rid of for the human race to survive and develop.
2. CAPITALISM IS DRIVEN BY PROFIT NOT HUMAN NEED: capitalists are driven to make profit by competition; profit is made by exploiting labour
3. EXPLOITATION DIVIDES SOCIETY INTO CLASSES- EXPLOITERS AND EXPLOITED: Slave owners and slaves, lords and peasants, capitalists and workers; historically these are the main forms of exploitation and class division – history is the history of class struggle
4. TODAY CAPITALISTS (BOURGEOISIE) AND WORKERS (PROLETARIAT) ARE THE MAIN CLASSES IN SOCIETY: capitalists are those who own control business, finance etc and employ labour; workers are those who live by selling their labour power.
5. THE WORKING CLASS IS THE REVOLUTIONARY CLASS: the working class is the class that has the power to overthrow capitalism; the working class has to do this itself.
6. THE WORKING CLASS IS THE SOCIALIST CLASS: the working class struggle is a collective struggle, it can only free itself by taking collective control of the state and the means of production and abolishing class divisions.
7. THE WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE IS INTERNATIONAL: capitalism is an international system and the struggle against is international; socialism cannot be built in one country, workers of all countries need to unite.
8. THE TASK OF SOCIALISTS IS TO ASSIST AND DEVELOP THE WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE: our job ii to relate to workers’ struggles and in the process raise their confidence, political consciousness and unity, combating everything that divides them (racism, sexism, nationalism etc) so as to lead the working class to take political power.

Lucian Freud - Passing of a Master

Lucian Freud – passing of a master

Lucian Freud, who died last week at the age of 88, was one of the most famous artists in the world in the second half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. He was hugely successful, which in terms of the contemporary art world means hugely successful with the bourgeoisie. In 2008 one of his paintings, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a nude portrait, was bought by Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich, for £17 million ($33.6 million), the largest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist.

Freud was not in any serious way left wing so why should he be of interest to socialists? Because rich or not, bourgeois or not, he was undoubtedly a major artist. Art critic, Robert Hughes, called him the world’s greatest ‘realist’ artist. The term ‘realist’ when used in relation to visual art, especially painting , is very problematic but in Freud’s case it meant three things.

First, that he painted recognisable pictures of people and things. You could immediately see that it was a painting of a woman with a dog, a man with a large pot plant, of Kate Moss etc.

Second he possessed, from quite an early age, a brilliant technique i.e. an absolute mastery of the application of paint to canvass to achieve certain desired effects, superior to that of his associate and main rival , Francis Bacon (in my opinion an even greater artist overall).

Third, and most importantly, his art was characterised by a relentless visual honesty. His technical mastery was the precondition of his achievement but the honesty of his vision was what made him a great artist. As he got older he was able to take his technique more and more for granted and as happens with many artists e.g. Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Jack Yeats, his style became freer and more ‘painterly’, but the honesty remained.

It is not easy to explain what I mean by ‘honesty’ here. I don’t just mean that he painted his subjects accurately ‘warts and all’ in the visual sense – though he certainly did that. I mean that his paintings are a visually and psychologically honest record of an encounter (perhaps over months of sittings) with another person.

Attaining this degree of honesty in art is not just a moral quality, not just a matter of not lying, it is a huge artistic achievement. Moreover, Freud maintains it whether he is painting a man or woman, naked or clothed, himself or his lover, a bohemian like Harry Diamond or Leigh Bowery, a fat person or a skinny person, an ‘ordinary’ person like Sue Tilley (the benefits supervisor) or a celebrity like Kate Moss. His portrait of the Queen, hated by the Royal Family, was, for precisely this reason, devastating.

In his opinions and lifestyle Freud was not particularly egalitarian but in his painting he was. That is why socialists should note his parting and value his art.

John Molyneux

On Anti-Semitism and Anti- Zionism

On Anti- Semitism and Anti –Zionism

Letter published in the Irish Independent, 5 July 2011, written in response to a column by Ruth Dudley Edwards claiming that the people supporting the Irish Ship to Gaza (subsequently sabotaged by the Israelis) were motivated, whether they knew it or not, by anti-semitism.

I found it very interesting to read Ruth Dudley Edwards's observations (Sunday Independent, June 26) on anti-Semitism and her grandmother's dismissal of the Holocaust as British propaganda.

My own experience of learning about anti-Semitism was rather different. My mother, who was British, joined the Women's Air Force to fight Hitler and I was brought up knowing of the evils of Nazi Germany. In my teens two major cultural influences were Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, both Jews.

In 1966, aged 18, I became involved with, and then married, a Jewish woman from Chicago. Then in 1968 I came under the influence of two other major Jewish thinkers, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, and went on to write books about both of them.
From the mid-Seventies until my move to Ireland in 2010 I was actively involved in the anti-fascist struggle in Britain, against the National Front, the BNP, and the Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

However, according to Ruth Dudley Edwards, I must be an unconscious anti-Semite because I support the Irish Ship to Gaza.

As for other oppression in the Middle East, of which there is a great deal, there have been many recent protests in Dublin by members of the Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian and Bahraini communities, as part of the Arab Spring. I have been on most of these, but didn't notice Ruth Dudley Edwards -- perhaps I missed her.

Finally, she says the supermarkets are full in Gaza. I will quote from an unfriendly source, The CIA World Factbook (very easily checked online).Gaza, it says, has "extremely high unemployment, and high poverty rates. Shortages of goods are met through large-scale humanitarian assistance." Unemployment is at 40 per cent, and 70 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. But, of course, that may just be anti-Semitic propaganda.

Dr John Molyneux,
Dublin 12

The Rising Tide of Revolution

The Rising Tide of Revolution

There is now a rising tide of struggle internationally. This kind of generalisation is not easy to make because the struggle is always at different levels and taking different forms in different countries. At any one point in time there can be a general strike in Spain or Greece but, at least on the surface, nothing much happening in Germany or France, or vice versa. Our side, the working class and the people, can be winning victories in Bolivia or India but suffering setbacks in Argentina or Indonesia and so on.

Nevertheless it is clear that in the last year the overall trajectory has been massively upwards. In 2010 the leading role was played by Greece where there were eight general strikes plus many major demonstrations and street battles. But there were also general strikes in Spain, and in Portugal (where the government was also brought down) and a huge struggle over pensions in France involving mass strikes and huge street mobilisations of up to 3.5 million people. In Iceland the government was forced into a referendum over their IMF bail-out and lost it, and then into a second referendum over ‘improved’ terms and lost that too. And in Britain in December there was the explosive student revolt over fees.

Then, starting on 17 December in Tunisia, came the ‘Arab Spring’ which lifted the struggle to a whole new level. The Tunisian Revolution which succeeded in bringing down a dictator, Zine Ben Ali, of twenty three years standing, in less than a month led directly to the 25 January Revolution in Egypt which on 11 February ended the rule of Hosni Mubarak, an even more long- established and powerful dictator.

What made the Egyptian Revolution an event of such importance for the region and the world was: a) the sheer scale of the mass mobilisation- up to 15 million people on the streets; b)the size of the Egyptian working class, the biggest in the Middle East, and its decisive role in getting rid of Mubarak; c) the massive importance of Egypt to US imperialism and its policy in the Middle East, especially with regard to Israel/Palestine. As a result the Egyptian Revolution served as a beacon internationally.

It led immediately to uprisings in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. In Libya Gaddafi was able to hold on to Tripoli and crush the revolt there, even though he lost Benghazi and the East. This enabled the imperialist powers – France, UK and US – to intervene in such a way as to gain control of the revolt in Libya, establish a western foothold in the region and try to stem the revolutionary tide. At the same time the Imperialists gave the nod to the Saudis to suppress the Revolution in Bahrain which had defeated the local police, like in Egypt.

Despite this, and despite vicious repression, the Arab struggle continues, thanks to the awesome courage and resilience of the people, in both Syria and Yemen. But the inspiration radiating out of Tahrir Square was by no means limited to the Arab world. Even as it was happening the Egyptian Revolution connected to the workers of Wisconsin and it had dictators worried as far afield as Mugabe in Zimbabwe , where socialist were arrested just for watching a film about Egypt, and Kim jong-il in North Korea, where the first ever public protests were recorded.

There have also been revolts of some size in the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean and in Burkino Faso in Sub - Saharan Africa, in Prague and in Chile. Meanwhile in Britain there was the biggest trade union demonstration in our history, on March 26 – accompanied by sit-ins in Fortnum & Mason and the Ritz, and in Ireland there was a riot at the ballot box, with the devastation of the ruling Fianna Fail party and the election of five hard left TDs.

Then came the 15 May in Spain, and the occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid. This spread with enormous speed to other cities, Barcelona, Seville etc and to Spanish communities in other countries. There were solidarity protests in Dublin, London, Bristol, Brussels, Paris and no doubt elsewhere that I don’t know. Greece has also come back into the equation with 25,000 in Athens and maybe 5,000 in Thessaloniki and there is a prospect of a mass strike on 30 June in Britain. As I write there is news of 50-100,000 on the streets of Milan greeting the defeat of Berlusconi in that city and the revolution continues in Egypt with hundreds of thousands out on 27 May, including perhaps 500,000 in Alexandria(!!), calling for a ‘second revolution’ – shades of Petrograd in June 1917.

In short, people are generalising. And it’s not difficult to generalise because everywhere working people are having to deal with attacks on their living standards to make them pay for the international crisis of capitalism that broke out in the US in autumn 2008 and which is far from having run its course.

It is useful to put this in historical perspective. The revolutionary struggle is always international and it goes in waves. Since the emergence of the modern working class there have been three major international waves. The first was 1848. It was the time of the great Chartist movement in Britain and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. The uprisings began in Palermo in Sicily and ricocheted round Europe through France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and even reached Brazil in Latin America. But tens of thousands were killed, everywhere the reaction triumphed, especially with the coming to power of Louis Bonaparte in France, and the movement receded when capitalism embarked on massive economic expansion. At this point the working class was too small and capitalism too strong for there to be a real chance of socialist victory.

The next and greatest wave began before the 1st World War with the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the ‘great unrest’ in Britain, the IWW in America the Dublin Lock-Out in 1913 and the Easter Rising in 1916 and reached its high point with the Russian Revolution of 1917. This was followed by six years in which the fate of capitalism as a system hung in the balance. Revolutions or revolutionary situations broke out in Finland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, accompanied by near revolutionary situations in Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and elsewhere.

Tragically the Russian Revolution failed to spread. The worst defeats were in Italy where Mussolini’s Fascists destroyed the powerful workers movement, and in Germany where a great opportunity for workers revolution was allowed to go begging in 1923. Humanity paid the price with Hitler and Stalin.

The third wave which Chris Harman called ‘the fire last time’ began in the late sixties There was a slow build up which exploded in 1968 when the black struggle in the States, the student revolt, the escalation of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, all came together with the struggle of the working class. Most spectacular was May’68 in France with its strike of 10 million workers, but there were also riots across America, the Prague Spring, the Civil Rights movement in Ireland, and smaller battles too numerous to mention. This in turn led to major workers struggles in Britain, including two successful Miners’ strikes which brought down the government, the hot autumn in 1969 in Italy, Popular Unity in Chile, the overthrow of the Greek junta and the Portuguese Revolution in 1974.

The upturn ran out of steam in the mid-seventies after the terrible defeat in Chile in 1973, the neutralising of the Portuguese Revolution in 1975, and the deals struck by the leaders of the labour movement with governments in various countries- the Social Contract in Britain, the Historic Compromise in Italy, the Pact of Moncloa in Spain etc. – which weakened the workers’ movement and paved the way for Thatcherism, neo-liberalism and the defeats of the eighties.

History never repeats exactly but the present situation is closer to the third wave than to the first two. It is beyond 1848 in that the working class is far stronger internationally and there is no prospect of capitalist expansion like in the 1850s. It has not reached the level of 1917 and after - the working class has not yet taken power anywhere. But there is a huge momentum and we are just at the beginning.
Also the economic situation is much more severe. The explosion of 1968 came on back of the first faltering of the long post war boom and ran aground as the system moved into recession in the mid- seventies. This time the movement is rising in response to the economic crisis which shows every sign of continuing for many years.

Moreover there is a new, extremely serious factor in the situation – climate change. The threat of climate change is widely recognised in the abstract but it tends to be seen as a disaster that may or will strike in the future and as a separate issue. In reality climate change is already happening, already having a serious impact in many parts of the world, for example the severe tornados in the USA, and has the effect of sharpening social conflicts and the class struggle. Along with inflation resulting from the economic crisis, climate change is a factor in the rise in basic food prices which in turn has been a major driver in the Arab revolts.

What are the implications of this? Certainly not that our side will advance smoothly from victory to victory. There is a powerful enemy involved here – the international ruling class – and it will fight back, and it will win some battles. But defeat in one place (say Libya) will not prevent somewhere else, say Greece, picking up the baton. So we should view coming events with a deep optimism and excitement.

We should expect the unexpected. Not only will there be new eruptions of struggle, there will be new forms of struggle emerging, like occupying public squares. Remember mass strikes, workers’ councils. flying pickets, and student sit-ins were all ‘new’ in their day. Very often, precisely because of their newness and spontaneity, these struggles will be characterised by anti-political, anti-party moods. People entering into struggle for the first time, enthused by the justness of their cause, frequently think that all that is required is for everyone to get together and keep ‘politics out of it’.

Socialists need to be on the alert and ready to respond, quickly and positively, to these developments, without losing sight of basic principles and strategic objectives. In the end it will be the struggle of the mass of the working class, especially the struggle at the point of production, which will be crucial. ‘Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be broken,’ as the great Rosa Luxemburg put it.

We also need a great sense of urgency. At the moment in Britain the racist and fascist right has suffered serious setbacks, due to anti-fascist campaigning and the rise of the anti-cuts movement, but this is by no means the case everywhere and even if the left currently has the initiative, if we squander our opportunities the fascists will be there to take advantage of the unresolved crisis.

History shows that as well as mass struggle ultimate victory depends on the working class developing strong political organisation. It is not an accident that in all the past struggles listed above the only one where the working class took power, albeit only for a few years, was the Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party.

At present the forces of revolutionary socialism are small, nationally and internationally, so it is right that socialists in many countries are involved in political initiatives designed to draw more workers into political activity – initiatives like the Democratic Workers Party in Egypt, the Left Block in Portugal, Die Linke in Germany and the United Left Alliance in Ireland. But this does not change the need, in this process, to build fully revolutionary parties. This is not easy, and some activists will balk at it, but it has to be done.
Build the struggle! Build the party!


John Molyneux
1 June 2011

Reflections on the Egyptian Revolution

Reflections on the Egyptian Revolution

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W.B. Yeats, Easter 1916

‘Esha'ab, esha'ab! (the people, the people!) ... the most beautiful sight I have seen in my life’
Tweet from Hossam el- Hamalawy describing the scene in Tahrir Square

This article is what it says, reflections, not a systematic account or analysis of the Revolution which is unfinished and ongoing and for which I do not have the resources. It should be read in conjunction with Rabab El-Mahdi &Philip Marfleet, Egypt: The Moment of Change, London 2009} and International Socialism Journal 130, which contains important articles by Alex Callinicos, Philip Marfleet and other material and the excellent article by Mustafa Omar ‘The Spring of the Egyptian Revolution’ http://socialistworker.org/2011/03/30/spring-of-the-revolution.

The Miraculous Revolution

What occurred in Egypt between the 25 January, when the Revolution began, and the 11 February, when Mubarak fell, 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.
This major miracle involved numerous minor miracles on the way: the miracle of 25 January, the initial ‘day of rage’ called by the 6th April Movement when the turnout on the streets vastly outnumbered all expectations, as did the determination of the demonstrators to stay on the streets, their willingness to fight and if need be die, which ended up giving its name to the whole revolutionary process; the miracle of The Battle of 6 October Bridge on 28 January, the’Friday of Anger’, when a large mass of protesters from Giza, west of the Nile, were marching to join the occupation of Tahrir Sq in downtown Cairo and were met by a police road block at the bridge. Anyone who has been in that situation [I remember something like that at Welling when the Anti Nazi League attempted to march on the headquarters of the BNP in 1994] knows that when armoured cops with vans etc block a limited space it is close to impossible to break through. But the crowd did breakthrough. They simply marched into the police lines, into truncheons, tear gas and water cannon, were beaten back and marched again, and were beaten back again and marched again and again until eventually the cops fled and the people took the bridge [for footage on Youtube see http://wn.com/BREAKING_NEWS_Civilians_fightback_Cairo_Egyptian_Army_on_6th_of_October_Bridge ]. Even the bourgeois commentator on Sky News felt moved to note the ‘extraordinary courage’ of the demonstrators. Then the miracle of the Battle of the Camel on 3 February. After the victory of forcing the withdrawal of the police from the streets on 29 January, there was a slight lull in the struggle, the protesters rested on their laurels for a moment, perhaps went home for a rest, and the numbers in Tahrir Square dwindled. At this point the regime counterattacked. So –called ‘pro-Mubarak supporters’ assembled and marched on Tahrir with the clear aim of driving the revolutionaries out of the Square and crushing the Revolution. Initially the western media reaction was to take these ‘Mubarak supporters’ at face-value and see this as evidence of a basic division in ‘the people’. I also heard commentators say that this ‘changed the situation completely’ and that the anti- democracy protesters were ‘dismayed and demoralised’ and ‘didn’t know what to do’. In fact the revolutionaries knew exactly what to do: in the words of Phil Marfleet ‘they fought like demons’, against clubs, rocks, machetes, Molotov cocktails, men on horseback with whips and indeed the legendary camel, to defend the Square until such time as word could get out to the rest of Cairo and the massive anti- Mubarak majority could assert itself. By the end of the day I heard rather astonished and bemused media commentators saying ‘It has to be said the Mubarak supporters are being routed’.
Another miracle was the self-organisation of the masses in Tahrir Square (which generated Hossam el- Hamalawy’s observation at the head of this article): the improvised medical care; the communal food supplies; the alternating relays of fighters going to the front line while others took a break in the rear; the arrangements for charging mobile phones; the wonderful scene of the Copts saying mass for the revolution’s martyrs protected by a ring of Muslims (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoqwlmGww9Y&feature=related;) and then of Muslims praying protected by Copts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqXfZTgOCOE&feature=related;) the magnificent participation of women in the revolution ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-TogXsrvI4 )and so on

Moreover, these miracles in Cairo, most of which were recorded by the Western media, were being duplicated in cities the length and breadth of Egypt, especially Alexandria and Suez where the level of struggle and per capita involvement was if anything even higher than in the capital. This point is well made by Mustafa Omar who writes
But in Alexandria, the protesters didn't adopt a Tahrir Square strategy. They didn't wait for the police to attack. The protesters came out every single day in the tens and hundreds of thousands from every neighborhood and street to confront the police--they fought back against police bullets and tear gas over and over again, until they defeated the police. http://socialistworker.org/2011/03/30/spring-of-the-revolution
And it was in Suez that there were probably the highest proportion of martyrs and the first police station was burned down.
All this talk of miracles may seem a bit odd coming from a Marxist materialist but I am reminded that Lenin felt the same way.
Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress.


The Predicted Revolution

The Marxist explanation of these ‘miracles’ was provided by Tony Cliff when he was analysing the French May Events of 1968. ‘The vast creative potential of unalienated men was glimpsed once again, as it had been at other revolutionary moments of history’. [Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall, France; The Struggle Goes On, Socialist Review Publishing, 1968]. And of course we must remember - with justified pride I think- that these amazing events were, in a general sense, predicted. In 2009 Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet published a collection of essays entitled Egypt: The Moment of Change. Rabab is an Egyptian academic and activist prominent in the Revolution. Philip Marfleet is the member of the British SWP who has had closest involvement with Egypt over the last 25 years.(It would be very interesting to compare the fate of the analysis in this book with that of the bulk of the standard academic texts on Egypt over recent years, most of which are now dramatically out of date). In 2008 I wrote the introduction to a book of photographs of Egyptian working people, The Liberty of Appearing by Yasser Alwan. It ended with these words
Concentrated in great cities like Sao Paolo, Seoul, Bombay, Canton, Mexico City and many others, this international working class possesses awesome potential power. Cairo is one of the greatest of these cities and the Egyptian working class is a key contingent in this international army.
Yasser Alwan’s photographs do not give us the demos, strikes and uprisings, but they give us the people in all their human contradictions. It is highly appropriate that this exhibition should appear at a time when these people may be about to take ‘the liberty of appearing’ on the centre of the world stage. There is a chance, only a chance but a real chance nonetheless, that the young brick and shingle maker who shoulders a bucket the size of his torso and whose face is obscured by his own arm and the boy with folded arms who is on the front cover of this book will grow up to make history. (Yasser Alwan, The Liberty of Appearing, Peacock Imprint, London 2008 p.27)
But the truth is that neither Rabab nor Phil nor I possessed any special prophetic powers. Rather we were articulating an analysis of the impending Egyptian Revolution that was common ground in the International Socialist Tendency, and that had been outlined and developed in numerous meetings in the annual Marxism Festival in London and the Socialist Days conferences in Cairo. Moreover the fact that it was common ground in our Tendency was due first and foremost to the work of that tendency’s founder, Tony Cliff. Cliff (original name Ygael Gluckstein) was a Palestinian Jew who became an Anti- Zionist and Trotskyist in the mid-1930s. He came to the conclusion that the Palestinians, despite the heroism of their long struggle, lacked the numerical, economic or political strength to defeat Zionism or liberate themselves, but instead of looking, as did the PLO, to the Arab rulers for support [ Cliff was convinced those rulers would always betray the Palestinians]he looked to the Arab working classes. He wrote
The Palestinians have not the strength to liberate themselves. They do not even have the strength to achieve any serious reforms. They are not like blacks in South Africa, who have achieved very important reforms.... The key to the fate of the Palestinians and everyone else in the Middle East is in the hands of the Arab working class whose main centres of power are in Egypt, and less so in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other countries. (Tony Cliff,The Jews, Israel and the Holocaust, Socialist Review, May 1998, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1998/05/israel.htm)
Hence Cliff adopted the slogan, also used in Egypt, ‘The road to Jerusalem lies through Cairo’. Indeed it is astonishing now to read one of Cliff’s earliest works The Middle East at the Crossroads, written in 1945, when he was twenty eight, and to find not only that he clearly identified the crucial importance of middle Eastern oil for imperialism and likewise Imperialism’s use of Zionism as a bulwark against the Arab national movement, but also discusses not just the Arab working class in general but specifically wages and conditions at the Mahalla el Kubra textile factory, which played such a key role over the last few years in the run up to the Revolution and in the Revolution itself.
...open and hidden unemployment is very widespread and the conditions of the town workers are very bad. This can well be exemplified by describing the conditions of work in one big industry. Let us take the spinning and weaving works of Mahalla el Kubra, which employs 26,000 workers and 3,000 clerks, inspectors and managers. Beginners receive 1/6 a day, experienced workers 2/7, skilled workers 10 pounds a month. The workers have one day of rest a fortnight and work a ten-hour day. There is no social service and the doctor is there only to give permission for sick leave. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1945/12/mideast.htm)

The Classic Revolution

Paradoxically one of the most surprising features of the Egyptian Revolution has been the very familiarity of many of its episodes and scenarios – at least familiarity to those who have studied the history of revolution and read the classic literature on the subject (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci etc).
The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, and history is made by specialists in that line of business – kings, ministers, bureaucrats... But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. (Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, London 1997, p.17)
These lines from Trotsky stand as exact description of what occurred in Egypt on 25 January and the days that followed.
‘For revolution [Lenin wrote], ‘it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers, or at least of the...politically active workers, should be willing to sacrifice their lives for it’. As we now know about eight hundred people were martyred in the struggle against with Mubarak’s cops and paid thug ’supporters’ but it was precisely this readiness to die that made victory in the battle of the streets possible.
‘Secondly’[ says Lenin], ‘ the ruling class should be passing through a governmental crisis that draws even the most backward masses into politics – a symptom of every real revolution is a rapid, hundred-fold increase in the number of members of the toiling and oppressed masses – hitherto apathetic – who are capable of waging the political struggle.’ (V.Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Peking 1965, p.86)


Again what an apt description of the gigantic popular mobilisations in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and so on which continually reinforced the anti- Mubarak struggle and secured its triumph. On my recent post-Mubarak visit to Egypt it was possible to have political street conversations everywhere with taxi drivers, stall holders, waiters etc and faces invariably lit up at the greeting ‘Mabrouk en thawra’ [‘Contratulations on the Revolution’].
Our Egyptian-American comrade Mustafa Omar was present in the revolution and has produced an excellent account of it. He notes:
I listened online to an amazing tape of a radio communication between the police headquarters in Alexandria and commanders in the field, trying to deal with the flood of angry protesters. In the tape, police officers are begging headquarters for reinforcements to deal with what they described as massive and dangerous crowds of 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000 people, closing in on them everywhere in the city.
But the headquarters was helpless because all of the officers in the field--literally all of them--were asking for reinforcements. The headquarters advised officers and units to retreat to the precincts, and the officers responded: "Sir, protesters are burning the precincts."
The tape ends dramatically with the commander at headquarters asking a subordinate for an explanation for the police defeats. The officer simply told him: "Sir, it is over. The people are in the saddle." http://socialistworker.org/2011/03/30/spring-of-the-revolution
Compare this with the following passage from Trotsky describing an episode in the February Revolution in !917.
General Ivanov telegraphed to the other “dictator,” Khabalov, in Petrograd ten questions, to which he received succinct answers: We will quote them in full, for they deserve it:
Ivanov’s questions: Khabalov’s replies: 1. How many troops are in in the order and how many are misbehaving? 1. I have at my disposal in the Admiralty building four corn companies of the Guard, five squadrons of cavalry and Cossacks, and two batteries the rest of the troops havegone over to the revolutionists,or by agreement with them are remaining neutral. Soldiers are wandering through the towns singly or in bands disarming officers. 2. Which railroad stations are guarded? 2. All the stations are in the hands of the revolutionists and strictly guarded by them. 3. In what parts of the city is order preserved? 3. The whole city is in the hands of the revolutionists. The telephone is not working, there is no communication between different parts of the city. 4. What authorities are governing the different parts of the city? 4. I cannot answer this question? 5. Are all the ministries functioning properly? 5. The ministers have been arrested by the revolutionists. 6. What police forces are at your disposal at the present moment? 6. None whatever . 7. What technical and supply institutions of the War Department are now in your control? 7. I have none. 8. What quantity of provisions at is at your disposal? 8. There are no provisions my disposal. In the city on February 5 there were 5,600,000 pounds of flour in store. 9. Have many weapons, artillery and military stores fallen . into the hands of the mutineers? 9. All the artillery establishments are in the hands of the revolutionists. 10. What military forces and the staffs are in your control? 10. The chief of the Staff of District is in my personal control. With the other district administrations I have no connections. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch06.htm

Then there is the question of the apparent spontaneity of the revolution, its ‘leaderlessness’, which pleases some bourgeois commentators and will no doubt be seized on by autonomists and anarchists (in ignorant comparisons with the Bolshevik led October Revolution – ignorant because the comparison should be with February 1917 not October). Precisely this point was dealt with by Gramsci
The term "spontaneity" can be variously defined, for the phenomenon to which it refers is many sided. Meanwhile it must be stressed that "pure" spontaneity does not exist in history: it would come to the same thing as "pure" mechanicity. In the "most spontaneous" movement it is simply the case that the elements of "conscious leadership" cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the "history of the subaltern classes"... Hence in such movements there exist multiple elements of ‘conscious leadership’ but no one of them is predominant. (A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, pp196-97)



And by Trotsky, who devoted a whole chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution to this question in relation to the February Revolution, and concluded;
The mystic doctrine of spontaneousness explains nothing. In order correctly to appraise the situation and determine the moment for a blow at the enemy, it was necessary that the masses or their guiding layers should make their examination of historical events and have their criteria for estimating them. In other words, it was necessary that there should be not masses in the abstract, but masses of Petrograd workers and Russian workers in general, who had passed through the revolution of 1905, through the Moscow insurrection of December 1905, shattered against the Semenovsky regiment of the Guard. It was necessary that throughout this mass should be scattered workers who had thought over the experience of 1905, criticised the constitutional illusions of the liberals and Mensheviks, assimilated the perspectives of the revolution....
To the question, Who led the February revolution? we can then answer definitely enough: Conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin. But we must here immediately add: This leadership proved sufficient to guarantee the victory of the insurrection, but it was not adequate to transfer immediately into the hands of the proletarian vanguard the leadership of the revolution. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch08.htm
And by Tony Cliff in his study of Rosa Luxemburg
Revolutions do indeed start as spontaneous acts without the leadership of a party. The French Revolution started with the storming of the Bastille. Nobody organised this. Was there a party at the head of the people in rebellion? No... The same was true of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and February 1917. The 1905 Revolution started through a bloody clash between the Tsar’s army and police on the one hand, and the mass of workers, men, women and children, on the other... Twelve years later, in February 1917, the masses, this time more experienced, and among whom there were a greater number of socialists than in the previous revolution, again rose spontaneously. No historian has been able to point a finger at the organiser of the February Revolution, for it was simply not organised.
However, after being triggered off by a spontaneous uprising, revolutions move forward in a different manner. In France the transition from the semi-republican government of the Gironde to the revolutionary one, which completely annihilated feudal property relations, was not carried out by unorganised masses without any party leadership, but under the decisive leadership of the Jacobin party. ...Similarly the October Revolution was not a spontaneous act but was organised in practically all its important particulars, including the date, by the Bolsheviks... And such a party was essential to raise the revolution from its initial stages to its final victory. http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1959/rosalux/5-partyclass.htm
And how well all these comments fit the reality of what Philip Marfleet calls ‘ Act One of the Egyptian Revolution’ (http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=721&issue=130) with the role of the 6th April youth movement in calling 25 January, the role of the Revolutionary Socialists in organising feeder marches to Tahrir from the working class districts of Imbaba and Shubra, the role of the Muslim Brotherhood youth in defending the Square , and even the role of the Ultras (football hooligans) in fighting the police i.e. elements of conscious direction within an overall spontaneity at the beginning of the revolutionary process.
Then there was the wave of economic strikes that broke out in workplaces up and down the country just before and just after the fall of Mubarak, which immediately evoked Luxemburg’s analysis of 105 years ago in The Mass Strike:
But the movement on the whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, nor even the reverse. Every great political mass action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes...Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position and their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval. http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/ch04.htm
Or the apparent paradox of such an immense and epic struggle producing in its triumph such seemingly limited results in terms of the new regime – from Mubarak to his long time supporter,Tantawi and the Supreme Army Council, with its curfews and laws banning strikes and marches – a paradox which has led more than one leftist I have met to discount the whole idea of an Egyptian Revolution. Once again Trotsky’s History has a whole chapter (‘The Paradox of the February Revolution’) on the same phenomenon in the Russian Revolution:
The insurrection triumphed. But to whom did it hand over the power snatched from the monarchy? We come here to the central problem of the February revolution: Why and how did the power turn up in the hands of the liberal bourgeoisie?
...A minority of the revolutionary class actually participates in the insurrection, but the strength of that minority lies in the support, or at least sympathy, of the majority. The active and militant minority inevitably puts forward under fire from the enemy its more revolutionary and self-sacrificing element. It is thus natural that in the February fights the worker-Bolshevik occupied the leading place. But the situation changes the moment the victory is won and its political fortification begins. The elections to the organs and institutions of the victorious revolution attract and challenge infinitely broader masses than those who battled with arms in their hands. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch09.htm
In Egypt we can say that the very scale of the mobilisation that swept Mubarak away meant that it involved large masses of the formerly ‘non-political’ who hated the regime but were a long way from fully understanding it. For thirty years this regime had presented itself, on every street corner, as virtually an extension of the personality of its leader. Many of the masses, though they deeply rejected this ‘personality’, nonetheless took it at face-value and attributed all the evils they suffered to the rule of this one individual. When Mubarak fell, some – not all, of course – of these masses joined with the sympathetic but passive majority (fifteen million is vast but still a minority of eighty million) in temporary acceptance of the ‘new’ military government, or at least the notion of giving it ‘a chance’. Interestingly Marx makes a similar point about mass working class consciousness in relation to another February Revolution, that of France in 1848.
Therefore, in the minds of the proletarians, who confused the finance aristocracy with the bourgeoisie in general; in the imagination of the good old republicans who denied the very existence of classes or, at most, admitted them as a result of the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the factions of the bourgeoisie which up to now had been excluded from power, the rule of the bourgeoisie was abolished with the introduction of the republic. At that time all the royalists were transformed into republicans and all the millionaires of Paris into workers. The phrase which corresponded to this imaginary abolition of class relations was fraternité, universal fraternization and brotherhood. This pleasant abstraction from class antagonisms, this sentimental reconciliation of contradictory class interests, this visionary elevation above the class struggle, this fraternite, was the real catchword of the February Revolution. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm

Naturally none of this is intended to suggest that the Egyptian Revolution is somehow a mere copy or repetition of the Russian Revolution or other past revolutions, or that it does not contain radically new and specific elements and features. Least of all would I want to suggest that it does not require sui generis analysis (which this article does not pretend to and can hardly be done from Dublin) after all the essence of Marxism is always ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ (Lenin). What these quotations from the classical Marxists do demonstrate, however, is that there are deep continuities in the history of working class struggle and revolution and that the Egyptian Revolution stands firmly in that tradition.
Here it is perhaps necessary to reassert the working class character of the mobilisations that constituted the Revolution. The bourgeois media, of course, go out of their way to deny this, partly because their class prejudices incline them to deny the revolutionary capacities of the working class and partly because workers’ revolt is what they most fear. Consequently they leap at the chance to talk about a ‘middle class revolution’ or a ‘facebook revolution’ or a ‘youth revolution’. They said the same thing about 1968 (for a comprehensive refutation see Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time:1968 and After) and even the British Poll Tax Revolt of 1989-90. So let us be clear: even though it is true that people from all classes (except the core of the ruling class) took part, including many middle class youth, the numbers and militancy involved could not possibly have been achieved without the active participation of millions of workers.
It is necessary to remember that white collar workers who live by the sale of their labour power – call centre workers, office workers (eg the Tax Collectors), hospital workers, teachers etc. - are workers too, not just manual workers, and that having had some education does not at all prevent you being working class. Also many young workers will have participated in the demonstrations as individuals or informal groups, rather than as identifiable trade union or workplace contingents (exactly the same happened in Paris in ’68 – I recall sitting in an occupied hall in the Sorbonne with about twenty ‘students’ and being amazed to discover that none of them were actually students). In such circumstances these workers will tend to eclipsed by more middle class elements, like Wael Gonheim and Gigi Ibrahim, who will be seized on and promoted as spokespersons by the media, as they seized on Tariq Ali and Danny Cohn-Bendit in 1968. We also need to stress once again that it was the spread of indubitably working class strike action in 8-11 February that finally compelled Mubarak’s departure.
Regarding the role of Facebook/Twitter/blogging there is an article Social media and social movements by Jonny Jones in ISJ 130. I would simply add that the internet and its derivatives constitute an important development in the means of communication (an aspect of the forces of production) which are inevitably dominated by the bourgeoisie but which revolutionaries, and the workers movement generally, should obviously make use of. The development of the printing press played a significant role in the Reformation (essentially a precursor to the bourgeois revolution) especially with regard to the translation of the bible from Latin into the vulgate, and it has been extensively used by socialists ever since; in the French Revolution there were newspapers, especially Marat’s Ami du People and also the paintings of David; the siege of Paris, prior to the Commune saw the use of hot air balloons for the sending of messages over the heads of the German army; the Russian Revolution used not only newspapers but also the telegraph and photography and film (Rodchenko, Eisenstein, Vertov etc); in May 68 the silk screen poster was king. But in none of these cases was the character of the revolution determined by its means of communication – in all of them it was determined by the class and political position of the masses involved. The internet, facebook et al are very helpful in that they are a) interactive rather than a centralised means of broadcasting; b) more or less instantaneous; c) global; d) more difficult than print, radio or TV to censor. Many of the British and European left, who have grown old in the long years of downturn, have been slow on the uptake in this area – I am a prime example - and urgently need to catch up. But we should not exaggerate or fall for hype: these new media do not stand above or outside of society and its class relations; they are not at all immune to state repression as Egypt proved when the entire internet was shut down for several days; nor does or did the revolution depend on them – mass mobilisations continued and increased when the net was down; above all they are not a substitute for people on the street and in the workplaces, and trade union and political organisation.

The ‘classic’ i.e mass working class character of the Egyptian Revolution is thus a tremendous vindication of those who have defended the original Revolutionary Marxist perspective of socialism as the self emancipation of the working class against all its bourgeois, reformist, Stalinist and postmodernist nay-sayers over the years. It is also the basis for forming a perspective on the dynamic and future development of the Revolution. This can best be done through the frame of the theory of permanent revolution, first formulated by Marx in 1850 and elaborated by Trotsky in !905-6 and then again in the 1930s. This theory deals with the question of how a democratic revolution can develop into a proletarian socialist revolution. But before returning to this issue it is necessary to comment briefly on the prospects of a different destination for the Revolution – one that is raised as a bogey by some and hoped for by others, namely the establishment of an Islamist regime.

An Islamic Revolution?

So pervasive has been the atmosphere of Islamophobia generated by western politicians and media over the last twenty years or so that the initial reaction to the Arab revolutionary wave of many commentators, especially from the right but also sometimes from the liberal ‘left’, was to say that no good would come of it as it would only end in ‘something worse’, by which they meant an Islamic Regime a la Iran. For such people the mere fact the Arab peoples are overwhelmingly Muslim meant that no other outcome was at all likely, rather as if one were to respond to news of revolutionary upheavals in Venezuela, Bolivia or Argentina with the view that they would only end in Catholic theocracy. This is a ‘logic’ which should be utterly rejected. What then are the real prospects for political Islamism in Egypt at present?
We must start from the indisputable fact that the, mainly young, people who initiated the 25 January did not do so with any kind of Islamist agenda – their aims were secular and democratic. Moreover this remained the overall tenor of the movement throughout the Revolution. However, it is also an indisputable fact that, prior to the Revolution and up to the present, the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes far and away the largest and best organised opposition grouping in the country, in terms of membership far larger than all the liberal, Nasserist and left organisations put together. As one young comrade in Alexandria put it to me, ‘there is only one Leninist organisation in Egypt and that is the Brotherhood – unfortunately they are not Leninists’. But neither are they Al Qaeda or ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘extremists’. Rather they are a highly contradictory, moderate, conservative, reformist, cautious tendency similar in many respects to right wing social democracy in Europe. Their leadership and core membership is middle class (a mixture of middle and small businessmen and higher professionals) but they also have substantial popular support among students and the urban poor, and their political policy is to tack between these different bases. (For a more substantial analysis of the MB prior to the Revolution see Sameh Naguib ‘Islamism(s):old and new’ in El-Mahdi and Marfleet)
At the beginning of the Revolution the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the mobilisation for the 25 January (in a manner reminiscent of the French CP in May ‘68). Then, when they saw the scale of the movement and came under massive pressure from their own younger supporters, they ‘allowed’ their members to participate. All accounts I have heard testify to the fact that the MB youth fought heroically and, because of their high level of organisation, very effectively to defend Tahrir Square, especially in the Battle of the Camel. This, by the way, was an important vindication of the united front strategy towards the Brotherhood adopted, against the grain of much of the old Egyptian left, by our comrades. But the moment Mubarak fell the Brotherhood transferred its allegiance to the new regime, started to do deals with the military, opposed strikes and further demonstrations, arguing that now is the time ‘to build Egypt’, and supported the right wing and army position i.e. Vote Yes, in the referendum on Constitutional Reform. At the same time this has produced all sorts of tensions and splits within the organisation, especially among the youth, many of whom want a more radical policy.
If we assume that some kind of stabilisation occurs on the basis of the current state of affairs – not an assumption that can be made with confidence – and the elections scheduled for the autumn go ahead, the Brotherhood will have a strong chance of becoming a significant part of the government, probably in alliance with rebranded old regime candidates and/or representatives of the military. This will not turn Egypt into Iran but will lend the MB’s considerable political weight to a right wing ‘moderate’ pro-capitalist settlement, with a highly ‘controlled’ and restricted democracy.
To the right of the Brotherhood stand various Salafi groupings, who are far more conservative and ‘fundamentalist’. Under Mubarak they were largely ‘non political’ but since the Revolution and the relative freedom that has been achievement they have emerged much more openly onto the political stage. In the present situation they constitute a highly reactionary force attempting to stir up sectarian hatred against both Coptic Christians and Sufi Muslims (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/salafis-attack-sufi-mosques). I am told by Egyptian comrades that in numerical terms the Salafis are considerably larger than the Brotherhood but they are divided into many sub-groups and are much less organised. In Qena, the main city in Upper Egypt (the far south), the Salafis, along with the Brotherhood, have orchestrated a mass campaign against the Christian Governor (mayor) Major General Emad Mikhael, demanding a Muslim mayor. However the matter is complex because Mikhael was a Mubarak loyalist and as Al Masryalyoum reports ‘ some protesters said they did not reject Mikhael for being a Copt, but rather for taking part in killing protesters during the 25 January revolution,’ http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/422224 But in the view of leading Egyptian Marxist, Sameh Naguib (in personal discussion) the reactionary sectarian element is the predominant one in the campaign.
Since writing the above a further horrible Salafi attack has occurred on a Coptic church in Imbebe, a poor district in north west Cairo, which resulted in armed confrontation, 12 deaths and 180 injuries. The military have responded by sending 190 people to trial in Military Courts, which may put a break on the Salafis, but is dangerous as it legitimises the use of these courts which are also used for repression against the democracy protesters and the left.
So clearly Salafism does represent a significant threat, but I am not in a position to offer a precise estimation of how serious this is. The way it seems to me, and I am tentative about this, is that the prospects for the Salafis as an independent force in their own right are very limited but as a more or less covert weapon in alliance with the military they can be used to try to roll back and break up the magnificent unity that was forged in the Revolution. The fate of Salafism is thus tied to the overall fate of the Egyptian Revolution: will it go forward or will it be thrown back? This in turn brings us back to the question of permanent revolution.

The Permanent Revolution

The theory of permanent revolution was developed by Trotsky in 1905-6 in response to the Russian Revolution of 1905 (the dress rehearsal for 1917) and in opposition to the ‘stages theory’ of revolution then dominant on the Russian and European left. According to this ‘stages theory’, which was wrongly attributed to Marx, socialist revolution could not come on the historical agenda until after society had passed through a substantial phase of capitalist development and therefore what was required in Russia (and the maximum that was historically possible) was a bourgeois led democratic revolution against Tsarism similar to the French Revolution of 1789 followed by period of stable constitutional democracy in which Russian society would mature economically and socially and the proletariat would be able to gradually strengthen its organisations a la German Social Democracy in preparation for an eventual struggle for socialism. Trotsky argued that the contradictions in Russian society would not permit such an orderly development.
In the first place he said that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak, too cowardly and too tied to international capital to make or lead a revolution: only the working class would be able to overthrow Tsarism. But in overthrowing Tsarism the dynamics of the revolutionary struggle would lead the working class to challenge capitalist interests and property relations. No stable period of bourgeois democracy would ensue. Either the revolution would develop into workers power or it would be thrown back into reaction. Moreover even if the working class took power in Russia it would not be able to sustain it in one country: rather the Russian Revolution would need, in order to survive, to spread to other countries (especially Germany) and internationalise itself. In Russia in 1917 and after virtually every aspect of this perspective came to pass including, tragically, the destruction of workers power in the form of Stalinist counter- revolution, when the revolution failed to spread.
In relation to Egypt many millions of people, almost certainly a huge majority of the population (and probably most of the world’s population too) would like to see the country become a stable economically developing ‘genuine’ (as they see it) bourgeois democracy with freedom of speech, free elections, less corruption and so on. But the fact that most people want something does not at all mean that it can or will happen. Most people would like there to be world peace. Most Irish people wanted the Celtic Tiger to continue indefinitely and so on. In the case of Egypt a number of factors militate against any straightforward stabilisation.
First, the complete absence up to now of democratic regimes throughout the middle east is no accident. The US, the dominant imperial power in the region , has systematically sustained dictatorships (including, of course, Mubarak) for the simple reason that this renders these regimes compliant to its will as opposed to democratic governments which would come under immense pressure from their electorates to go against US foreign policy, especially in regard to Palestine, Iraq and the underlying issue of oil. Far from overcoming this tension the Egyptian Revolution, and the Arab Spring as a whole, intensifies it. In other words, the US, despite Obama’s rhetoric, will be pressing to drastically restrict the process of democratic reform in Egypt.
Secondly the Egyptian Revolution has occurred in response to, and in the context of a severe international economic crisis which is driving most governments round the world to go on to the offensive against their own people in terms of welfare cutbacks, privatisation, and unemployment, to which must be added the acute problem of inflation and rising food prices . ‘Urban consumer inflation in Egypt accelerated to 12.1 percent in April, its highest in a year, on the back of soaring food prices which contributed to the mass protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak earlier this year’. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/10/egypt-inflation-idUSLDE74906920110510). But in Egypt the Revolution has created massive hopes and expectations of the exact opposite, of a dramatic improvement in the living standards of the masses through, for example, wage increases and the establishment of a decent minimum wage. The masses may make a revolution in the name of democracy but that is because they think that, among other things, democracy will bring them a measure of social and economic justice. Moreover the Revolution has given them the means, such as independent trade unions, and the spirit to fight for it. This will prove a very hard knot to unravel except by massive repression and the attempt at such repression risks the splintering of the state apparatus, i.e. the army rank-and-file going over to the people.
We must remember Gramsci’s injunction that ‘one can “scientifically” foresee only the struggle – not the concrete moments of the struggle which cannot but be the result of opposing forces in continuous movement’ (A.Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, p.438) but the likelihood is that there will be a confrontation of these opposed forces whether the forces concerned desire it or not. In such a situation the weaker the working class, the less organised, the less prepared it is, the more likely it is to be defeated and gain nothing from the Revolution for which it has paid in blood, or even worse, be crushed by a counter revolution which could produce a regime even more terrible than that of Mubarak.
At present, however, such a decisive confrontation is some way down the road. At the moment both the revolution and the counter-revolution, the working class and the capitalist class (currently represented primarily by the Supreme Army Council) are advancing on some fronts and retreating on others. Thus the Army tries to ban strike and demonstrations and is able to pass the law but is unable to enforce it. The Revolution retreats from the streets but then suddenly returns in force to demand the arrest of Mubarak. The regime retreats and actually arrests him and his sons. Then (5 May) they sentence the former Minister of the Interior, Habib el Adly, to twelve years for money laundering and today (10 May) the former Tourism Minister Zuhair Garranah has been jailed for five years for corruption. Do such concessions appease the movement and diminish its anger and size or do they encourage it? A bit of both. The Salafis whip up a sectarian storm in Qena but when they threaten the weakly sermon of the Coptic Pope, ten thousand including many youth from the 25 January and many Muslims turn out in solidarity. The regime imposes a curfew but the curfew is at 2.00 am so it doesn’t have much effect.
What needs to be done by socialists in this situation cannot, in any detail, be specified from afar but what needs to be done in broad terms is pretty clear. On the one hand the democratic revolution must be pushed to completion. That means struggling for genuinely free and equal elections, not ones loaded in favour of bourgeois parties ( as is the case at present with an electoral law that requires a party to have 5000 members and publish their names in a national newspaper at the cost of £E500,000 ). It means fighting not just to remove one or two figure heads, but to cleanse public life of all the little Mubaraks, all the corrupt hangers –on, and all those responsible for murder and torture of protestors – the Portuguese, after the 1974 Revolution, called this process saniemento. It means fighting for full equality of citizenship, against all discrimination and sectarianism, especially against women and Christians.
On the other hand it means doing everything possible to raise the independence, combativity and consciousness of the working class. This involves seizing the moment to develop independent and democratic unions (as far as possible free of corrupt or treacherous bureaucratic officials). It means encouraging, strengthening and bringing together the Popular Committees to Defend the Revolution which were formed spontaneously by local areas when the regime started to unleash thugs and criminals and which have the potential to become embryonic workers’ councils (soviets)and eventually replace the bourgeois state. It means developing a programme of economic and political demands, like the demands for a minimum wage, for price control and for renationalisation of privatised industries that articulate and advance the interests and aspirations of the workers. Similarly it means developing demands which can align the peasants with the working class. This in turn means developing a workers’ political party that can carry such a programme, work to win the leadership of the class and spearhead its struggle for power.
Fortunately all these tasks are being seriously undertaken by socialists in Egypt, especially our comrades in the Revolutionary Socialists, as I was able to see, first hand, on a recent visit. Young Revolutionary Socialists were the initiators of the dismantling of the hated State Security Offices, first in Alexandria, then in Cairo. Comrades are playing a key role in drawing together the numerous Popular Committees (there are forty in Alexandria alone) and likewise in building the independent unions. In particular they are strongly rowing in behind the proposal of the long standing militant and socialist Kamal Khalil for a new Democratic Workers Party, which has tremendous potential in the current situation. (To see interview with Kamal Kahlil regarding this party and its programme click here http://vimeo.com/23327371). As Khalil explains this party does not begin with a fully socialist programme, so as to facilitate mass working class participation, but its demands are entirely socialist in spirit and there is every possibility that it can develop in a fully socialist direction rather congealing into a bureaucratic reformist social democratic or Stalinist formation.

An International Revolution?

From the very beginning Marx and Engels insisted that the struggle for socialism was an international one that could not be brought to conclusion in one country alone.
Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. (Frederick Engels, Principles of Communism 1847 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm)
As we have noted Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution reemphasised this point in relation to the Russian Revolution, and the ongoing process of economic, political and media global integration has made this interconnectedness more intense than ever before. The Egyptian Revolution was directly inspired by the success of the Tunisian Revolution. The fall of Mubarak was followed immediately by uprisings in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria – all within weeks. For a brief moment it appeared as if all the dictators in the Arab world were going to be overthrown in one great revolutionary wave. Sadly it was not so simple.
The enemies of the people – not just the individual dictators but the ruling classes whom they represent and the imperialist forces with whom these classes are in league, principally US imperialism, of course – do not give up easily and are more than capable of tenacious resistance, manouvers, and tactical retreats followed by returns to the offensive. The revolution in Libya succeeded in the east round Benghazi – because large sections of the military switched sides – but it failed in Tripoli where Gaddafi’s security forces, and at least a section of the population, remained loyal and where Gaddafi struck the rebels down with absolute ruthlessness. As a result the country was divided and imperialism saw its chance and seized it with both hands. Under the fig leaf of a ‘humanitarian’ no-fly zone they launched a substantial air assault on Libya. This proved, probably by design, to be enough to stop Gaddafi’s outright victory but not enough actually to defeat him. What it did do was reduce the Benghazi based rebels to a state of dependency on the western powers, while preparing the ground for the eventual partition of the country and securing a strong foothold for imperialism in the region. At the same time, just as the people’s revolt in Bahrain had defeated the police, much as their Egyptian counterparts had done, the overwhelming intervention by the Saudi army (simply marching across the linking causeway) crushed the revolution there. These two interventions, almost certainly co-ordinated, changed the dynamic of events in the whole region. It took the bloom off the Arab Spring, halted its amazing upward trajectory and undoubtedly emboldened all the other rotten regimes including Bashir in Syria and Saleh in Yemen to believe they could weather the storm.
Nevertheless at the time of writing, and so fluid is the situation that anything I write may be out of date by the time it is read, not all revolutionary momentum has been lost. Heroic resistance is ongoing in Syria (to deafening silence from the West apart from token meaningless appeals for restraint) and the democratic revolution seems to be winning in Yemen. Wonderful things continue to happen. When President Saleh criticised Yemeni women’s partciipation in the protest as un-Islamic tens of thousands of women, many fully veiled, took to the streets in rebuttal (for video footage see http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/04/2011416162256587141.html). Moreover, there remain huge resources of democratic and revolutionary energy among the Egyptian masses.
Clearly there is a strong reciprocal relationship between the fate of the revolutions in all the Arab countries. Every step forward by the revolution in one country, helps it to progress in all the other countries., while every reverse for one is a reverse for all.
However it would be a mistake to limit this reciprocity to the Arab world. Clearly the Arab revolutions have inspired people much further afield , from Wisconsin in the USA to the Maldives (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13269801) and every dictator from Mugabe (who arrested fifty of our Zimbabwean comrades just for watching a film about Egypt) to Kim Jong-il is worried . Asia News reported on the 14 February ‘The wave of protests that began in the Mideast appears to have reached even North Korea. For the first time in the history of the Stalinist regime, groups of ordinary citizens have protested in three cities demanding food and electricity’. (http://www.asianews.it/news-en/First-public-protests-against-the-Kims%E2%80%99-regime-20861.html ).The Arab revolts and the Egyptian Revolution, witnessed live on TV by millions round the world, has strengthened the argument for resistance, struggle and revolution, everywhere.
As well as seeing the international effects of the Arab Revolutions we also need to grasp that they had international causes, especially in terms of rising food prices (to which climate change is a significant contributor) and the general crisis of capitalism that erupted in 2008. This enables us to see the Arab Revolutions as a whole and the Egyptian Revolution in particular not as an isolated Middle Eastern affair but has the highest point yet reached in a rising wave of struggle internationally that includes the eight general strikes in Greece, the general strike in Spain, the mass struggles over pensions in France, the fall of the government in Portugal, the workers’ revolt in Wisconsin, Iceland’s two referendums rejecting the IMF bail - out, the UK student rebellion and the huge trade union demonstration in London on 26th March and so on. Overall what we are seeing is a mass popular rejection of the attempt to make ordinary people pay for the crisis of the system, which is why all these different struggles resonate so strongly with one another.
If this is the case, and I believe it is, what we have entered internationally is a phase similar in some respects to that in 1968-74, which Chris Harman called ‘The Fire Last Time’. Now that the fire this time has been lit we can expect new explosions and not just in the Arab world. Given the crisis of capitalism is continuing to deepen and that it is merging with the ever more urgent crisis of climate change, which as Harman pointed out acts to intensify the class struggle, to say there is everything to play for is quite literally true.

John Molyneux
10 May 2011.

Interview with Kamal Khalil re new Democratic Workers Party in Egypt

Here is the interview I conducted in Cairo last week with Kamal Khalil, Egyptian revolutionary socialist, worker leader and main mover behind the formation of the new Democratic Workers Party

http://vimeo.com/23327371

John Molyneux

Marvellous Miro

Marvellous Miro

Miro, The Tate Modern, 14 April – 11 September, 2011

Joan Miro is without a doubt one of the supreme artists of the twentieth century and the current exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern is a wonderful experience.


Miro was always politically engaged and committed. In 1924 he joined the Surrealist Movement along with Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Andre Masson. Their aim was to use images from the subconscious to undermine the dominant ‘common sense’ bourgeois view of the world. In 1937, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, he exhibited The Reaper or Catalan Peasant in Revolt in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic alongside Picasso’s Guernica and Alexander Calder’s mobile sculpture Memory Fountain. At the same time he produced the blazing Still Life With Old Shoe [which he called ‘my Guernica’] and the campaign poster Aidez Espagne. In 1973 he showed May 68, a tribute to the French May Events, and in 1974 he painted The Hope of a Condemned Man on the day of the execution by garrotte of the young Catalan anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich.

However, neither the greatness nor the politics of Miro’s art are properly captured by these external connections: both are drawn from a deeper well.

At bottom the driving force of Miro is his intense involvement with the basics of life, natural and human, in his native Catalonia – with the land, the sun, the sea, the sky, the stars, the night, the moon, the clouds and the people, above all the people of the land, the peasants. And it is a joyful abundant involvement which embraces humour, sexuality, love, romance, the cosmic and the microscopic. All this finds expression in an eruption of colour - of vibrant reds, yellows, blues, oranges, greens, which evoke both a Mediterranean summer’s day, and a tropical parrot - and a carnival of surrealistic forms in which stars resemble starfish, birds are eyes or aeroplanes, and ants and algae are as important as mountains and galaxies.

In Miro even a painting which is predominantly black seems overwhelmingly joyful and bright; even a single black line or blob on a vast field of colour hops, skips and dances like a child at play or a kite swooping and soaring in the sky.

In one sense Miro is one of the simplest of modern artists and one of the easiest to enjoy. All that is required is to open up to the pleasures he offers. No effort of interpretation is needed. Interpretation is possible, of course, but it is not in the least necessary. Moreover this is the simplicity of an absolute master, like that of Giotto or Mondrian. Both his colour and his forms are drawn from a host of other artists, such as Picasso (as always), Gauguin, Goya, Van Gogh, Arp, Tanguy, Matisse and others, and yet his palette and signature are unique and instantly recognisable.

The relationship between Miro’s sensuous delight and burgeoning creativity and his radical politics is both simple and profound. Just as Rembrandt’s deep humanity and Van Gogh’s passionate intensity clashed almost involuntarily with the profit driven calculations of capitalism, so too does Miro’s flow of joyful invention.
Of course Miro’s positive passions exist in opposition to negatives. He is for the people, the peasants, life, nature, creativity, imagination, art; he is against poverty, oppression, hunger, war, dictatorship and fascism(especially Franco, of course). But rather than confronting and exploring the negatives – the horror, the alienation, the barbarism – as Goya did in his Disasters of War and Black Paintings, as Francis Bacon, Kafka and Beckett did in their different ways, Miro’s art overwhelms the negative with positive creative energy. He even quotes Marx in his support;

This is the negation of the negation that Marx spoke of. In negating the negation, we affirm. In the same way, my painting can be considered humorous and even light hearted, even though I am tragic.[Miro cited in Iria Candela, Joan Miro, Tate Publishing, 2011, p. 27.]

If by ‘light hearted’ is meant not serious then it is a false characterisation of Miro’s work but it certainly does lighten the heart, and we all need a bit of that from time to time .

John Molyneux
17 April, 2011