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

What is a Revolution?

What is a Revolution?

‘Thawra,thawra, hatt an-nasr!’ This chant, the Arabic for ‘Revolution, revolution – until victory!’, has been heard repeatedly on the streets of Dublin in recent weeks. It comes straight from Tahrir Square in Cairo and is one of many slogans from Egypt chanted outside the Egyptian Embassy and at the Spire in O’Connell St as groups of Egyptians, Libyans and others gathered in solidarity with various phases of the great wave of revolt that has swept North Africa and the Arab world.

As I write this article the fate of Libya hangs in the balance – by the time you read this article there is no way of knowing what will have happened right across the region. But one thing is already clear: that anyone who wants to know what a revolution is need only look at events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Equally anyone who has ever read the great writers on revolution – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg etc – has been able to see their words coming to life on the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi.

The Role of the Masses

‘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.’

These lines from what is the greatest account of a revolution ever written, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, stand as exact description of what occurred in Egypt on 25 January and the 17 days that followed culminating in the fall of Mubarak on 11 February.

‘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 know over three 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 the toiling and oppressed masses – hitherto apathetic – who are capable of waging the political struggle.’

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.

‘Socialism must be created by the masses, must be made by every worker. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be broken!’ declared Rosa Luxemburg in the midst of the German Revolution of 1918-19. The chains of capitalism are forged in its work places where workers are exploited and profits are made.
Therefore, Luxemburg argued, mass strikes play a crucial role in revolutions. It is at work that working people are organised as collectives, have the greatest power of resistance, can most effectively inflict blows on the profits of the big companies that stand behind the government, and can challenge for control of the economy by occupations and the like.

In Tunisia the trade union federation, the UGTT, which had hitherto been ‘moderate’ and collaborationist, played a key role in mobilising the movement against Ben Ali. In Egypt, it was when mass strikes and occupations started to gain momentum that Mubarak was finally forced out. And since the fall of Mubarak the workers strike movement has been one of the main ways the revolution has continued and begun to enter a new stage.

All these quotations from Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg, are developments of Marx’s fundamental principle that ‘The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’. And it is the demonstration in practice that the mass of ordinary people are indeed capable of this that is the principle lesson to be drawn from the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and the so far successful uprising in eastern Libya.

The Question of the State.

‘Ash-sharb yireed iskuk an-nidam! - The People want to Bring Down the Regime!’, is another slogan that made the journey from Tahrir Sq to Dublin. It reflected the understanding among the core of the movement that they needed to remove not only the person of Mubarak but also his whole system of rule, including the hated Emergency Law, the systematic torture and the equally hated Security Police. This in turn found expression in the absolutely heroic struggle over several days and nights against the police which forced their withdrawal from the streets.

In other words the Egyptian masses came face to face with what Marx, Lenin (and all the other great Marxists) regarded as the central issue in any real people’s revolution – the question of the state.

In his key book The State and Revolution Lenin, following Marx, argued : 1) the state i.e. the army, judiciary, police etc., does not represent, as it claims, ‘the nation’ but is an instrument of capitalist class rule; 2) the central aim of the workers’ struggle and of the revolution is the winning of state power; 3) the existing state machine cannot simply be taken over and used by the workers but has to be ‘smashed’ or ‘broken up’ and replaced by a new state apparatus geared to the workers’ needs i.e. a state based on workers’ councils.

The way this can be done, as the Russian Revolution and many subsequent revolutions have shown, is not through defeating the ruling class army in a set piece battle but by winning over the rank-and-file of the soldiers and breaking them from their officers in the course of the revolutionary struggles in the streets.

On this question the Egyptian Revolution, and the Tunisian Revolution, went further than any other mass struggle of recent years, but nevertheless stopped half way. On the one there existed among some of the masses illusions in the neutrality and ‘decency’ of the army – despite the fact that the Generals had been hand in glove with Mubarak. On the other hand the Egyptian Generals did not directly use the army against the protestors. This enabled them to keep it intact until the movement had lost some of its momentum, consequently the state has held on and the revolution is not yet complete, but at the same time it is not yet over.

From Democratic to Socialist Revolution.

The issue of the state is linked to question of turning the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. Only if the movement is able to go beyond demands for democracy, necessary as those are, to challenging capitalism and the economic power of the capitalist class, will the real needs of the mass of ordinary Egyptians be addressed. The same applies to every other revolution in the modern world. Inequality, poverty, exploitation, unemployment etc exist everywhere and are caused by international capitalism, not just individual dictators.

This in turn leads to the question of socialist organisation. The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, like revolutions in general (the Paris Commune of 1871, The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, France 1968 and so on) began spontaneously, but they do not end spontaneously.

To unify and focus the power of the masses, to combat the power of capitalist ideas, and to defeat the highly centralised power of the capitalist state, the leadership of a revolutionary workers party is necessary. Hopefully the magnificent struggle of the Arab masses of Tunisia , Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and the rest will aid the building such revolutionary parties across the region and throughout the world, including here in Ireland.

John Molyneux
24.02.2011

I'm With You In Egypt

This poem was performed in a Dublin bar last week at a Gig for Palestine by Connor Kelly who is a 21 year old SWP member from Derry in Northern Ireland. Connor is a brilliant young musician, poet and comrade.

I'M WITH YOU IN EGYPT

Dedicated to the people of Egypt, and Hossam El Hamalaway (member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists)


I’m with you in Egypt, where the streets are filled with fire, women dance in the flames, casting off the muck of tyranny of ages now past.

I’m with you in Egypt, ten thousand Muslims kiss the ground, guarded by Christians, Mohammed and Jesus married in the violence of the class - ah Israel, how you quake in your blood soaked boots.

I’m with you in Egypt, where Coptic chants imbue my spirit with mystical revolutions.

I'm with you in Egypt where El Baradei won’t leave the house.

I'm with you in Egypt, where the Muslim brotherhood are talking to the monster state.

I’m with you in Egypt where freedom is a fist of love.

I’m with you in Egypt where Hossam El Hamalaway leads the vanguard, stands up, lies down, gets shot, then returns home tired and bleeding to inform humanity of his adventures.

I’m with you in Egypt, where you guard your factories - workers of the world unite!!

I’m with you in Egypt in dreams of love and courageous liberation.

I'm with you in Egypt where you risk your life.

I’m with you in Egypt where you bare your soul.

I’m with you in Egypt where you strike the spark that will set the world on fire.

I’m with you in Egypt and I share your tears.

I’m with you in Egypt shoulder to shoulder.

I’m with you in Egypt and I love you.

I’m with you in Egypt, people of Egypt, you are beautiful.

Connor Kelly 2011

Workers Strikes in King Abdulla Financial Centre in Riyadh

Workers Strikes in King Abdulla Financial Centre in Riyadh

report received from worker in Saudi Arabia

I went last Thursday to my workplace, and I found out that there were over 3000 workers demanding their rights before they called a general strike in the construction site in Saudi Binladin Group. The workers were very angry, there workplace is one of the largest construction project in the country, which worth SR.100 billion. However, they live in a terrible conditions, one of the workers was telling me how he was living: "I live in a room 4m x 3m with 8 people, and for every 10 people there is only one toilet". Another Egyptian worker was telling me about the working conditions and the restriction of religious freedom: "those are Zionists, they don’t even allow me to pray on time!!", and another worker was speaking about the water at the site, which is infected and full of filth and insects: "the managers wouldn’t even wash their hands with it, but for us we have to drink it because it is the only drinking water at the site". The others talked about the delayed salaries and the unpaid overtime: "can you believe that some of the workers here are paid only 700 riyals a month, and I am paid 1000 riyal, how would we survive??".

They couldn’t continue in the old way, they organized themselves and decided to do a demonstration at the site, to demand their rights immediately. It was the most interesting scene that I have witnessed in my life, when a group of coordinators and security guards tried to persuade them to go back to work the workers replied by smacking their hats on the walls and they shouted we demand "food, money , accommodation – we need to be respected!!", all the managers, for the first time since the start of the project 4 years ago, took the workers seriously.

The police force which had an oppressive role in this socity couldn’t control the workers, when of the police officers told the workers that they need to return to their accommodation and their issue will be solved later, the worker replied by throwing stones at him, and they managed to frighten all the police officers around him. The stones missed the police officer, but unfortunately it did not miss his car! It was the first time in my life I saw a police car smashed in Saudi Arabia.

When several coordinators, sent by thy managers, tried to promise the workers for change, I and several socialist we were pushing for the occupation of the construction site, but that did not work. However, when one of coordinators said: "we will give you a new accommodation with a football pitch", one of the workers replied: "how would we play football after 13 hours of work with an unpaid overtime?!" , then the coordinators promised that every worker will be paid after 5 days, someone replied: "what would we do with todays bread after 5 days, we need it now, we are sick of excuses, a billionaire cannot pay his workers today??!!"

In the end, the owner promised the workers that they will pay them on Saturday – which is after two days – the workers went back, and on Saturday they received an extra SR. 500 on top of their salary and the owners promised them that they will improve their accommodation and they will pay them 100 hour for their overtime each month. The workers started to organized with a sister company which belong to the same owners to start a new wave of strikes in different parts of the construction site. Through this week, there were several strike actions in King Fahad Library and in a construction sites in King Saud University.

HAIL THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

HAIL THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION!

Friday 11 February 2011 is a historic day. It will be remembered forever as the day a heroic people brought down a hated tyrant.

Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment that three hundred Egyptians, mostly young Egyptians, paid with their lives for this victory. Glory to the martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution! Those responsible should be brought to trial.

Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment, the terrible and heroic struggle waged by the Egyptian people, mostly (as in all revolutions) the youth of Egypt, to win this great victory. The world saw, in the full light of day, Mubarak’s thugs – his police out of uniform and their paid accomplices – attempt, with ferocious violence, to drive the people from Tahrir Square. It saw the people, with courage and organisation and, above all, numbers, drive them back and rout them.
What the world did not see, or saw much less of, was the even more heroic battle of the Egyptian people, again mainly the young, which occurred to a considerable extent under cover of darkness, in which the revolutionaries routed the feared and hated police. This was the seemingly impossible. This was the victory no ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’ or ‘reasonable person’ would have deemed possible. The fact is it happened, and the fact is also that revolutions happen when people are willing to give their lives for them, as they were in Egypt.

Let us not, in the midst of our joy, forget also that the USA, and Britain and Saudia Arabia etc, sustained the hideous Mubarak regime with massive financial and military aid, until the last possible moment. The American modus operandi for these situations is unfortunately well established: support the dictator to the last possible moment, then pose as champions of democracy at the eleventh hour in order to retain influence over the situation.

But nothing – nothing – can change the fact that the ordinary people, with their bare hands, brought down the tyrant and this means that everywhere in the world whenever people say, in their weariness and alienation, ‘it’ll never change’ or ‘it will never happen’ we can say simply ‘Egypt!’.

However, our joy at this great victory does not relieve us of the duty to tell the truth about the situation on the ground. Apart from the fall of Mubarak the central aims of the Revolution have not yet been achieved. As yet we do not know that the practice of torture in Egypt’s police stations and prisons has ended. As yet we do not know if the practice of detaining people without trial is finished. We do not know if there will be a transition to genuine democracy.

At the moment the Egyptian people are asked to trust the military, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to ensure these things happen. But this Supreme Council consists entirely of generals close to Mubarak and up to their necks in the blood of the Egyptian people and up to their wallets in the people’s wealth. It includes the notorious Omar Sulieman, torturer-in-chief, and the CIA’s man in Cairo. It includes and is headed by Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, former commander of Mubarak’s Presidential Guard, and Sami Hafaz Anan of whom Al Jazeera reports:

Lieutenant- General Anan ... is commander of 468,000 troops. He is seen as having a crucial role in coordinating interim arrangements... He was in Washington when the uprising began ... it was reported that the United States was pushing Anan for a key mediating role, though it was speculated that he was far too close to Mubarak to retain ant role in a new government.

The other members are similar and many are closely linked to the US. Moreover, the basic idea that the army is the army of ‘the nation’, of the people, is an illusion. The Egyptian Army, i.e. its high command as opposed to the ordinary soldiers, like every army, is part of the society’s ruling class and will defend its interests. If the army did not repress the people in the last 17 days it was probably for fear that its rank- and – file would break and side with the people, as has happened in many revolutions from the Paris Commune through Russia in 1917 to the Iranian Revolution. So the army is still there to defend the rich and the regime if need be. I remember with sadness the prevalence of the illusion in a ‘national army’ before the Polish military coup, crushing Solidarnosc, in 1981 and before the Tianenman Square massacre in China in 1989.

There is an even more fundamental problem. The Egyptian people who made the revolution will be hoping for a better life – not only political freedom but also economically and socially. But the poverty and deprivation that is so widespread in Egypt is NOT simply the product of the Mubarak regime. It exists, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere from Washington to Rio, from London to Cape Town, from Portugal to India. It is a product not of one government but of the international capitalist system and the imperialist structure of the world economy that goes with it.

Economically and strategically Egypt is a highly significant part of this system and structure and closely tied to the US which is the very heart of the system and its main international policeman. Nothing that has happened so far in Egypt will have changed the fact that the Sawiris family, estimated wealth over $20 billion, coexists with millions in slums and abject poverty; nothing to end the contrast between the rich luxuriating in Zamalek or Heliopolis and wage slaves of Mahalla or Helwan or the poor of Shubra or the Cities of the Dead. And the Supreme Council, and the US government and David Cameron and many of the media pundits, who are expressing false solidarity and fake approval of the Revolution, will be desperate to see that nothing does challenge this monstrous inequality or the capitalist system that underlies it.

But what the Revolution has produced already is a power, the power of the working class, that CAN challenge capitalism and, undoubtedly WILL come into conflict with the system in the days, weeks and months ahead.

This is why the struggle goes on: to cleanse the regime of its torturers and thieves; to establish real democratic freedom; to build the people’s power from below that can claim Egypt’s wealth for the people of Egypt. In this struggle the People’s Committees formed to defend communities in the Revolution and the strikes and workplace occupations developing over the last few days are crucial. POWER TO THE WORKERS!

John Molyneux
12 February 2011

STATEMENT FROM THE APRIL 6 MOVEMENT in CAIRO

April 6 Movement:

Egypt - Mubarak refuses to resign, a general strike is needed to bring him down!The Egyptian masses thought Mubarak would resign, but he had other plans, Simon Hardy reports on what happened and what comes next

In the afternoon of 10 February the Egyptian Army Supreme Council, which had met without its commander in chief Hosni Mubarak, issued Communique number 1. The communique explained that the army had stepped in in order to safeguard "the people's achievements and demands". Omar Suleiman, the Vice President, was sent to meet Mubarak to relay the discussion and opinions of the generals.

ABC news in the US announced that Mubarak would step down. Leading members of the NDP had said that they "did not think Mubarak would be president by Friday." Thousands surged into Tahrir and took to the streets across the country to be there when they heard the news that they had been waiting for.

Everyone thought he would resign - the mood in tahrir square was phenomenal, celebratory - a feeling of triumph surged through the crowd. But Mubarak had other plans.

Mubarak's speech was an astonishing piece of hypocritical filth. This man who sat atop of the regime which brutalised his people for 30 years, and tried in the last 17 days to destroy the movement any way that it could shed crocodile tears for the people that his police had killed. Over 300 people have died to force him from power, and after cursing the movement and trying to drown them in blood he addresses his speech to the "youth of the nation". These are the youth of the nation who have risen up against him and hate him with a passion - they have nothing in common with him or his regime. They are the future and he is the past, that is why he has fought against them so violently.

He promised a full investigation into anyone involved in persecuting protesters and swore again that he would resign in September, but not before.

During his entire speech he did not offer one serious concession to the people - he did not even withdraw the state of emergency. He proposed the amendment of 6 sections of the constitution, including the most controversial ones of article 76 and 77. He said he would scrap article 179. Article 179 is a relatively new anti terrorism amendment which stipulates "the state will assume responsibility for safeguarding security and public order in the face of the dangers of terrorism", which allows for anti terror suspects to be investigated and arressted without any kind of judicial over view.

The crowd in Tahrir square became enraged when word spread that he was not resigning. People began to wave their shoes in the air, the universal sign of disrespect and contempt in the Arab world, they were lifted up on sticks, held aloft above their heads. Mubarak knows that he cannot step down, if he does so it will give a green light to everyone across the region that dictators can fall under popular pressure.

But now the masses will become enraged. Tomorrow will see millions upon millions of people marching across the country. Masses of workers are due to join the protests. The strikes should not be called off, they need to be extended and co-ordinated into an all out general strike. The strikes should be co-ordinated by democratic councils of the workers, they need to organise the defense of the revolution. It is also important now that the rank and file soldiers be won over to the revolution.

Now the demand for a constituent assembly is crucial. It is not the military or technocrats which should decide the new constitution but a democratic assembly composed of recognished deleates from the people.

Whether Mubarak is working in relative agreement with the army or defying them is not clear. Clearly the army wants to consolidate its influence in the political process. Clearly the miltiary are divided over what to do - still the different factions within the regime do not know what to do. Some within the NPD want Mubarak gone, but Mubarak and his clique want to hold on to power. The army's position is changing, but it is not clear yet what role they will play.

Tomorrow may see a revolution in the country, or a military coup. There will be a reckoning between the people and the army sooner or later. All the world is watching history happen in Egypt tonight!

Solidarity with Egypt from Portsmouth Trades Unions

This is from the Trades Council in my (former) home town of Portsmouth. This is what Trades Unions should be doing everywhere.John M

On Behalf of Portsmouth Trades Council (the official organisation that represents the various trade union branches in the City of Portsmouth)

Congratulations on the formation of RETAU, the independent federation of Egyptian trade unions.
When our trades Council met on 3 February we discussed the inspirational struggles in Tunisia and Egypt. Our delegates wanted to express our solidarity with you in your revolution against tyranny.

Down with Mubarak! Victory to the Egyptian People! Workers of the World Unite!

As media officer, I issued the press release below. I didn't know how to convey this message to our sisters and brothers in Egypt until some comrades emailed me your contact details. I am so pleased to open up a direct dialogue with you. Your bravery and determination gives us strength to fight our bosses and rulers who are trying to cut our living standards. Many of us are watching your struggle on the TV and internet. We have heard of your strikes, but were concerned that the Egyptian Trade Union Federation was too closely linked with Mubarak. We are delighted that you have formed your own free and independent trade union federation. We wish you every success in your struggle and offer any help that we can provide.
Victory to the Egyptian Revolution!

Yours Fraternally
Jon Woods
Portsmouth Trades Council Media Officer



PORTSMOUTH TRADES COUNCIL

MEDIA RELEASE 6.2.2011



SOLIDARITY WITH REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA AND EGYPT



Portsmouth Trades Council (PTC) is sending a message of solidarity and support to the people in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Middle East fighting for economic demands and political freedom. The uprisings across the region began in Tunisia with protests over unemployment, food prices and the banning of political protest.



‘In Tunisia, the Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisien (UGTT) trade union confederation called a general strike which helped force Ben Ali from power. Although the Egyptian Trade Union Federation has close links to the Mubarak regime, there have been widespread strikes. Workers in the Suez steel mill that produces 70% of Egypt’s steel are on indefinite strike until Mubarak falls. There are strikes in the centre of the textile industry in Mahalla al-Kubra’, said Jon Woods.



PTC supports our brothers and sisters across the Middle East in their struggle for bread, freedom and social justice. We call for genuine democracy and the removal of tyrants such as Mubarak. We demand an immediate end to violence against the pro democracy protestors. We support workers in forming their own independent and democratic trade unions.



For further information contact;

Louis MacDonald (PTC Secretary) on 07940 503634 or at louismacdonald@ntlworld.com

Mick Tosh (PTC Chair) on 07900 877720

Jon Woods (PTC Media Officer) 0n 07921 775828

STATEMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISTS EGYPT

Statement of the Revolutionary Socialists Egypt:

Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!

What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal 'leaders' and their criminal system is destroyed.
Mubarak's departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution
The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafik is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.
The country's wealth belongs to the people and must return to it
Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country's largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90% of the country's wealth. They monopolize the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatization, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.
Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people
We want the nationalization of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.
We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel
This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of America and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of America, participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt's independence, dignity and leadership in the region.
The revolution is a popular revolution
This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt's youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.
A people's army is the army that protects the revolution
Everyone asks: "Is the army with the people or against them?". The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.
This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 73. This army is closely associated with America and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that ‘the army is on our side’. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.
Form revolutionary councils urgently
This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.
What we need right now is to push for the socio-economic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organize ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.
Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution
The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.
The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian Workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!
Glory to the martyrs!
Down with the system!
All power to the people!
Victory to the revolution!

DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL VOTES SOLIDARITY WITH EGYPT

Emergency Motion passed at Dublin City Council 8th February, 2011

This Council declares its total solidarity with the heroic democracy protesters of Egypt, and especially with those currently occupying Tahrir (Liberation) Square. It strongly supports their demands: for the immediate removal of the dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from his office as President; for the repeal of the anti-democratic Emergency Law (which since 1981 has given the notorious State Security Forces the right to detain people without charge or trial); for the dismantling of the whole Mubarak regime of murder torture and corruption; for full freedom of the press and genuine democratic elections. This Council resolves to refuse all collaboration with the illegitimate Mubarak Government or its agents .
This Council also calls upon the Irish Government to; a) end all diplomatic relations with the Mubarak/Suleiman regime until such time as a new democratically elected government is established; b) to make a public statement of its support for the democracy movement; c)to vote accordingly at the United Nations and in the EU Council of Ministers and European Parliament; d) to call publicly for Mubarak to be put on trial at the International Court of Human Rights at the Hague.

This motion was proposed by Councillor Brid Smith
People Before Profit Alliance

Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution

Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution

As someone who has often visited Egypt and has many friends in Cairo I appeal to everyone everywhere who reads this blog to do everything they can to mobilise support for the ongoing and embattled Egyptian Revolution. Demonstrate, picket your Egyptian embassy, organise meetings, whatever you can do.

Above all it is necessary to combat the idea that the Egyptian people are divided or that it is just chaos and confusion. What has happened is an organised attack by plainclothes police, paid thugs on behalf of a brutal dictator and his regime to attempt to crush the amazingly heroic uprising of the Egyptian masses. Mubarak must not be given another 6 months to scheme, kill, and shore up his position.

MUBARAK AND HIS REGIME MUST GO NOW! VICTORY TO THE REVOLUTION!

Solidarity Rally in Dublin
The Spire, O’Connell St.
Friday 4 February 4pm-6pm


Followed by
Irish SWP public meeting
Egypt in Revolution
Friday 4 Feb 7pm
Cassidy’s Hotel, Upper O’Connell St.

Trotsky and the Russian Revolution

First of three articles on Trotsky's contribution to Marxism, published in Socialist Worker (UK)

This article was written before the Tunisian Revolution but is worth noting that what is happening in Tunisia at the moment and the way it is spreading to other North African and Middle Eastern countries is an excellent example of the first stages of the process of 'permanent revolution' theorised by Trotsky and outlined here.


Trotsky and the Russian Revolution.

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was murdered seventy years ago by an agent of Stalin who drove an ice pick into his head. Why write about him now? Because he was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century and because, after the death of Marx, it was he, together with Lenin, who did most to develop Marxist ideas.
Trotsky’s practical revolutionary achievements were enormous. At the age of 26 he emerged as the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905, when he was elected President of the St Petersburg Workers’ Council (Soviet). Then in 1917, once again president of the Soviet, he organised the October Insurrection which established workers’ power in Russia.
After that he became chief organiser of the five million strong Red Army which defended the Revolution against the counter revolutionary White armies backed by Western imperialism. Finally he led the Left Opposition in Russia which tried, unsuccessfully to resist the rise of Stalin and defend workers’ democracy and the original ideals of the Revolution.
Trotsky not only led the Russian Revolution in action, he was also, again with Lenin, Its main political inspirer and thinker. It was he who, as early, as 1905 most clearly foresaw the course the revolution was going to take.
At the time all Russian socialists and radicals thought that Tsarist Russia was heading for revolution, but they almost all thought it would just be a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ like the French Revolution of 1789. That is they thought it would overthrow the Tsar and establish a normal capitalist democracy like in Western Europe, and that only after that would the working class begin the struggle for socialism.
The more moderate wing of the Russian socialist movement, the Mensheviks, thought this meant the middle class would lead the revolution and the working class should limit itself to supporting them.
The revolutionary wing, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, argued the middle class was too conservative to lead the movement and it would be up to the working class to make the revolution but they accepted the idea that Russia was too economically backward to move to socialism, particularly as the working class were only a minority of the population, compared with the vast majority of peasants.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin that the working class not the middle class would make the revolution. However, he argued that in doing so the logic of the struggle would lead to the establishment of workers power and to breaking with capitalism. To the objection that this would be blocked by the peasants he maintained that the peasants, even though they were the majority, would support the urban working class IF the workers gave a strong enough lead.
To the argument that Russia was not sufficiently economically developed to sustain socialism, Trotsky said this was true if you looked at Russia in isolation, but the Russian Revolution should be seen as the first breakthrough in a wave of international revolution. Workers power in Russia would lead to workers power in Germany and elsewhere in Europe where the level of industrialisation was high enough to make the transition to socialism.
Trotsky’s idea became known as the theory of Permanent Revolution. This didn’t mean revolution going on forever, but revolution not stopping at any intermediate stage until it had achieved its ultimate goal of world revolution.
In 1917 Trotsky was proved right – the workers, not the middle class, brought down the Tsar in February and moved on to take power themselves in October. Lenin came round to Trotsky’s view and won over the Bolshevik Party in April. Trotsky then joined the Bolsheviks and they united to lead the Revolution and to found the Communist International with the aim of spreading the Revolution internationally.
The theory of permanent revolution had significance way beyond Russia. It meant that the working class in colonial and third world countries where it was still a minority did not have to sit back and wait for socialism in Europe but could take the lead in fighting for their own workers revolutions.
Even today when modern capitalism has spread across most of the globe permanent revolution is still important in dictatorships like Egypt or oppressed countries like Palestine, because it says that in these countries the movement should not limit itself to achieving democracy or national freedom, or to methods of struggle acceptable to the middle class . Rather it argues that revolutionary socialists and the working class should take the lead in the struggle and try to transform it into international workers revolution. This is particularly relevant in the Middle East where it is the only way Palestine can really become free.