End the Siege of Gaza – Open the Border Now! Block U.S. Warships from Suez Canal!
For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

On February 11, the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was ousted after 30 years in power. After 18 days of continuous protests by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, and two days after strikes swept across the country, the hated dictator departed. The streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other cities exploded in joy. Upwards of 2 million people streamed into Maidan al-Tahrir (Liberation Square) to celebrate. Fireworks exploded overhead, youth danced on burned-out armored personnel carriers. The slogan “The people want the regime to fall,” borrowed from Tunisia, became, “The people, at last, have brought down the regime.”

This is at best a partial truth, at worst a deadly illusion. The determined mass protests, courageously resisting and throwing back every bloody assault by the regime, played a vital role in forcing Mubarak out. The workers mobilization was what finally triggered his downfall. But although the despotic Raïs (Leader) is gone, the army-based regime that has lorded it over Egypt for more than half a century remains. Talk of “democracy” under the dictatorship of capital, particularly in semi-colonial countries like Egypt, is a lie. The ouster of Pharaoh, as the Egyptian president was unaffectionately known, must lead to workers revolution if autocratic rule is to be swept away.

Demonstrators remarked over and over that for the first time they were proud to be Egyptian. They wanted to honor the more than 300 martyrs who were killed by the regime in the recent mobilizations: their blood was not shed in vain. But beyond the pride in having brought down the despot, we must look at the hard facts:

• The huge repressive apparatus is intact: The notorious Central Security Force which viciously beat demonstrators is still in place. The Republican Guard, in charge of protecting the government, is still in place. The 2 million-strong National Police as well as the army of police spies, squads of baltagi (regime-paid rent-a-thugs) and legions of torturers are still in place.
• While government media have begun to wobble, and Law 100 giving the state control of union elections was recently annulled by restive justices, the gigantic apparatus of the corporatist regime – including the National Democratic Party, the official Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) and other state organizations that controlled every aspect of Egyptian life – is still intact.
• The 30-year-old national emergency law is still in place, and the military is in no hurry to remove it. The army command is unchanged: The head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which now holds the reins of power, is Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, referred to by junior officers (according to U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks) as “Mubarak’s poodle.”
• The sinister longtime intelligence chief and short-lived “vice president,” Omar Suleiman, who was in charge of the “extraordinary renditions” of CIA prisoners to Egypt’s dungeons, is still around. Praised by Israeli leaders and popular with U.S. officials because he was “not squeamish” about things like torture, Suleiman messed up Washington’s “orderly transition” by openly asserting on a TV talk show that the Egyptian people lacked a “culture of democracy.”

In short, the revolution that so many Egyptians yearn for may have begun, but it is far too early to proclaim victory. While the masses are still in ferment, at this point the brutal military-based government has been replaced by naked army rule under Mubarak’s poodle and Israel’s buddy. In the name of “democracy,” the Egyptian army (with Washington’s backing) just staged a coup.

What concretely has happened so far? The Egyptian masses overcame every obstacle to demonstrate unmistakably their hatred for Mubarak – but they did not attempt to take power. When U.S. president Barack Obama praises the Egyptian people for acting “peacefully,” with the “moral force of non-violence” (this from the imperialist warmonger who is slaughtering Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq!), he is hailing the fact that they did not storm the presidential palace or seize TV and radio stations – although police stations were burned down in Suez, Ismailia and other outlying cities.

Mubarak having become a liability because of popular hostility, the generals finally dumped him in order to preserve their positions, from which many have grown obscenely rich. The “hundred families” who own Egypt are desperate to get the masses off the streets so they can rest easy in their gilded estates. The merely well-to-do were nervously watching CNN inside their well-manicured gated communities. And the U.S. imperialists are still hoping to preserve the fundamentals of the puppet government they have propped up for decades. So for the greater good of imperialist-capitalist domination, Mubarak had to go.

The credit for driving out the tyrant belongs to the Egyptian masses, who even on the last crucial day refused to compromise, and even strengthened their mobilization, encircling the presidential palace and state television headquarters. But this was not enough: the army did not “resign” Mubarak until chief of staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan got the go-ahead from the U.S., in the form of Obama’s statement saying that the Egyptian president’s February 10 TV speech was not the “immediate, meaningful or sufficient” transition Washington required. A revolutionary mobilization is needed to sweep them all out. But what kind of revolution? How is it to be accomplished? And which class shall rule?

The core of the opposition which sparked the two and a half weeks of anti-regime protests is among well-educated, and well-heeled, young professionals in the capital: doctors, lawyers, business execs. Wael Ghonim, who launched the Facebook page that attracted a wide following, is a Google executive who says he could have “stayed in my villa in the [United Arab] Emirates and made good money” rather than protesting and getting thrown in jail, blindfolded for 12 days. On February 10, Ghonim “tweeted” his “trust” in the Egyptian army and proclaimed “mission accomplished” – even as the final tug of war was looming. That night the consensus figure of the bourgeois opposition, former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei posted his reaction to the Mubarak speech: “Army must save the country now.”

So these proponents of (capitalist) democracy are not about to spark protest against army rule. For that matter, the military could ultimately have crushed the protests in Tahrir Square, at a cost of many lives to be sure. There were doubtless discussions about just that at the command level in Cairo and Washington. Why didn’t they crack down? Leaks from Egyptian army and U.S. “diplomatic” sources say the generals were afraid that soldiers would not obey any orders to fire on the crowd. Perhaps. But there was no evidence of budding mutiny in the ranks, nor was there any sign of discontent in the military when the high command took power.

What decisively changed matters was when the working class entered the scene this week. In response to appeals by protest organizers and a newly formed independent Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions (FETU), strikes broke out just about everywhere. On February 8, some 6,000 Suez Canal workers at five service companies struck in the cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia. On February 9, about 400 steel workers in Suez downed tools; 750 bottling plant workers in Sadat City staged a sit-in; 2,000 pharmaceutical workers in Quesna struck; hundreds of phone workers rallied in front of company headquarters in Cairo; 5,000 postal workers protested in front of the Egypt Post Authority; 1,500 workers in the textile center of Mahala al-Kubra marched; 4,000 workers at the coke and chemical factory and thousands of workers at the al-Nasr automobile plant, a silk factory and military factories in the Cairo industrial suburb of Helwan struck; health, museum and other government employees demonstrated in the capital, and Cairo bus drivers walked out. Demands included increases in their starvation wages, converting temporary workers into full-time employees, ousting regime-imposed company directors, and in many cases, removal of Mubarak as president.

Even bourgeois journalists recognize that the action by the Egyptian working class was the tipping point for the military. Various leftists and labor militants have celebrated this fact. Still, while workers joined the struggle, the working class was not leading the mobilization. Interviews with strikers in Mahalla expressed support for the “youth rebellion” as something separate. Yet so long as the workers are just one more sector in struggle, and even if they should come to the forefront, it will not be possible to bring down the capitalist dictatorship until they undertake a fight for their own class rule, for workers power.

At present, the mobilizations have not yet subsided. Activists are demanding guarantees from the army that it will support a civilian regime and “free elections.” News blogs and Internet video postings today are reporting divisions in Maidan al-Tahrir over whether to take down the protest encampment or to stay. The military Supreme Council says it will rule “until a new government is formed” – quite an open-ended formulation. Today (February 13) that was changed to “for a period of six months or until …  elections are held” – still pretty elastic. But even so, it takes a lot of money to compete in bourgeois elections. Who in Egypt has that kind of money? The people who ran Mubarak’s authoritarian regime, and those who those who grew rich off it. The “crony capitalists” will do everything to preserve their domination.

For Red Revolution on the Nile!

Even under Mubarak’s police-state rule, a small left has managed to eke out a semi-public existence, including the Communist Party of Egypt (CPE) and the Revolutionary Socialists (RS). (There are also several bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Arab/Egyptian nationalist currents which claim to be socialist.) From various reports, the CPE and RS have been present in the mobilizations, but they have not played an independent role. This is not only due to relative size, compared to the bourgeois opposition such as ElBaradei’s Movement for Change, and the April 6 Youth Movement. It is primarily a result of the fact that these “socialists” are politically indistinguishable from the capitalist “democrats.”

Thus in a February 1 statement (“The Revolution Will Continue Until the Demands of the Masses Are Achieved”), the Communist Party puts forward a four-point program including removal of Mubarak; formation of a coalition government for a transition period; calling a “constituent assembly to draft a new constitution”; and prosecution of those responsible for the hundreds killed. This is a purely bourgeois platform, a faithful reproduction of the Stalinist program of “two-stage revolution,” in which the first stage is capitalist democracy  (and the second stage never arrives because in the meantime, the bourgeois democrats massacre the left).

For its part, the Revolutionary Socialists issued a statement (“Glory to the Martyrs! Victory to the Revolution!”), also dated February 1, which calls for nationalization of the companies, land and property looted by Mubarak and his crony capitalists; restoration of “Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region” rather than acting as guard dogs for the U.S. and Israel; for a “people’s army” that “protects the revolution”; for the formation of “revolutionary councils” and for a “popular revolution.” But while this statement has more leftist verbiage, it does not call in any way for a struggle for socialist revolution.

The RS are followers of the late Tony Cliff who characterized the Stalinist-governed Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state, as “state capitalist” and refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack. The two are related, as Cliff’s anti-Marxist “theory” served to justify his pro-imperialist stand in the anti-Soviet Cold War. The Cliffite International Socialist Tendency is a left social-democratic current which constantly seeks to hook up with various petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois “movements,” from antiwar movements to electoral coalitions, in order to pressure capitalist governments. Building a revolutionary communist vanguard is the furthest thing from these reformists’ intentions.

Thus in Egypt as everywhere, the reformist Stalinists and social democrats follow similar playbooks, in which the language may vary but the essential bourgeois content is identical. The RS calls for “Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution,” but not to lead it. While expressing reservations about the army, the RS yearns for an army like “the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 1973” – that is, for the bourgeois army of the reactionary Anwar Sadat, which for that matter did not defeat Zionist Israel in the 1973 war which was by no means a defense of the Palestinians. The RS calls for “popular councils,” not workers councils, and for a “popular revolution” not workers revolution. Even when the most prominent RS spokesman, the journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, talks of permanent revolution he poses this in classless terms, to “empower the people of this country with direct democracy from below” (“The workers, middle class, military junta and the permanent revolution,” 3arabawy, 12 February).

Leon Trotsky based his theory of permanent revolution on the experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. He held that in colonial and semi-colonial countries subjugated by imperialism, the democratic, national and agrarian tasks of the classical bourgeois revolutions could only be accomplished by the working class taking power, supported by the impoverished peasantry, and proceeding directly to socialist tasks of expropriating the bourgeoisie and extending the revolution to the imperialist centers. Hence Trotsky’s insistence on the need for a communist vanguard party of the proletariat to lead this struggle for socialist revolution. Modern-day revisionists like Cliff (or the pseudo-Trotskyist Ernest Mandel) turn this program into a caricature, arguing that objective circumstances will compel this outcome, thereby justifying their tailing after “popular” “movements.” 

Contrary to the RS, there is no such animal as a “popular revolution.” A popular uprising, as a description of a mass upheaval including various class forces, yes. But a revolution establishes a new state power, which necessarily has a class character – either bourgeois or proletarian. Talk of a “third way” is simply eyewash to hide the capitalist nature of the regime. And as in Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1970-73, organizing for popular/people’s unity/revolution promotes suicidal illusions in the nature of bourgeois “democrats.” The butcher Augusto Pinochet was appointed defense minister by Allende, who praised the general’s “constitutionalist” credentials. This is the program of the popular front, tying the workers and the oppressed to their exploiters and oppressors, that has led to bloody defeat from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s until today.

Characteristically for Cliffites, they do not draw a class line, but rather seek to carve out a niche on the left of the bourgeois political spectrum with a dash of pink “socialist” artificial coloring. But in semi-colonial countries where bonapartist military-police regimes are the norm, there is not much political space there to inhabit. The RS, EGP and other leftists have endured the exactions of the Mubarak dictatorship, and may soon face repression at the hands of the military junta, against which they must be vigorously defended. But at times of revolutionary upheaval, such as the present moment in Egypt, the Stalinists’ and social democrats’ reformist program would sink revolutionary struggle in a “democratic” swamp.

In the volatile situation which the mobilization against the Mubarak regime and now its fall have opened up, Trotskyists would put forward a transitional program to take the struggle from the immediate demands of the workers and oppressed to the goal of socialist revolution. Many of the burning issues in Egypt today are democratic questions, but which can only be resolved through revolutionary class struggle. Thus the League for the Fourth International calls for a revolutionary constituent assembly, organizing for the formation of workers councils such as the soviets in Russia in 1917 to overthrow capitalist rule with a workers and peasants government. As part of this struggle, Trotskyists would call on the Egyptian fellahin (peasantry) to seize the estates returned to the large landowners by Mubarak and to carry out agrarian revolution.

There will almost certainly be an explosion of strike actions by Egypt’s long-suppressed working class. Trotskyists would fight for workers to dissolve the corporatist ETUF and for trade-union independence from state control, as well as from political ties to bourgeois parties. The struggle against mass unemployment and the ravages of inflation can be addressed by fighting for a sliding scale of wages and hours, to divide the available work among all takers and form neighborhood committees to control prices. Workers should occupy factories owned by Mubarak cronies (like the Misr National Steel Company) as well as other military, state-owned and private capitalist enterprises, while forming workers defense squads to fend off attacks. 

While the reformists conciliate bourgeois liberals (like ElBaradei’s Movement for Change), conservatives (the Wafd) and Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood), communists fight for the complete separation of religion from the state, a key democratic demand. It is vital to defend the embattled Coptic Christian minority, as many of the demonstrators in Liberation Square understood. When a few Islamists tried to strike up a chant of “Allahu akbar” (god is great), many others began chanting “Muslim, Christian, we're all Egyptian!”  At the same time we fight for complete equality for women, including not only equal legal rights but also the right to free abortion on demand, equal pay for equal work, etc. Such demands will be ferociously resisted both by reactionary fundamentalists of all religions, and by the “secular” bourgeois politicians who consider such fundamental demands “unrealistic.” (Neither the EGP nor RS statements say a word about women’s rights.)

A key issue in Egypt is the struggle against imperialism and Zionism. While the bourgeois “youth” leaders express confidence in the Egyptian army and President Obama, Trotskyists fight to defeat U.S. imperialism in its predatory colonialist war and subjugation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Raising the demand to block passage through the Suez Canal to U.S. warships and military supplies could arouse mass support, mobilize workers action, and set off a sharp clash with the military junta, as the U.S. Sixth Fleet is reportedly steaming toward Egypt.

This is also a key moment to escalate the struggle in defense of the Palestinian people, demanding that Egypt immediately open the border to Gaza to relieve the population in this giant concentration camp besieged by Zionist Israel. Organizing mass marches to open the border could mobilize tens of thousands, and put the military in a difficult bind. There should also be a concerted effort to win over the ranks of the conscript army, including the formation of soldiers councils fighting for workers power.

Such a proletarian internationalist program for a socialist federation of the Near East, including for an Arab-Hebrew workers state in Palestine, will clash sharply with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Egyptian and Arab nationalist currents, with Islamic fundamentalists and bourgeois liberals and conservatives. Yet it could galvanize the working class at a time when protests are spreading from Algiers to Teheran. It will take hard struggle, but in revolutionary times events move quickly and the masses’ consciousness can advance at a rapid pace, provided there is a revolutionary leadership to mobilize them. Certainly the imperialists, Zionists, militarists and a host of autocratic regimes in the Near East fear that following the February upheaval an Egyptian October could follow. Red revolution on the Nile would shake not only the region but the entire world. ■