To have the greatest chance of success in not only overthrowing the gangster regimes but also to flush out the systems of subjugation that have stifled the region for decades, workers, youth and intellectuals must lead a mass-based movement that seek to do away with class-based antagonisms at their root, with special focus upon helping the most oppressed, marginalised sections of society. In other words, an authentic, mass-based, democratic socialist movement. The class-based nature of the revolt must be made clear and brought to the fore. Nationalism and fundamentalist religion, by contrast, are deadly poisons to the working class. The revolt must spread and inspire further acts of disobedience throughout the region, until both imperialism and capitalism have been thoroughly overthrown.
To the Tunisian people, I just want to say Thank You. You have inspired new hope and vitality in the struggle for dignity and decency. May your example serve to ignite the world and crush all oppressors.
From Socialist Alternative Australia:
The Arab world is being turned upside down
Corey Oakley 28 January 2011
A stunning revolt by workers and the poor is shaking the Arab world. The revolution in Tunisia has inspired or accelerated protest movements in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. And now Egypt – the most strategically important of all the Arab countries – is in the midst of a mass rebellion the likes of which has not been seen in a generation, and which threatens to topple the hated pro-US dictator, Hosni Mubarak.
In amazing scenes not witnessed in Egypt since the bread riots of 1977, thousands of people marched through the streets of Cairo, battling riot police, storming government buildings, and occupying the symbolic Tahrir Square. The protests started in the early afternoon, but many hours later – at 2am the next morning – thousands of people were still demonstrating outside the parliament building.
The protesters showed incredible courage and defiance in the face of police repression. Riot police – who usually suppress protests in the capital with ease – lost their ability to instil fear.
One account from Tahrir Square, early in the day, tells how:
On the south end of the square, a military tank rolled into the crowd. At the top of the tank an officer manned a fire hose that hammered down onto the protesters. But no one moved.
The fire tank had not advanced more than 30 yards before a young Egyptian sprinted up the front of the vehicle and scaled up the side. He proceeded to climb up to the top of the tank, inciting ovations from the crowd. When he reached the top of the tank, the officer manning the hose dropped the nozzle and jumped on the back of the protester. The two men toppled off the vehicle and onto the ground, where the man was taken away by other officers.
The moment they fell to the ground, the front 200 protesters dropped to their knees in unison and began to pray while the rest of the crowd looked into the faces of Egyptians staring at the scene from high above in their apartment windows. “Who will be the next hero?” they chanted as they looked up. Then they burst into a new chant: "Come join us, come join us!"
In many places the police found themselves on the losing end of battles with protesters, who broke their lines and chased them off the streets.
While the protests in Cairo – where the ability of the state to repress dissent is strongest – were immensely significant, so to were the protests outside of the capital. As Egyptian-American activist Mostafa Omar told socialistworker.org
The size and scale of the protests outside Cairo is the government's biggest problem. In Suez, people refused to be dispersed and fought a kind of guerrilla battle with police. In Alexandria, there was a mass demonstration of tens of thousands, followed by meetings at central squares. There were fascinating scenes – people brought huge posters with Mubarak's face, and were burning them in the street. Elsewhere, in a number of cities in the Nile Delta – a very industrialized era – the demonstrations were most militant as well. It was almost like a national uprising.
In Mahalla, the heart of working-class militancy in recent years, as many as 45,000 demonstrated, and engaged in fierce battles with police.
But it was not just the militancy of demonstrators – the protests were infused with an insurgent, revolutionary mood. Outside the offices of the ruling National Democratic Party in Cairo, a crowd of a thousand chanted: “Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” (Zine Ben-Ali fled by plane from Tunis to Saudi Arabia). “This is the first day of our revolution” said a group of young men talking to Al Jazeera.
Hatred of dictatorial rule, corruption, police violence, and craven subservience to the US and Israel, are all important factors motivating the protests. But at the centre of the revolt – in Egypt and across the region – are class issues: endemic poverty, debilitating price rises, and the vicious neo-liberal policies imposed on Egyptians by the ruling elite. So while there is support for the protests across social classes, it is being driven by the anger of workers, youth and the poor.
The grievances that led to this week’s explosion have been building for many years. And the latest revolt follows on from what has been a growing rebellion by workers over the past three years.
But it is the events in Tunisia that have turned hatred and anger into open rebellion. Marx once said that ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses. The idea that is gripping the imagination of the Arab world today is that it is possible to resist, that dictators can be overthrown, that people can rise up and make their own history.
The histories of all of the mass revolutionary movements of the past are filled with accounts of how ordinary people, usually too ground down by the drudgery of everyday life to be involved in politics, can be transformed by the fact that suddenly it is they who have the power to determine their own destiny and that of their country, rather than the usual politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”.
Watching the footage of Egyptians, young and old, defiantly speaking their minds to the cameras; organising each other to defend the protests from the police; making heroic, unforgettable gestures of defiance and dignity – the reclamations of humanity that define mass rebellion – you could not help but think that something has fundamentally changed. And the regime, for all its power, will find it very difficult to change things back.
It was the sense of the power of mass defiance that turned the hesitations and nervousness with which the protests began into a revolt that lasted long into the night. Guardian journalist Jack Shenker sent this report late Tuesday evening:
As midnight approaches in Cairo thousands of protesters are still occupying the Tahrir Square, vowing to remain in place until the government falls…
"We will stay here all night, all week if necessary," said Youssef Hisham, a 25 year old filmmaker. "There are too many people on the streets for the police to charge – if they did, it would be a massacre. I came here today not as the representative of any political party, but simply in the name of Egypt. We have liberated the heart of the country, and Mubarak now knows that his people want him gone."
As fresh waves of protesters broke through police cordons to join the throng in Tahrir, a festival atmosphere took hold – groups were cheered as they arrived carrying blankets and food, and demonstrators pooled money together to buy water and other supplies. "The atmosphere is simply amazing – everyone is so friendly, there's no anger, no harassment, just solidarity and remarkable energy," added Hisham.
Just before 3am, after prolonged fighting, the police finally cleared the square. The next morning, Thursday, the government announced that all further protests were banned, and anyone who attempted to demonstrate would be arrested and charged. Literally tens of thousands of police manned street corners, arresting anyone who walked near. According to Egyptian officials, over 860 people have been arrested, the overwhelming majority in Cairo.
The Guardian reported on Thursday night (Egyptian time) that
Riot police and plainclothes officers armed with staves and bars broke up a demonstration outside one of the capital's biggest tourist hotels, the Ramses Hilton, on the banks of the river Nile. Tonight demonstrators and police are still playing a violent game of cat and mouse through the city centre with protesters quickly regrouping after being broken up. The sound of police sirens and detonating teargas canisters could be heard across the city.
But for all the repression, the security forces failed in their attempt to squash the movement through means of state terror. Thousands still managed to demonstrate in Cairo and across the country. In Suez the main police station was set on fire. Further mass demonstrations – hopefully the biggest yet – are planned after Friday prayers this week.
The US and the Egyptian ruling class
It is often said on the left – with some truth – that the Israeli state is the key means by which the US ensures its domination of the Middle East and its resources. But just as important is the network of Arab dictatorships that maintain an iron grip on their populations, collaborate closely with Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians, and allow the vast resources of the region to be expropriated by the various imperial powers while the mass of the Arab population lives in abject poverty. In exchange for this base treachery they are allowed to amass their own obscene fortunes, which to their minds is more than fair payment for their souls.
Because of this, the latest rebellion puts the US government in a bind.
On the one hand, it feels obliged – for purely public relations reasons – to not seem hostile to what is self-evidently a heroic movement for democratic rights.
On the other hand, the upsurge of democratic revolt is fundamentally at odds with US imperialistic domination of the Middle East. Any genuinely democratic regime that represented the views of the people in the Arab world would be fiercely opposed to US/Israeli domination of the region, and also to the brutal class system that sees a tiny minority live in luxury while most people struggle to survive.
So the US is attempting to hedge its bets. Obama claims to support the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people – though he did not feel moved to do so until Zine Ben-Ali was safely in a plane circling Europe looking for a country to land (thank god for the US’s favourite client, Saudi Arabia!). No mention, of course, of the billions of dollars the US gave Ben Ali for services rendered, particularly since the beginning of the War on Terror.
But it was one thing to abandon the Tunisian dictator, it is entirely another to abandon Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, which has played a key role in enforcing US interests in the region and the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Obama pointedly refused to mention the Egyptian protests in his state of the union address. White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said when questioned about the upheavals that "We have a close and important ally in Egypt and they will continue to be". Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said the United States believed the government of Egyptian President Mubarak was “stable and was looking for ways to meet the Egyptian people's needs.”
There are figures in the US ruling class who think the US needs to distance itself from Mubarak. A Washington Post editorial warned that “Tuesday's events suggested that the Cairo government is not at all stable” and argued that “blind U.S. backing for Mr. Mubarak makes a political disaster in Egypt more rather than less likely.”
But these are mere strategic differences. The US ruling class is united in its determination to see a pro-US regime in Egypt. And on a fundamental level, that means an anti-democratic government, for the reason that the interests of the US and Israel are totally counterposed to those of the mass of Egyptian citizens. There should be no doubt that the US will stop at nothing to try and prevent any genuinely democratic government coming to power in Egypt.
The strategic importance of Egypt to the US is one of the reasons that the Egyptian uprising will face much more serious obstacles to success than did the revolution in Tunisia. On top of that, the Egyptian ruling class is much more stable and broadly based than was Ben Ali’s nepotistic dictatorship. The army will not abandon Mubarak with the same speed as its Tunisian counterpart.
A fight for socialism is the only solution
The revolt in Egypt poses point blank the need for a struggle for socialism.
The demands that are driving the revolt – for an end to imperialist domination of the region, for democracy, for a decent life for the millions of Arab workers who cannot afford the basics of life in spite of living in a part of the world that has created more riches than almost any other in history - cannot be met without a fundamental reorganisation of power in the Middle East.
US imperialism has to be driven out. So too do the ruling class elites who are both craven servants of the US, and exploitative ruling classes in their own right. The only way to do this is to turn the current uprisings into a genuinely social revolution, one that expropriates the riches of the powerful and creates new organs of power based on the democratic organisation of workers, students and the poor.
In Tunisia we are starting to see the beginnings of such organisation, as people organise in their workplaces and communities to try and defend the radical spirit of the revolution against attempts to impose a government that is simply the Ben Ali regime without Ben Ali.
In Egypt the immediate task is still the overthrow of the dictatorship. Because of the strength of the regime, and the intransigent backing that the Egyptian ruling class receives from the US state, working class organisation and struggle is crucial not just to determining the nature of a future regime, but to getting rid of the current one.
This means that in the coming days and weeks in Egypt, the extent to which the working class imposes itself on the movement and gives it direction and organisation will be crucial to determining whether the regime can be overthrown.
The huge strike movement of the last few years opens up the possibility that the working class movement can play a decisive role. But until now the political opposition to Mubarak has been occupied by forces – like the Muslim Brotherhood – who have no fundamental opposition to the prevailing social order in Egypt.
The difficulties that those rebelling in Egypt face are not minor concerns. For decades oppositional politics have been dominated by, variously, bourgeois Arab nationalism, Stalinism, and Islamism. It will not be easy for a genuinely revolutionary working class socialist current to build now, even given the extraordinary events taking place. But insofar as mass upheavals inspire hope on an undreamt of scale, they also open up possibilities that yesterday seemed mere fantasy.
1 comments:
Good article. It is amazing what is happening. I just wonder though how likely it is that the whole thing will be hijacked by fundamental Islamic interests. No problem with Islam as such other than its seeming intolerance of any other religion. Not a good look for the christian and other minority religions in the region.
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