MUBARAK‘S LIFE-SENTENCE!

If anything distinguishes the difference between a revolution and an uprising, then the sentence handed down to the dictator Mubarak, in Egypt today, highlights this in stark detail. The life-sentence, passed by the - still in power - Egyptian judiciary, for failing to stop the massacre of protestors, will be served in comfortable surroundings and with the best medical facilities on hand. His accomplices, family and friends, in corruption and torture are exonerated, by the same legal establishment. What else can be expected, when the same socio-economic forces, including the military and legal system are left intact?

The message to the world’s dictators is, this. Unless there is a thoroughgoing revolutionary transformation, the worst you can expect for decades of murder, torture, financial corruption and savage exploitation of your populations, is a comfortable, supported retirement, with only a few restrictions on your freedom. The message to those who are complicit with corrupt regimes and get their hands bloody on behalf of it, is even more reassuring. Without a revolution you will get off Scot free, and may even be allowed to run for office (as former official Ahmed Shafiq is now doing) in the new regime.

The message to the working and oppressed, people of the Middle East and North Africa, suffering under decades of torture, corruption and exploitation, is the same as that for the rest of the world. If you stop at a mass uprising, and allow yourself to be convinced that you have carried out a revolution - by no matter whom - beware. Unless you carry out a complete revolution, you will be tricked into being diverted into forming political parties and engaging in the complex, debilitating and Machiavellian charade of political elections. In other words, having suffered countless deaths and injuries, in opposing the brutal regime, your efforts and aspirations will be absorbed and deflected and the ‘system’ will continue to exploit you under a new figurehead.

Instead of a revolutionary unity of working and oppressed classes, united by economic and social grievances, changing things for themselves, as they did in Tahir square, we now have a disunited populace. The unity achieved, during the uprising was too quickly channelled into top-down ’official’ institutions, instead of being channelled into bottom-up and horizontal organisational forms. The Egyptian working and oppressed classes have now been thrown back upon past religious and other sectarian differences and once again are being played off against each other in a supposedly democratic, peaceful political conflict, which just masks the hidden and sinister violence of ‘business as usual‘.

This new situation will present huge problems, for the working and oppressed classes of Egypt, as the anger and frustration amongst the population seeks outlet and explodes in different ways. A section of the anti-regime forces, may well now swell the votes of the Muslim brotherhood, despite any reservations, in the hope that they will confront the regime. The secular, pluralist forces, which led the original uprising, may therefore be further split and weakened in the short term. The remnants of the old regime, and their supporters, will now be able to regroup politically and also split the secular tendency and attract those who are suspicious and fearful of the Islamists, in and out of the Muslim brotherhood.

With Libya fractured by the European and NATO military intervention and now thrown back on tribal, sectarian and township divisions, and a similar situation developing in Syria, the initial optimism prompted by the Arab Spring is gradually eroding. Anyone who thought that the insidious and corrupt system of capitalist inspired imperialism and neo-liberalism, could be swept away simply by the impetus of heroic mass uprisings will now have to rethink their opinions. To the increasingly wide-spread recognition, that the capitalist system is fundamentally corrupt, exploitative and brutal will need to be added, another.

It is the following. A revolutionary transformation, on a global scale, of the whole system needs to take place and this will require more than heroic sacrifice. but clear thinking, a knowledge of past mistakes and the reliance upon the working and oppressed, classes self-activity and self governance. The present global crisis will cause further uprisings, which will go beyond demonstrations, petitions and one-day strikes, in one country after another. Since capitalism is a global system, so to is its crisis and so too is resistance to it. The challenge for the revolutionary, anti-capitalist left is to be the internationalist, non-sectarian bearers of the lessons of the past and the humanist aspirations of the human species as a whole.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2012) [See also ‘Revolution’ and ‘The Riddle of History Solved’ at www.critical-mass.net ]