The Egyptian Revolution enters a new stage and much more

'The Egyptian Revolution enters a new stage' and more
14 February 2011

The forced resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator of Egypt who ruled the country for more than three decades, was a significant victory for workers and youth who have participated in their millions in demonstrations and strikes during the past several weeks. Subsequent events have shown, however, that this revolution is only in its initial stages.

With its series of communiqués issued over the weekend, the Egyptian military has made clear its response to the revolutionary struggles. Its aim is to divert and suppress the mass movement, while ensuring a tactical transfer of power to maintain the old regime in all but name.

The Egyptian army is highlighting its elimination of various legal fictions of the Mubarak regime—the rubberstamp parliament and the dictator’s constitution. In line with the Obama administration’s false claims that the army would lead a “democratic transition,” the New York Times praised these measures as “sweeping steps that echoed protestors’ demands.”

This is an absurd falsification. The army is trying to keep itself in power, while granting none of the basic demands that are driving millions of Egyptians into the streets. The country is now under the rule of a military junta, which is retaining all the emergency powers of the old regime, preserving the police, and attempting to rule through a network of old Mubarak cronies like Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq.

As for the Obama administration, having supported Mubarak for as long as possible, it is backing the military regime. On Saturday, the administration declared that it welcomed the measures taken by the generals and their supposed commitment to democracy. Having helped train many of Egypt’s officers, it intends to use them to secure its interests in Egypt and the Middle East. These include not only defending its strategic and military interests, but above all heading off a revolutionary challenge from the working class.

Deeply tied to Egypt’s business community, the officer corps is hostile to the wave of strikes that is shaking Egypt, and workers’ demands for improved wages and social conditions. While it does not yet feel strong enough to do so, the army is signaling its intention to move against strikers. In a statement denouncing “chaos and disorder,” the Higher Military Council said it would ban meetings by labor unions or professional syndicates, effectively making strikes illegal.

In six months, and perhaps longer, the army plans to hold elections on the basis of a constitution drafted exclusively by itself, and without dissolving Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). That is, it hopes to use the six-month period to wind down the protests and give a pseudo-democratic cover to a regime no more responsive to the demands of the population than the one controlled by the hated Mubarak.

This basic political fact is summed up in the person of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi—now officially the ruler of Egypt—as depicted in cables by US Ambassador to Egypt Francis Ricciardone published by WikiLeaks. Describing Tantawi in March 2008 as committed to the 1979 treaty with Israel and firmly “opposed [to] both economic and political reforms,” Ricciardone summed up Tantawi’s politics thus: “He and Mubarak are focused on regime stability and maintaining the status quo through the end of their time.”

The claim that this corresponds to protestors’ demands is a repugnant lie. The millions of people now participating in strikes and protests—and the thousands who were killed or tortured—were not struggling to preserve the old regime.

Egypt’s official “opposition” is nonetheless signaling its support for the army. After stressing the need for “law and order” Friday, Mohammed ElBaradei declared yesterday: “We trust the army and call upon people to give them the opportunity to implement what they promised.”

Mohamed el-Katatni, a leading official of the Muslim Brotherhood, said: “The main goal of the revolution has been achieved.”

These statements clearly demonstrate that no constituency for genuine democracy exists in the Egyptian capitalist class, or its backers in Washington, or in the capitals of the other imperialist powers. The basic demands of the workers and oppressed masses—for better wages and living conditions, for social equality, and for an end to imperialist domination—fill all sections of the political establishment with dread. Faced with a mass upsurge of the working class, threatening their basic class interests, the pro-capitalist “opposition” reacts by backing the dictatorship.

This confirms a central tenet of the theory of Permanent Revolution elaborated by Leon Trotsky: the bourgeoisie of oppressed countries cannot lead a struggle for democracy and an end to imperialist domination. Any such struggle, Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution, “is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.”

The continuation of the revolution and the fight for its interests is bringing the working class and oppressed masses into ever more direct conflict with the military, the official opposition, and US imperialism.

To carry forward this struggle requires the building of independent organs of workers’ democracy, in opposition to the military-police state, to lay the groundwork for a transfer of power to the working class. It requires the fight to unify the workers of Egypt with the working class of the entire region, along with workers in the advanced capitalist countries—above all the United States. The revolutionary uprising in Egypt is part of a global struggle of workers and oppressed around the world against a common assault of the corporate and financial elite.

Above all, it requires the building of a new party dedicated to leading these struggles to their necessary conclusion: socialist revolution. The WSWS calls on all its readers and sympathizers in Egypt and internationally to join it in the fight to build such a party.

Alex Lantier

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The Egyptian working class moves to the forefront
10 February 2011

During the past few days a steady stream of reports has confirmed the increasingly decisive role of the Egyptian working class in the struggle against the Mubarak regime. While the mass assemblies and clashes in Tahrir Square in Cairo have been the focal point of media coverage, the growing wave of working class militancy—in the form of protest demonstrations and strikes—will have a greater impact on the course of events.
In the industrial community of Kafr al-Dawwar—a historic center of working class militancy—hundreds of silk and textile workers participated in protests over inadequate pay and bad conditions. In Helwan, a Nile city south of Cairo, 4,000 workers from the Coke Coal and Basic Chemical Company announced a strike. While demanding higher pay, permanent contracts for temporary workers, and an end to corruption, the workers also declared their solidarity with protestors in the capital. In another significant protest action in Helwan, 2,000 silk workers participated in a demonstration that demanded the removal of their company’s board of directors.
In the city of Mahalla, located in the Nile Delta, 1,500 workers protested the late payment of wages and bonuses. In another struggle in that city, hundreds of workers at a spinning company participated in a sit-in demanding action on over-due promotions. In Quesna, also located in the Delta, 2,000 pharmaceutical workers went on strike.
More than 6,000 workers employed by the Suez Canal Authority in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez staged sit-ins to demand adjustments in their pay. Also in Suez, 400 workers employed by the Misr National Steel Company initiated industrial action.
This movement of the Egyptian working class began long before the mass protests that erupted in Cairo during the last week of January. As documented in a study by Professor Joel Beinin, a specialist in the history of the Egyptian labor movement, the developing strike wave “is erupting from the largest social movement Egypt has witnessed in more than half a century. Over 1.7 million workers engaged in more than 1,900 strikes and other forms of protest from 2004 to 2008.”
Ironically, the growth of labor militancy has been, for the sclerotic Egyptian regime, an unwelcome consequence of economic growth during the last decade. This growth has been fueled by the massive inflow of international capital into Egypt during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Foreign Direct Investment increased from $400 million in 2000 to $13.2 billion in 2007-08. Egypt is now the largest recipient of FDI on the African continent. Between 2004 and 2007, the annual rate of GDP growth increased from 4 percent to 7.2 percent. But the benefits of economic growth have been confined to a small section of society. Despite strikes that have occasionally wrested concessions, the overwhelming mass of the working population is mired in poverty. Moreover, the regime has responded to the rising challenge from the working class with escalating brutality and repression.
Now, in the context of a nation-wide mass movement against the Mubarak regime, the central question is the role of the working class in deciding not only the fate of Mubarak, but the nature of the regime that arises from the ongoing revolutionary convulsions.
The greatest danger confronting Egyptian workers is that, after providing the essential social force to wrest power from the hands of an aging dictator, nothing of political substance will change except the names and faces of some of the leading personnel. In other words, the capitalist state will remain intact. Political power and control over economic life will remain in the hands of the Egyptian capitalists, backed by the military, and their imperialist overlords in Europe and North America. Promises of democracy and social reform will be repudiated at the first opportunity, and a new regime of savage repression will be instituted.
These dangers are not exaggerated. The entire history of revolutionary struggle in the Twentieth Century proves that the struggle for democracy and for the liberation of countries oppressed by imperialism can be achieved, as Leon Trotsky insisted in his theory of permanent revolution, only by the conquest of power by the working class on the basis of an internationalist and socialist program.
The history of Egypt provides ample proof for this strategic principle.
The Egyptian working class has a long history of struggle. In the early national movement against British colonialism, the working class engaged in major struggles. However, setting a pattern that was to be repeated again and again, the corrupt Egyptian bourgeoisie—after taking advantage of the pressure exerted by the working class to extract limited concessions from the British—reneged on all its commitments to the workers. In the aftermath of the fake independence proclaimed by the British in 1922—in which London continued to rule through the mechanism of a thoroughly venal constitutional monarchy—the working class remained subject to relentless state repression.
In the decades that followed, the Egyptian bourgeoisie bitterly opposed the efforts of workers to establish trade unions. Only under the pressure of World War II, when the British-backed regime made concessions to obtain broader support, were trade unions legalized. But once the war-time emergency passed, the regime moved to roll back this limited gain. In the aftermath of the war, in response to a renewed upsurge of the working class, the bourgeoisie made concessions which, invariably, were followed by repression.
The Free Officer coup of July 23, 1952 ended the monarchy. The months leading up to the coup had witnessed a rising tide of working class struggle that weakened the monarchy. However, the class character of the new regime—of which Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser soon emerged as leader—was revealed within weeks. The workers welcomed the coup. Their illusions in the revolutionary rhetoric of the army leaders were encouraged by the Stalinist Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL), which had very close ties with the Free Officers (and had even been informed in advance of the plans for the coup). In keeping with the Stalinist theory of a “two-stage” revolution (first democracy, and later, at some unspecified point in the future, socialism), the DMNL attributed a progressive role to Naguib and Nasser. This had, almost immediately, tragic consequences. At the Misr Fine Spinning and Weaving Company in the industrial community of Kafr al-Dawwar, thousands of workers went on strike in August 1952 to protest long-standing grievances. As one of the leaders of the movement later recalled:
It was very natural that the workers should start a movement in Kafr al-Dawwar because they heard the communiqués of the revolution which announced that the kingdom was abolished, that the regime was against injustice, that the rights of the people would be restored. It was natural that workers who had been oppressed for a very long time would put forward their demands… [Cited in “Egyptian Communists and the Free Officers: 1950-54,” by Selma Botman, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3 (July 1986), p. 355]
The movement was savagely repressed by the army. The new Revolutionary Command Council hastily convened a court martial of workers in the leadership of the strike. Two of the leaders, Muhammad Khamis and Ahmad al-Bakri, were sentenced to death on August 18, 1952 and hanged three weeks later on the grounds of the factory. It should be noted that the member of the Revolutionary Command Council who presided over the court martial, Abd al-Mun’im Amin, had links with the American Embassy in Cairo.
Subsequently, the Nasser regime did carry out a series of reforms that offered marginal improvements in the conditions of the Egyptian peasantry and the working class. The nationalization of the Suez Canal won broad support for the regime among the Egyptian masses. Later, the nationalization of foreign-owned companies and a substantial segment of Egyptian companies led to a rise in living standards. However, the unchallengeable rule of the Nasserist regime was that no independent social or political initiative of the working class was permissible. In the words of Nasser, “The workers don’t demand, we give.” When workers defied this rule and demanded, they were imprisoned, tortured and even executed.
Though Nasser called his combination of nationalist paternalism and repression “Arab socialism,” the Egyptian bourgeoisie remained firmly in power. Upon Nasser’s sudden death in 1970, only three years after the catastrophic defeat of Egypt in the Six Day War with Israel, Anwar Sadat became president. The new regime moved to repudiate both the pseudo-socialist policies of Nasser as well as those elements of Nasser’s foreign policy that had incurred the wrath of the United States. On the economic front, Sadat moved to adapt his policies to the demands of the International Monetary Fund.
It was in the sphere of foreign policy that Sadat took his most dramatic step. He visited Jerusalem in November 1977 and signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, an action which guaranteed the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and amounted to a total betrayal of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. Sadat suffered retribution from assassins in October 1981. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, continued, albeit in a more ruthless form, the policies of Sadat.
On the economic front, neo-liberalism was entrenched. Large segments of the economy that had been nationalized by Nasser were returned to private ownership. In the countryside, much of the land redistribution that had been carried out by Nasser was reversed.
In its foreign policy, Sadat and Mubarak placed Egypt unreservedly at the disposal of US imperialism.
In no sense have the policies of the Sadat-Mubarak regime been substantially different from those that have been implemented by capitalist governments during the past 30 years in any other former colonial country with a belated capitalist development.
Today, in the midst of a global crisis of the capitalist system, profoundly impacting all capitalist countries, a world-wide offensive is underway against the working class. The direction of capitalist policy is not toward reform, but toward reaction. No bourgeois government in Egypt will contradict this global tendency.
The struggle that is now unfolding in Egypt will be of a protracted character. The responsibility of revolutionary Marxists is to develop among workers, as they pass through colossal political experiences, an understanding of the necessity for an independent struggle for power. The revolutionary Marxists must counsel workers against all illusions that their democratic aspirations can be achieved under the aegis of bourgeois parties. They must expose ruthlessly the false promises of the political representatives of the capitalist class. They must encourage the creation of independent organs of workers’ power which can become, as the political struggle intensifies, the basis for the transfer of power to the working class. They must explain that the realization of the workers’ essential democratic demands is inseparable from the implementation of socialist policies.
Above all, revolutionary Marxists must raise the political horizons of Egyptian workers beyond the borders of their own country. They must explain that the struggles that are now unfolding in Egypt are inextricably linked to an emerging global process of world socialist revolution, and that the victory of the revolution in Egypt requires not a national, but an international strategy. After all, the fight against the Mubarak-Suleiman regime and the Egyptian ruling class is, in the final analysis, a struggle against the entire Arab bourgeoisie, the Zionist regime in Israel and American and European imperialism. In this global struggle, the greatest and indispensable ally of the Egyptian masses is the international working class.
What has been outlined above is the perspective and strategy of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

David North

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Thousands protest, clash with police in Yemen and Algeria
By David Walsh 
14 February 2011

Major protests took place in Yemen and Algeria over the weekend, as thousands took to the streets in rallies against government corruption, poverty and unemployment. Unrest continues to simmer in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa, including in Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq and, most recently, Bahrain.
In Yemen, Sunday’s demonstrations in the capital San’a were the largest so far in three days of continuing protest, which began Friday with a celebration of Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in Egypt.
On Saturday, a march of several hundred students on the Egyptian embassy swelled to several thousand people, according to the BBC, chanting, “After Mubarak, it’s Ali’s turn,” referring to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The latter, a thoroughly despised despot, is a key ally in the US “war on terror.”
Pro-government elements attacked the demonstrators Saturday with knives and sticks, forcing them to flee.
By Sunday the protests in San’a had grown larger, and demonstrators, many of them young, scuffled with police and pro-government thugs. The Associated Press reported that “Yemeni police armed with sticks and daggers beat back thousands of protesters marching through the capital … uniformed police used truncheons to stop protesters, many of them university students, from reaching the capital’s central Hada Square. Witnesses said plainclothes policemen wielding daggers and sticks also joined security forces in driving the protesters back.”
The Xinhua News Agency reported that the security forces beat protesters in “the massive anti-regime demonstration” with electric batons and rifle butts. Many people were injured, commented a Xinhua reporter, and some 120 people arrested.
According to the Chinese news service, demonstrators were attempting to march on the presidential palace Sunday. They called for the ouster of Saleh and the expulsion of his family members from the military and security apparatus, including Saleh’s son, Ahmed Ali, who heads the secret police.
The crowd shouted, “The people want the regime to fall. After Mubarak, it’s Saleh’s turn.”
Police have ringed San’a’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square with barbed wire and brought in government supporters to set up a tent camp in an effort to forestall protesters from occupying the area.
In southwestern Yemen, 5,000 people also took part in a protest in Taiz (population 460,000), near the Mandab Strait that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. Taiz and Aden (140 kilometers away) have been the scene of numerous protests in recent weeks.
Predictably, the Yemeni interior ministry, which presides over the brutal internal security forces, accused the mostly youthful demonstrators of “spreading sabotage and chaos” and “threatening security and stability.”
The caliber of the official opposition in Yemen can be gauged by its acceptance Sunday of a token political reform initiative offered by Saleh earlier in February, stipulating that he would step down in 2013 and not pass rule on to his offspring. The opposition coalition indicated as well its willingness to re-enter negotiations with Saleh.
Reuters reports that one of the coalition leaders is a former foreign minister, Mohammed Basindwa, and cites his conciliatory comment, “The opposition does not reject what came in the invitation by the president and is ready to sign an agreement in no more than a week.”
Poverty and wretchedness are the reality for wide layers of the Yemeni population, even as Washington continues to finance and arm the Saleh regime. More than 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. The International Food Policy Research Institute reports that some 32 percent of Yemenis lack access to sufficient food and nearly 58 percent of all children are malnourished. The UN ranks Yemen 151st out of 177 countries on the human development index (HDI), a measure of life expectancy, education, and standard of living. Yemen has the lowest HDI rank of any Arab country.
Protest in Algiers
Government and opposition claims as to the size of Saturday’s demonstration in Algiers varied wildly, but the Associated Press (AP) reported that some 10,000 people rallied in Algeria’s capital Saturday before being dispersed by police. Demonstrations are banned in Algeria under a state of emergency in place since 1992.
The regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika dispatched some 30,000 police and security forces in a massive show of force aimed at intimidating the protesters. Armored vehicles were located at “strategic points” across Algiers, commented the BBC, “with water cannons on standby and a helicopter circling above” the city’s center.
Heavily armed police attempted to prevent any demonstrators from gathering in Algiers, lining up along the march route and setting up roadblocks to stop busloads of people from reaching the city. However, thousands managed to evade the police and express their opposition to the government in May 1 Square.
The Algerian newspaper El Watan described the scene at 3:30 in the afternoon: “The police are carrying out a veritable manhunt in May 1 Square. They have forcefully dispersed the demonstrators and seized many of them. The police are attempting to chase the demonstrators whose number is continually growing, but they have not counted on the determination of these young people, who have succeeded in taking back the field. The police and the protesters are playing cat and mouse. Groups of demonstrators stay on the move so as not to be caught between police units.”
El Watan also described a scene earlier in the day in blunt terms: “Blows from police clubs rain down on many demonstrators. No one is spared.”
The protesters shouted “Ouyahia thief!” referring to Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, as well as “No to the police state!” “The people want the fall of the regime,” and “Bouteflika out!” They also chanted, “We remain revolutionaries!”
Opposition spokesmen declared that some 400 people were arrested in the protest. Ali Yahia Abdenour, head of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, asserted that women and foreign journalists were among those detained Saturday.
This weekend’s rally was called by the National Coordination for Change and Democracy (CNCD), the bourgeois opposition that includes political parties, human rights organizations and trade unions.
“This demonstration is a success because it’s been 10 years that people haven’t been able to march in Algiers and there’s a sort of psychological barrier,” declared Ali Rachedi, the former head of the Socialist Forces Front, a social democratic formation. “The fear is gone,” he added.
Said Sadi, head of the opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), a member of the CNCD, asserted that the size of the police mobilization showed “the fear of this government, which is in dire straits.… We’re going to continue to demonstrate and to defy the authorities until they fall.” The opposition has not called for the resignation of Bouteflika, who was returned to office for a third term in 2009 in a rigged election.
Smaller demonstrations were also held in Oran, Annaba and Constantine.
The CNCD has issued an appeal for a mass demonstration February 19 and agreed in principle on the call for a general strike in the coming days.
In another development in Algeria, more than 400 unemployed youth organized a sit-in Sunday morning at a government office in Mezaourou, 480 kilometers southwest of the capital. Protesters also blocked the main road between Mezaourou and Telagh with old tires and debris. The youth demanded jobs and denounced corruption.
An unemployed man of 36 died of self-inflicted burns in the town of El Oued, in eastern Algeria, near the Tunisian border. Lofti Maamir, father of six, doused himself with gasoline in a government office January 17, where he had gone to look for work and housing. Four individuals are known to have died by this method in Algeria since the crisis began in January. (In another desperate protest, an unemployed Iraqi man set himself on fire in the northern city of Mosul on Sunday and died from his injuries.)
Some 23 percent of the Algerian population lives below the official poverty line. Algerian youth in particular suffer from mass joblessness. The official poverty rate for young people is 23 percent (and estimated to be much higher), and 70 percent of the unemployed are under 30 years of age.

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President Chavez Applauds Egyptian People’s Lesson of Political and Democratic Maturity

• International cooperation
• Solidarity

Venezuelan Foreign Relations Ministry
Official Statement

The president and commander-in-chief of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, in the name of the Venezuelan people, applauds the genuine lesson of political and democratic maturity that the courageous Egyptian people have brought before the eyes of the world.
The Bolivarian government has paid close attention to the development of the people’s movement that is underway in the fraternal Arab Republic of Egypt, and, in light of the events that took place on Friday, February 11th, joins in the Egyptian people’s jubilation in this moment of peaceful triumph, trusting that, as the sole master of their destiny, the people will continue to consolidate this emancipatory political process. 
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela will act in solidarity with the Egyptian people in the actions and decisions that they take while using their sovereign and inalienable prerogative as the dignified heirs to the legacy of the historic leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Egypt can count on the fraternal willingness of Bolivarian Venezuela to construct a pluri-polar world of equality and justice on the basis of an authentic relationship of friendship and cooperation.
Caracas, February 11th 2011

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