Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

EGYPTIAN CLASS COMBAT DEEPENS: On to the Mass Political Strike! Forward to workers councils!

 
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In a photo syndicated by Associated Press, workers held aloft bumper stickers that read “Bye-Bye Mursi” in Arabic and “Game Over” in English. For Mursi himself, and perhaps also for the clique of Badei, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “General Guide,” now (7/12) once again said to be under arrest, the game that began last year with the Army/Muslim Brotherhood constitution deal, the deal of frustrating the masses and carrying on for Washington’s approval, is over. The masses put a stop to this regime. Leftists who are fixated on BBC reports and subsequent talking heads’ buzz of a military coup don’t realize who has been in power continuously but uninterruptedly since 1952. And they do not realize that the Army acted to remove Mursi by force after he had already been de facto removed by the resignations of his cabinet ministers.

This distinction between coup d’etat myth and mass action reality matters because some on the left buy the story that a “democracy” has been suppressed. Thus they call for a Constituent Assembly, and think that would be a revolutionary advance. Or, variously, they see a big defeat for the masses in the “military coup,” corresponding to the defeats of last summer, and defense of democracy becomes the justification for their call. This is good logic but a false reading of the present day facts. That the masses were on the streets last week and are at home this week does not signal any defeat. This rejection of the Islamist theocracy of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian masses can point the way forward for the secular revolutionary forces in Syria, such as the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) and neighborhood militias, who have been fighting Assad and even now are struggling against the imposition of Sharia law by the Islamist opposition in the liberated zones.[i]  The ongoing series of demos and strikes against Mursi during the last year raises the spectre of permanent revolution, of the MENA working class entering the political arena under its own independent revolutionary banner to lead the masses to their democratic aspirations and to free the region from imperialist and capitalist exploitation.

Class War maintains that the call for a Constituent Assembly, or a “Revolutionary Constituent Assembly,” is ALL WRONG at this time and plays the game of the bourgeois democrats seeking to broker a new constitutional arrangement with the armed forces. To confuse the suppression of the major theocratic group, however reprehensible this may seem as a violation of civil liberty, with the suppression of democracy, is to side with those who believe democracy is parliaments and laws and not the activity of millions of Egyptians taking the streets and speaking their minds! To what extent the masses understand that they have superseded parliamentarism, we can’t say, but clearly they have begun to, and what they need now is a general strike movement and a workers’ councils movement, the first to split the enlisted ranks from the brass; the workers’ councils and militias to prepare to take all power away from the bourgeoisie!

In recent weeks we have seen theocratic politics take a beating, first in Turkey and now also in Egypt. Erdogan’s rule was badly shaken and its whole political direction of recent months, back in the direction of his party’s roots in Islamism with new laws inspired by religious proscriptions, all had to be put on hold or explicitly abandoned.  No small part was played by the masses’ fears that the regime would oblige Obama and solve his regional dilemma by invading Syria.  A similar mass sentiment in Egypt caused Mursi to cut Bashar al-Assad loose, (a reversal of an opening to Iran Mursi had hopes for,) but by then the workers of the cities, the unemployed youth and millions of women who see rule by the Muslim Brotherhood as unrelieved oppression, all decided in their millions that a government that only solved problems for the clergy, behind a figure setting out to accumulate Pharaoh-like powers, was not going to be tolerated. Tens of millions took to the street to repudiate rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, a rule in no wise democratic and now mourned by no one in Egypt but its followers.  And so the permanent revolution continues to develop, unevenly but inexorably, setbacks and all, around the Mediterranean rim.

In Egypt we watch the unrolling of the revolutionary period as most of the 85 million Egyptians opt consciously to be sophisticated, modern urban personalities insisting upon their democratic rights.  That these are going to be denied to them and for as long as possible by every servant of imperialism and each bourgeois party, including the Armed forces, in whom many continue to have illusions, is beginning to dawn upon mass consciousness (Ali Ahmed, a 12 yr. old student in Cairo, Excoriates Muslim Brotherhood).[ii] Already they have a sense of who they are and can be in terms of completing the Arab national revolution (many Egyptians will cry that they are leading it!) and of their own power.

The will of the masses has been frustrated again, and just as the working class was escalating its strike wave all this spring (even, to some extent, BECAUSE they were!)  But they have asserted their power yet again and the permanent, post-1952 state has had to bow to them once more.  At each conjuncture since January, 2011 the armed forces and the wing of the capitalist class that they represent, particularly the managerial elite of state capitalist enterprises, has exerted its power for ostensibly populist purposes.

In reality though, it has carried out imperialism’s wishes at each phase and in removing Mursi they removed a government that showed insufficient energy in complying with the conditions of the long-negotiated international monetary fund loans.  These call for big changes in the way the Egyptian government spends money and it was this and not any question of religion in politics that meant Mursi had to go.  These loan conditions are also aimed squarely at the livelihood of the Egyptian working class.  And we can expect more reactionary laws, more price gouging in the markets and more attacks on every social gain, just as imperialism is demanding everywhere during this world crisis of the capitalist system. Will this become a circular track of logic and events with a joke liberal executive and parliament ruling at the convenience and pleasure of the General Staff, the middle brothers of the capitalists and the clergy?

To break out of this circular track of mobilizing to halt the most egregious offenders and outrages, the one revolutionary class in modern society, the working class, must seize control of the state with the express aim and its own plan to put an end to human exploitation and capitalism.

To get out onto the revolutionary road the Arab working class needs revolutionary theory and action.  To teach and popularize this theory and to lead revolutionary action by example, and also to gather and co-ordinate united revolutionary support from worker allies around the world, the workers need their own revolutionary party, a Bolshevik-Leninist party on the model of the 1938 foundations of the 4th International, at once the class memory of culture and struggle and champion against every form of  subjugation and bosses’ agent.  Right now such a party would fearlessly advocate and organize WORKERS COUNCILS and ENLISTED RANKS COUNCILS and WORKERS MILITIAS to wrest power from the exploiter class once and for all!  We already find ourselves in the situation where the masses can’t wait for the formation of the revolutionary party they need.  Just as the events in Libya and Syria have shown so far the biggest obstacle between the masses and the formation of their revolutionary workers party has been the international Menshevik alliance of Stalinists/Bolivarians/Castroists/the World Social Forum and fake Trotskyists of every stripe.[iii]  In this era of social media it is possible for the revolutionary workers to meet their obligation to expose this treachery wherever it is found.

Who wants Socialism and walks the walk?

Such is not the program of those who in their orientalism[iv] see no “Arab revolution,” or any revolution and instead have chronically supported the “anti imperialism” of local Bonapartist strongmen, those whose history also includes wiping out the leaders of the working class.  Such is also not the program of those for whom the present historical instant’s lack of a Bolshevik party signals utter doom for the masses’ aspirations.  Some of these have seen every development in the Middle East since the first days of the Tunisian rebellion as the works of the C.I.A. These too are orientalists, and they won’t lead anybody.

Then there are even much better forces among the revolution’s supporters who are nevertheless confused and think “democracy” has some real content apart from the interests of the class it serves.  This permits them to advocate a political bloc and even a “united front” with the Tamarod, with the National Salvation Front, and with the liberals around M. Al-Baradei, and to deceive themselves that this is something other than a popular front, the assassin of the workers movement and servant of U.S. imperialism.  A popular front by another name and altogether nothing but a “democratic” front operation of a modernist slice of the bourgeoisie and a wannabe electoral excrescence resting on real rule by the army is what it really is.  This is a bad mistake, akin to and logically deriving from a similar bad idea, the multi-class “anti-imperialist united front.”  The only principled bloc workers can have with these forces is the tacit one made with their feet and the slogan “Down with Mursi!”  Many more workers already understand this reality than western leftists think.

But perhaps the most repellent and poisonous forces on the left are the Cliffites of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialist Group (RS.) Following orders from the Menshevik mothership in London, the RS has steadfastly raised the wrong demands at every turn!  When the anti-Mubarak uprising began the Egyptian Independent Trade Union Federation came out from underground and launched upon a rolling strike wave to bring down the regime.  This got little western press at the time, largely because just afterward the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) entered the anti-Mubarak mass movement, turning 180 degrees from what they (the MB) had only the day before called “lawlessness.” It was already time THEN to raise the slogan “For Workers’ Councils” and “For A Government of Workers’ Councils.”  Instead, the RS Cliffites announced that now was the time to form independent trade unions(!)[v]  Later of course, when union organizing was under repressive attack, they wanted a Constitution, which piece of clergy-friendly poison the masses got rammed down their throats and then the racketeers’ elections, parliamentary and then presidential, in which the RS backed the Muslim Brotherhood and Mursi![vi]  They are members of the Tamarod and now they call upon the masses to “preserve their demands of June 30^th” as they prepare for new—you guessed it—parliamentary and presidential elections.  Don’t let anyone tell you these “socialists” want any revolutionary socialism!  They create illusions in the Egyptian military as late as July 6^th RS stated, “millions of Egyptians poured into the streets and forced their institutions to remove the failed president.”[vii]  Who else can they be speaking of but the army and police, and since when did they become the masses “own” institutions?

The RS invokes the blood of the martyrs going back to January, 2011 and then without so much as a pause for breath calls for a constituent assembly and a new president from among the January, 2011 anti-Mubarak forces and laws that carry out “retribution”(!) against the MB and the Military Council this is a pipedream, that imperialism would permit such a bourgeois government to come to pass!  We say again, only a workers government can complete the national democratic tasks of the revolution.  Such a government will have an independent working class internationalist policy and to achieve this requires an insurrection and the complete destruction of the bourgeois state and all its super-structural flim-flam “institutions.”

We predict they will support candidates of the liberal bourgeoisie and continue to try to pass themselves off as Trotskyists.  Actual Trotskyism however has nothing in common with class collaboration.   We say they will do so because we have seen their co-thinkers in action and seen how they demobilize the masses to appease their “strategic partners” (see Lessons of Chicago Teacher’s Strike).[viii]  And we say so because their U.S. co-thinkers, the International Socialist Organization, albeit somewhat estranged now from London, are the official World Social Forum standard bearer-franchisees.  We hope Egyptian workers will identify and quickly sidestep their ruinous game.  Class independence in all political questions is the workers’ road to power.

Short-term prognosis/prescription

In the short-term, working class political independence is the means to removing the base of mass support for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) among the impoverished in the backward villages.  These were favored by the last MB/Army constitution’s electoral districting maps so as to drown out workers’ voices. Removing that support with a mass campaign for full-employment as a right will undercut the MB’s implicit threat of civil war, which has already caused street battles and attacks on army posts in the Sinai.  The masses are crying out for employment, the last serious right workers have left before the complete triumph of tyranny! The Wall Street Journal is recommending Egypt get itself a Pinochet regime![ix]

Self-organization into mass, direct democratic local bodies and a coordinated national council of workers’ and enlisted ranks’ councils with immediately recallable delegates who serve for workers’ wages only, will drive the theocratic opiate back out of politics AND take the ranks and their weapons away from the generals.  This will take some doing, and those who realize the need should form the dedicated revolutionary workers’ party with the necessary democratic centralist discipline to make sure of the accomplishment of fulfilling the national-democratic revolution in the only way possible for an oppressed semi-colony, via the socialist revolution!

A revolutionary workers’ party would patiently explain how Egyptian and other Arab supporters of the Palestinian self-determination struggle—and the Palestinian masses themselves—have been put upon by the false consciousness and miserable projects of petty-bourgeois political leaders. While every bourgeois political force in Egypt strives to isolate the masses from their Palestinian allies, a revolutionary workers’ party would help put Palestinian workers in the driver’s seat of their own struggle for the first time.  A revolutionary workers’ government would exert every form of its power and to the utmost to cripple and excise the Zionist colonial settler state! Needless to say, while such a government will divulge all the bourgeois secret treaties it will tear up the Sadat/Begin peace pact.  A revolutionary foreign policy in pursuit of completing the Arab national revolution would also render solidarity to Syrian and other revolutionary fighters in ways unseen in recent decades!

Once more on the Constituent Assembly

We agree with the July 8^th statement of the South African Workers International Vanguard Party (WIVP) where the comrades reject the slogan for a Constituent Assembly.  Even though we don’t agree that a military coup took place we can’t imagine how a Constituent Assembly could be revolutionary at this time. We quote:

“A Constituent Assembly?

Some of the left like the RCIT are calling for a Constituent Assembly. But the central question is: who will convene it? The military? They have shown that they will do everything to water down and constrain any Constituent Assembly. The only force that can convene it without restrictions, is the working class in power, a workers government, but for this to happen, the military regime has to be overthrown. The 17 million in the streets are not demanding a Constituent Assembly; in a sense, the fact they are there, means they have moved beyond capitalist parliament. Why should we hold the masses back, take them back to bourgeois parliament? The imperialist only hope is to offer a sham Assembly, maybe with some more concessions, but only enough to keep the system intact. The other option, if they can get away with it, is to divert the masses struggle into inter-group fighting and in this case try to wipe out a generation of fighters- but the masses are not defeated, they are on the march, the capitalists are on the defensive, why should we help them get out of their corner? We condemn also the ‘Revolutionary Socialists’, who just as they did just before Mubarak was overthrown, create illusions in the military, as if it is some sort of class neutral entity. The base of the military should be split from the generals.

It is clear we need a revolutionary working class party, but the precondition is a revolutionary programme.  This leaflet is our contribution towards the programme in Egypt. If the working class takes power in Egypt, this will mark a giant historical step forward for the struggle for world Socialism. Let us define the programme around which the world revolutionary party is to be constructed.[x]

What coup, we ask…?

   Coup d’etat?  Who did they think was in power all this time?! Certainly not some MB “democracy!” This is where impressionists believe the BBC and why they think it is permissible to call for a  Revolutionary Constituent Assembly (RCA) now at the same moment that they are calling for workers councils and militias and even a government of them! But we only called for an RCA last year when the democratic mass movement was under attack and retreating and demobilizing under the weight of the repression that was the prelude to the series of bourgeois elections, with the setup results we all know or ought to.  The RCA is a defensive slogan for revolutionaries.  Otherwise and at other times the call for a constituent assembly comes from other class forces and for their classes’ reasons/interests.  It doesn’t happen otherwise.  What does it get you?  The enshrinement of, or the attempt to put over, another bourgeois constitution and overlays of over-lording lawmakers and functionaries, all in the service of the same imperialists as before.

Against the more and more open threat of civil war by the medievalist theocrats and their martyrs’ utopia we must have the utmost clarity. Neither the “National Salvation Front” for national subjugation, nor the Muslim Brotherhood for whom there is no brotherhood but civil war and for whom one’s Muslim sister is a person of the cursed sex.  Against all of them we counterpose the historical program of the working class for workers’ democracy, Arab national liberation and the completion and outstripping of democracy through the end of human exploitation. It is time for our program!  Let’s recall that the Transitional Program tells us that “…the masses enter the revolutionary road with all their prejudices intact….” Their consciousness lags behind their actions, the products of necessity, and right there at the point of action is where the subjective factor belongs with no other slogans and program but that of our class