Workers in Egypt Key to Saving the Arab Spring

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Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. is using every weapon in its arsenal—military, diplomatic, financial, etc.—to try to turn the Arab Spring into a Washington Winter, an endless night of continued poverty enforced by dictatorships.

But Egypt’s workers, who initiated the process leading to the mass Arab revolt with their strikes five years ago, have moved back to the fore. Protesters have returned to Tahrir Square in Cairo, with a continuous presence since July 8. Militant actions and strikes have also been held in Suez, Alexandria, and elsewhere as a result of months of stonewalling of demands for economic justice, political rights, and prosecution of corrupt and murderous regime figures.

Broad coalitions of labor and revolutionary groups backing the Tahrir sit-ins issued statements calling for prosecution of Mubarak regime figures and all those involved in the killing of the martyrs of the revolution and the corruption of the regime. They demanded an end to military courts and freedom for the thousands jailed by the military.

They also demanded the revocation of the anti-strike and anti-demonstration law, recovery of the nation’s stolen money inside and outside the country, a rise in the minimum wage and a cap on executives’ salaries, and linking wages with prices.

But the military has made clear its intention to maintain its grip on power on behalf of Egypt’s wealthy. Since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has combined token reforms, meaningless cabinet shuffles, and selected firings and prosecutions of corrupt and criminal officials with repression, imprisonment, and warnings to the country’s workers that strikes would be crushed.

As a result, illusions in the military, based on its having left the dirty work in January and February largely to the police, are quickly dissipating. Growing numbers of workers in Egypt realize that the real showdown with the old regime, and the ruling class it protects, is yet to come.

The military is fully aware of this change in consciousness and watches with fear the growing return to the squares. This means that the danger is very real that they will crack down soon, and hard, against the protests.

The military has turned for help increasingly to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, which only late and reluctantly joined the protests in January and February, and is now joining the chorus that is howling denunciations of workers who dare to strike. Other voices in this choir are those of major media and business figures, who blame workers fighting for long-delayed justice and equality for the economy’s supposed downturn. (Fortunately, the youth of the Brotherhood have split off in repugnance toward their leadership’s betrayal of the revolution.)

The July 17 New York Times reported that the Egyptian military has openly declared it will maintain itself in power come what may, issuing a declaration giving it “a broad mandate to intercede in Egyptian politics. … The military plans to adopt the document on its own, before any election, referendum or constitution sets up a civilian authority.”

Egypt’s military is fueled by $1.3 billion a year given by the United States, making it second only to Israel as a recipient of U.S. military aid. (This compares to only $250 million in economic aid—which, of course, as with all aid to neocolonial countries, is itself skewed towards business-friendly projects.) Yet SCAF has been baiting its opponents with allegations of foreign funding!

And this is the same military whose head, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, met on July 26 with General Carter Ham, commander of the U.S. Africa Command to talk about how to continue cooperation with the United States vis-à-vis Israel and to expand cooperation throughout Africa.

The masses of Egypt know that U.S. aid to the military is intended both to maintain Egypt’s wealthy in power, and to guarantee Egyptian support for U.S. policies in the region—first and foremost support for Zionism. They have also not forgotten that the tear-gas canisters fired at them during the January-February revolt were made in the U.S.

The same issue of The Times reporting on SCAF’s intention to stay in power profiled in its Business Section a program jointly sponsored by the U.S. State Department, the Agency for International Development, and the Chamber of Commerce, along with internet corporation heads, to foster “entrepreneurs” who will supposedly solve Egypt’s unemployment problem.

This program is, of course, just one example of the broader effort to maintain U.S. economic dominance, an effort analyzed by Adam Hanieh in his article “Egypt’s ‘orderly transition’? International aid and the rush to structural adjustment.”

Hanieh describes how Obama has reshuffled a small part of Egypt’s massive debt to the United States, a maneuver that comes with the usual strings attached, i.e. IMF/World Bank-style demands for greater openness to Western corporations and less spending on workers’ needs. The net result will be greater—not less— and deregulation, and greater opening of Egypt’s markets and investment opportunities to Western corporations and banks. This at a time when demands are flourishing for the renationalization of privatized companies and more, not less, public provision of jobs and services Mass movement revived An article in Ahram Online by Mostafa Ali describes a visit to Tahrir Square and the revival of self-organization for security, sustenance, Pedro Costa / AFP / Getty Images and health care, to give haircuts or to provide artwork. He notes that the current round of occupation of Tahrir was a reaction to police use of tear gas to disperse a peaceful protest by families of the martyrs of the uprising.

Ali describes the Egyptian media’s attempt to characterize those sitting in as “wreaking havoc, shutting bridges, attacking our army and on and on.” He also mentions two tents in the square used by TV and radio workers “involved in a campaign to purge state media outlets of corrupt managers who forced them to tow government propaganda for years.”

This dialectic between workplace struggles and the broader political movement is superbly analyzed by Anne Alexander in her article, “The growing social soul of Egypt’s democratic revolution,” published in the British journal International Socialism. Alexander shows how the current stage of struggle in Egypt mirrors the process described by Rosa Luxemburg after Russia’s 1905 Revolution—that is, how a nationwide general strike became the inspiration for struggles in individual workplaces, which in turn strengthened national political struggles.

Luxemburg wrote: “Every great political mass action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes. … With the spreading, clarifying and involution of the political struggle, the economic struggle not only does not recede, but extends, organizes and becomes involved in equal measure. Between the two there is the most complete reciprocal action. “In a word: the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political center to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect here continually change places; and thus the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completely separated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia. And their unity is precisely the mass strike.”

The key task of revolutionaries immersed in such a dialectic, Alexander points out, drawing on Leon Trotsky’s analysis of 1905 as well as Luxemburg’s, was to reinforce this dialectic, to make the ties stronger, more political, more deeply rooted in mass organizations, so that each pole of the dynamic reinforces the other in a building process ending in the seizure of power by the working class.

In contrast, without the development of this dynamic, the revolution as a whole must fail, a point at the heart of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which made clear that the bourgeoisie was no longer capable or even interested in leading a democratic revolution (i.e. one that fights for the kind of political reforms demanded in Tahrir Square, Suez, and Alexandria).

Further, should the revolution fail, for lack of a strong enough bourgeoisie to take the reins (especially given its dependence on imperialism), the most likely regime to come to power would be a Bonapartist one, i.e. one loyal to capitalism but relying on military strength to substitute for an incompetent and impotent capitalist class. And in an imperialist world, such a Bonapartist regime inevitably follows the dictates of Western capital (however much, as in Syria, Libya or pre-invasion Iraq, the Bonapartist dictators bend to mass pressure and issue fake anti-imperialist demagogy and grant haven and funding to resistance groups).

This stark choice—between a thoroughgoing proletarian-led revolution, and a regression to dependence on imperialism (and its local cop, Zionism), supervised by a Bonapartist regime—is exactly the one confronting Egypt.

To illustrate the Egyptian version of the dynamic (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) outlined by Luxemburg, Alexander gives numerous examples from various industries in which workers have ousted their boss and taken partial or full control of their workplaces to run them democratically. These include museum employees, airport workers, bus drivers and mechanics, nurses, porters and doctors, railroad and textile workers, civil servants in the Ministry of Finance, and so on.

Given the interpenetration of state and society under Mubarak—i.e., every corporate executive, plant manager, or government office supervisor was a craven lackey of the central regime and dependent on it for his or her job—the struggle of workers in their offices and factories to remove the old bosses also strikes a political blow at the remnants of the regime which still run the country. This, again, is why these struggles must be coordinated, solidarity spread between them, and political demands formulated that make explicit the common threads between workplace and nationwide struggles.

That is exactly the task that the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), and the Revolutionary Socialists who lead it, have set themselves. An example of how they seek to do so is by broadening participation in the struggle for a nationwide minimum wage and for caps on bosses’ salaries. This relates back to the anger at rising food prices, which was a key spark of the revolution, while building on individual struggles for higher wages in U.S. supporters of the Khalil Hamra / AP Amir Nabil / AP

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6 Socialist Action august 2011 U.S. aid to the Egyptian military is intended to guarantee support for U.S policies in the region — and for Israel.