We must raise even louder demands that Washington cut all military aid to client regimes in the Middle East

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of military rule, the cleansing of the police, an end to military trials and for the rights of the families of the martyrs and the injured, “they have failed to raise social demands, or even to offer solidarity with workers’ protests.”

“The second bloc among the revolutionary forces has at its heart the core sections of the Egyptian working class … which have fought a large number of battles since 2006,” and dealt the death blow to the Mubarak presidency last February. It has organized many independent unions since then and engaged in waves of mass strikes. “However,” writes the RS, “its birth has been aborted by the absence of a revolutionary workers’ organization and the absence of demands which link the social and the political,” as well as its absence as an organized force in the rallies in city squares and sit-ins against military rule.

The third bloc within the mass movement is the far left, including the RS itself, as well as other radical groups. Taken as a whole, these groups “remain relatively marginal to the political scene, lacking the ability to propose initiatives which rally wider forces, despite their participation in the leadership and development of the November sit-in and their support for workers’ and professionals’ strikes and sit-ins.”

The desire to overcome these weaknesses inspired the Revolutionary Socialists to make several concrete proposals. They advocate turning the abstract slogan of social justice adopted by the revolutionary movement—“which sets them apart from the liberals and the Islamists”—into concrete, practical demands around wages, prices, housing, health, education, and jobs, “in turn connecting the achievement of this program with the presence of a revolutionary government in power.”

They note in this regard the demagogy of the Islamists, whose mention in their electoral program of social demands is pure hypocrisy given their longstanding opposition to labor organizing, their own huge economic investments, and their support for and end aid to Israel.

neo-liberal policies during the Mubarak era.

To organize and mobilize for these concrete demands, and in so doing to link the varied components of the mass movement, the RS proposes “to construct a revolutionary front with a political program,” which could unite the social, economic. and political demands of the revolution, and unify the struggles in the workplace, the squares. and the campuses.

Finally, the RS calls for translating its slogan “power and wealth to the people” into a concrete radical program that could mobilize the masses from the very first day on which the newly elected parliament members take their seats and begin enacting anti-worker, anti-revolutionary legislation. And to ensure the success of all these projects, the RS pledges “to build a revolutionary socialist party rooted in the ranks of the workers, peasants and students, capable of leading the masses to victory.”

Workers and next phase of Arab Revolution At the very same time as Egyptian government employees were staging mass protests, their counterparts in Yemen began mass action against their own officials’ corruption.

As the AP reported on Dec. 26: “The strikes are following a pattern. Workers lock the gates to an institution, and then they storm the offices of their supervisors, demanding their replacement with bosses who are not tainted with corruption allegations. So far the demanding end to military rule.

scenario has played out in 18 state agencies.”

As in Egypt, Yemen’s military has a large stake in the country’s economy, and hundreds of workers have demonstrated in front of the Military Economic Institution, protesting its budget secrecy and demanding dismissal of the agency manager, one of the regime’s most powerful and corrupt figures and a funder of the armed gangs that have attacked protesters.

This similarity in tactics in Egypt and Yemen is, as far as we know, a coincidence. But it could and indeed must become part of a conscious, organized sharing of tactics, and a discussion of shared needs and goals among workers across the region. Such a regional class project would, of course, require construction of a revolutionary party for the Middle East and North Africa as a whole.

Furthermore, this discussion of how to deepen the centrality of workers’ mobilization and demands in the Arab Revolution is also crucial for opposing imperialism’s latest maneuvers. Nowhere is this more needed than in Syria. For months the regime has murdered dozens in cold blood every single day. Yet for months the masses’ response has been to turn out in the tens or hundreds of thousands after each massacre.

But in contrast to this almost unparalleled heroism and steadfastness by Syria’s working people, depending not on lying imperialist “saviors” but rather on the masses’ own strength, the traitorous leadership of the liberals heading the Syrian National Council speaks more and more openly about requesting aid from Washington’s murderous military.

We in the U.S. can further this counterposition of workers’ power to imperialist maneuvers by raising ever louder our own demands that Washington cut all military aid to its client regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere, that it stay out of Syria, and that it end all aid to Israel! n