The flames of anger are spreading through all Egypt and nothing can
stop them. The fate of the Mubarak regime hangs in the balance. Today
there were violent clashes on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian
cities as the struggle for power has entered into a new stage. The call
went out for mass protests after Friday prayers. The regime warned that
any protests will be met with the full force of the state. The stage was
set for a dramatic confrontation.
Protests, January 28th. Photo: MonasoshThe
situation has become explosive with extraordinary speed. In the last
few days hundreds of thousands of people went on to the streets
demanding freedom. With admirable courage they braved the batons,
bullets and tear gas of the police. Today they faced a real baptism of
fire. The protests that used to be predominantly made up of students
have now been swelled by the army of the poor and disinherited from the
slums of Cairo and other cities. Robert Fisk wrote:
“There are various clues that the authorities in Cairo realised
something was afoot. Several Egyptians have told me that on 24 January,
security men were taking down pictures of Gamal Mubarak from the slums –
lest they provoke the crowds. But the vast number of arrests, the
police street beatings – of women as well as men – and the near-collapse
of the Egyptian stock market bear the marks of panic rather than
cunning.”
Can repression succeed?
On the face of it the Revolution faced a daunting challenge. The
regime has a million and a half soldiers in its security apparatus, upon
which it lavishes millions to keep them loyal. The purpose of this
fearsome apparatus is not to defend Egypt against foreign aggressors. It
is not to fight Israel. It is to keep the Egyptian people down. But can
it succeed?
Protests today. Photo: MonasoshOn
paper it is a formidable force, against which the people have no chance
of success. But one could say the same of every tyrannical regime in
history. Louis XVI of France, Tsar Nicholas of Russia and the Shah of
Iran all possessed an apparatus of repression that was a hundred times
stronger than the one at the disposal of Hosni Mubarak. Yet in the
moment of truth these mighty monsters collapsed like a house of cards.
But such a display of naked force revealed not strength but weakness:
save for the police force and the army, the government is powerless.
Napoleon once observed that one can do many things with bayonets, but
you cannot sit on them. In the final analysis the army and police is too
narrow a base to sustain an unpopular regime. To their shock and
astonishment the authorities are finding the repressive apparatus cannot
stop the protests. Their spontaneous character itself provides a
certain protection against the state, although it is a weakness that
will have negative effects later on.
Today the regime mobilised its full strength to abort the revolution.
Members of an elite counter-terrorism police unit were ordered to take
up positions in key locations around Cairo in preparation for a wave of
mass rallies. From the early hours of the morning the security forces
were already taking possession of all the key points in an attempt to
stop demonstrators from coalescing.
But all these measures were in vain. The protestors poured onto the
streets in greater numbers than before. There were 80,000 protestors in
Port Said, 50,000 Beni Suef, 100 kilometers south of Cairo, and big
demonstrations in Alexandria and Suez City and elsewhere. As in Iran
last year, it is impossible to arrest the organisers when demonstrations
have been organised through Facebook and Twitter. The army of informers
is powerless to combat this.
The state tried to block Facebook. They closed down the internet and
disabled mobile phones. But the people proved to be one step ahead.
Bloggers passed on ways to bypass the controls and information was
spread by word of mouth. By midday (in London) the television screens
were already showing scenes of massive conflict on the streets of the
Egyptian capital. The police lines were unable to contain the
demonstrations. The television coverage shows masses of protestors
pushing against the police lines and the police retreating in disorder.
After chasing the police, thousands of protesters were able to flood
into the huge Tahrir Square downtown after being kept out most of the
day by the heavy police presence. Few police could be seen around the
square after the confrontation. At a certain point even the violence of
the state security services becomes counterproductive. Instead of fear,
it arouses indignation and anger. In Suez City people rose up against
police who shot demonstrators and burned a police station. And when this
point is reached, cracks always appear in the ranks of the state
forces. Most ordinary soldiers and policemen are reluctant to kill
fellow citizens and will refuse to carry out orders to fire on unarmed
demonstrators. In Suez there have been reports of such incidents.
Role of the youth
The protestors who have poured onto the streets all over Egypt in
recent days are mainly young Egyptians, unemployed and without any
future. One young Egyptian told the BBC: “We are poor. We have no work,
no future. What should we do? Should we burn ourselves?” The only hope
these young people have is to fight for a fundamental change in society.
They have cast aside all fear and are prepared to risk their lives in
the fight for freedom and justice.
Protesters having seized police vehicles. Photo: monasoshMany
of the protesters are university students who are unable to find work,
and are therefore unable to marry and raise a family. They are motivated
by a deep sense of injustice and a burning anger and resentment towards
a system that denies them a future and a corrupt regime that has
enriched itself at the people’s expense.
The Guardian correspondent in Cairo, Alaa Al Aswany, who participated
on the big demonstration last Tuesday, was profoundly impressed by the
“dazzling bravery” of the protesters, and impressed by their
determination to do one thing – change the regime:
“I will always be in awe of these revolutionaries. Everything they
have said shows a sharp political awareness and a death-defying desire
for freedom. They asked me to say a few words. Even though I’ve spoken
hundreds of times in public, this time it was different: I was speaking
to 30,000 demonstrators who were in no mood to hear of compromise and
who kept interrupting with shouts of ‘Down with Hosni Mubarak’, and ‘The
people say, out with the regime’.”“I said I was proud of what they had achieved, and that they had
brought about the end of the period of repression, adding that even if
we get beaten up or arrested we have proved we are not afraid and are
stronger than they are. They have the fiercest tools of repression in
the world at their disposal, but we have something stronger: our courage
and our belief in freedom. The crowd responded by shouting en masse:
‘We’ll finish what we’ve begun!’" (The Guardian, Thu 27 Jan 2011)
The decisive factor is that the masses have acquired a sense of their
collective strength and are losing their fear. Beginning with the
youngest, most energetic and determined elements, the mood of defiant
has transmitted itself to the older, more cautious and inert layers of
the population. The Guardian reports a significant instance of this:
“More ordinary citizens are now defying the police. A young
demonstrator told me that, when running from the police on Tuesday, he
entered a building and rang an apartment bell at random. It was 4am. A
60-year-old man opened the door, fear obvious on his face. The
demonstrator asked the man to hide him from the police. The man asked to
see his identity card and invited him in, waking one of his three
daughters to prepare some food for the young man. They ate and drank tea
together and chatted like lifelong friends.“In the morning, when the danger of arrest had receded, the man
accompanied the young protester into the street, stopped a taxi for him
and offered him some money. The young man refused and thanked them. As
they embraced the older man said: ‘It is I who should be thanking you
for defending me, my daughters and all Egyptians.’" (The Guardian, Thu
27 Jan 2011)
What now?
One thing is clear. Today has ended in a catastrophic defeat for
Hosni Mubarak. As I write these lines events are moving with lightening
speed. Rumours spread thick and fast. A Cairo daily has been claiming
that one of President Hosni Mubarak’s top advisers has fled to London
with 97 suitcases of cash, but other reports speak of a furious
President shouting at senior police officers for not dealing more
harshly with demonstrators.
As night fell, the protestors remained on the streets, defying the
curfew that the government has proclaimed throughout Egypt. They have
begun to storm public buildings. According to Al Jazeera a few minutes
ago, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo has been stormed and taken
over by protestors and set on fire. For the first time an office of the
ruling National Democratic Party was set on fire, and the fire brigade
made no attempt to douse the flames.
There is growing alarm in Washington. This afternoon Hillary Clinton
admitted that the US is "deeply concerned about the use of force"
against protestors. She called on the Egyptian government to restrain
security forces but also says protesters should refrain from violence.
She said: “These protests underscore that there are deep grievances
within Egyptian society and the Egyptian government needs to understand
that violence will not make these grievances go away.” And she added:
“As a partner we strongly believe that the Egyptian government needs to
engage immediately with the Egyptian people in implementing political,
social and economic reforms”.
Translated into plain English this means: “Don’t be a fool Mubarak.
If you try to use the military to crush the rebellion it will break in
pieces. The movement is too big to drown in blood. You must use cunning
instead. Make some changes, or at least, give the impression that there
will be change. In the end, of course, you may have to go. That is
unfortunate, but we all have to make sacrifices from time to time. You
are an old man and have outlived your usefulness. You can have a
comfortable retirement and save capitalism. Or you can cling to power
and end up like Sadat, dead. That would be too bad for you. But if you
provoke the masses too much there will be a complete revolution and that
would be too bad for us.”
But Mubarak does not seem to be listening. Shut off from the real
world in his palace, surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, he is
clinging to power even as power ebbs away. He declares a curfew, but
people remain on the streets. He calls in the army “to help the security
forces” but the people applaud the army and call on the soldiers to
join them. Here and there we hear of reports that the fraternisation is
having an effect. Associated Press reported on the scene in Cairo’s
central plaza. One of their reporters saw the protesters cheering the
police who took off their uniform joined them. The triumphant protestors
hoisted them on their shoulders.
Is this just an isolated incident? Or does it show a more widespread
tendency? In such a rapidly changing, dramatic and chaotic situation,
the mood can swing violently in minutes. In Alexandria the army is on
the streets, but the soldiers are giving the thumbs up sign to the
demonstrators. In Suez also the people are cheering the soldiers, who
they see as their allies. There are unconfirmed reports that the army
and the police are clashing. If this is true, Mubarak is in serious
trouble.
Robert Fisk is one of the few western journalists who shows a serious
understanding of the real situation in the Middle East. In today’s
Independent he writes:
“Already there have been signs that those tired of Mubarak’s corrupt
and undemocratic rule have been trying to persuade the ill-paid
policemen patrolling Cairo to join them. "Brothers! Brothers! How much
do they pay you?" one of the crowds began shouting at the cops in Cairo.
But no one is negotiating – there is nothing to negotiate except the
departure of Mubarak, and the Egyptian government says and does nothing,
which is pretty much what it has been doing for the past three
decades.”
The Egyptian Revolution
Whatever the outcome of today’s protests, one thing is clear: the
Egyptian Revolution has already begun. Those sceptics and intellectual
snobs who constantly harp on the alleged “low level of consciousness” of
the masses now have their answer. Those western “experts” who talked
contemptuously of the Egyptians as “apathetic” and “passive” and
“indifferent to politics” must now eat their words. The masses, whether
in Egypt, Iran, Britain or the USA, can only learn from experience. In a
revolution, they learn much faster. The Egyptian workers and youth have
learnt more in a few days of struggle than in thirty years of “normal”
existence.
Only a few months ago the President and his ruling clique imagined
they had everything under control. They were so confident that they were
already grooming the youngest son of Mubarak, Gamal, to occupy his
father’s post. A former investment banker, Gamal was educated at the
elite American University in Cairo, and worked for the Bank of America.
He was heavily involved in the economic “liberalisation” of Egypt, which
delighted the rich while the poor suffered. This information is
sufficient to make clear his political allegiances. Last year posters
were plastered across Cairo calling for Gamal to stand for president in
elections scheduled for later this year.
The protesters showed their attitude towards the chosen son, chanting
"Gamal, tell your father Egyptians hate you" and tearing up his
picture.
With lightening speed everything has turned into its opposite. On the
streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities people are not just talking
of revolution. They are carrying out a revolution. That is now an
indisputable fact. The question is posed of who or what is to replace
Mubarak’s regime? But this question is not uppermost in the minds of the
protestors. Maybe the young people on the streets do not know exactly
what they want. But they know precisely what they do not want. And that
is sufficient for now.
The immediate task is to carry out the overthrow of Mubarak and his
rotten regime. That will open the flood gates and allow the
revolutionary people to push their way through. They are daily
discovering their strength on the streets, the importance of
organisation and mass mobilisation. That is already a tremendous
conquest. Having gone through the experience of a thirty year
dictatorship, they will not allow the imposition of a new one, or any
intrigue to recreate the old regime with a new name. Tunisia is
sufficient proof of this.
Despite attempts by the media to play up the role of the Muslim
Brotherhood, it is abundantly clear that the Islamist element has been
largely absent from these protests, which have taken place under the
banner of revolutionary democracy. The overwhelming majority of the
activists are young people from the schools and universities, who are
not at all under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism. It is not even
clear whether the belated participation of the Muslim brotherhood in
today’s demonstrations had any real effect in increasing the number of
protesters on the streets.
Now the masses have had a taste of their own power, they will not be
satisfied with half-measures. They know that what they have achieved
they have conquered with their own hands. Mohamed ElBaradei, an
opposition leader and Nobel prize-winning former UN official, flew back
to Egypt last night but no one believes – except perhaps the Americans –
that he can become a focus for the protest movements that have sprung
up across the country without the aid of any bourgeois “leader”. Today
the foreign television cameras made a feeble attempt to highlight
ElBaradei’s participation on the demonstration. But all they achieved
was to show pictures of a bewildered old man who scarcely seemed to know
where he was or what he was doing.
The struggle for complete democracy will permit the construction of
genuine trade unions and workers’ parties. But it will also pose the
question of economic democracy and the fight against inequality.
Democracy would be an empty phrase if it refused to lay hands on the
obscene wealth of the ruling elite. Confiscate the property of the
ruling clique! Expropriate the property of the imperialists who backed
the old regime and exploited the people of Egypt! The fight for
democracy, if it is pursued to the end, must inevitably lead to the
expropriation of the bankers and capitalists and the establishment of a
workers’ and peasants’’ government.
World revolution
In 1916 Lenin wrote these lines:
“Whoever expects a pure social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what
revolution is….“The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an
outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and
discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and
of the backward workers will participate in it—without such
participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is
possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their
prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors.“But objectively they will attack capital, and the class- conscious
vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this
objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly
fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture
power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though
for different reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which
in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and
the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately
purge itself of petty bourgeois slag.” (Lenin, The Irish Rebellion of 1916)
Further protests today. Photo: monasoshThese
lines could have been written yesterday. The whole world situation has
changed decisively and the events in Egypt show this in a very dramatic
way. We have decisively entered the epoch of world revolution. Nowhere
is the international character of the revolution clearer than in North
Africa and the Middle East. It spreads ceaselessly from one country to
another: from Tunisia to Algeria, from Jordan to Egypt, from the Yemen
to Lebanon.
The Tunisian events were of course inspiring. People could now see
with their own eyes that even the most powerful security apparatus could
not prevent the overthrow of a hated dictator. People on the streets of
Cairo even imitated the French slogan of the Tunisian protesters: "Dégage, Mubarak".
Tunisia showed what was possible. But it would be entirely false to
assume that this was the only, or even the main, cause. The conditions
for a revolutionary explosion had already matured in all these
countries. All that was required was a single spark to ignite the powder
keg. Tunisia provided it. The revolutionary uprising has already
reached other Arab states such as Yemen. As in Tunisia, the people of
Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and Yemen were living in poverty under
dictatorial ruling elites which lived a luxurious life by plundering the
nation.
These movements have striking similarities to the mass movements that
led to the overthrow of the regimes in Eastern Europe. Again, on paper
these governments had a powerful state apparatus, big armies, police,
and secret police. But that did not save them. The bourgeoisie was
overjoyed at the overthrow of “communism”. But their rejoicing was
premature. In retrospect the fall of Stalinism will be seen as only the
prelude to a far more dramatic development: the revolutionary overthrow
of capitalism. Everywhere, including the United States, the system is
in crisis. Everywhere the ruling class is trying to place the full
burden of the crisis of its system on the shoulders of the poorest
layers of society.
In Tunisia and Egypt the system is breaking at its weakest links.
They will tell us that such things cannot happen here, that the
situation is different and so on and so forth. Yes, the situation is
different, but only in degree. Everywhere the working class and the
youth will be faced with the same alternative: either we accept the
systematic destruction of our living standards and rights – or we fight.
The argument “it cannot happen here” is without any scientific or
rational basis. The same thing was said of Tunisia only a couple of
months ago, when that country was considered to be the most stable in
North Africa. And the same argument was repeated in relation to Egypt
even after Ben Ali was overthrown. Just a few weeks were sufficient to
expose the hollowness of those words. Such is the speed of events in our
epoch. Sooner or later the same question will be posed in every country
in Europe, in Japan, in Canada, in the United States.
Revolutionary developments are on the order of the day. The process
will advance at a greater or lesser speed according to local conditions.
But no country can consider itself immune from the general process. The
events in Tunisia and Egypt show us our own future as in a mirror.