EGYPT: Discussion Statement of the FLTI August 17th
The revolutionary process in Egypt faces the counter-revolutionary reaction of the SCAF (which has been and remains the main enemy and conduit of US imperialist program of attacks) against the toiling masses the ‘exploited ones’ whose liberation demands an independent course through which the working class takes leadership of the revolution, only then can the nation conquer bread, justice and democracy. Independence from both imperialist blocs, the national bourgeoisie, the Islamists and the SCAF is essential for the masses to make the ‘revolution in permanence’.
We have yet to see any of the self-proclaimed revolutionary currents develop a theoretical analysis of how rivalry between the US and Chinese blocs is behind the counter-revolution within the wider Arab Revolution. For example, while we are largely in agreement with the FLTI’s postion on the Arab Revolution what is missing is their refusal to recognize China as an imperialist power competing together with Russia against the US/NATO/Zionist interests in MENA. Nor does the RCIT, with whom we are in agreement on China and have considerable agreement on the Arab Revolution, recognize the extent to which the revolutions in MENA are also proxy wars between the US and China.
In Libya the US bloc prevailed in removing Gaddafi who maneuvered between imperialisms before aligning with the China bloc. But the US was not able to disarm the popular armed revolution and cannot transform its ‘democratic counter revolution’ into a military dictatorship. In Syria the revolution against Assad, who is backed by the China bloc, is held back by the US/NATO/Israel bloc’s fear of arming the revolution and ending up with a Libyan outcome. In Egypt, the US was able to collaborate with the SCAF to re-impose a military dictatorship when the ‘democratic’ counter-revolution failed to contain the masses upsurge. As we wrote in our earlier analysis of the impact of the inter-imperialist rivalry on the Arab revolution, Libya and Syria show the way to the Egyptian masses. Not until it breaks from the sham bourgeois democracy manipulated by the SCAF and opens up an armed struggle against the state can the revolution survive and succeed in overthrowing the national bourgeoisie and the bloody intervention of both imperialist blocs.
LCC 8/25/13
We republish and offer qualified endorsement to the following statement of the FLTI on Egypt issued on the August 17th. (Below is the FLTI’s English language text)
August 17th, 2013
EGYPT – Statement of the FLTI Collective for the 4th International
Presentation
Yesterday with Mubarak, then with Morsi and today with a military coup, the same officer caste of the Egyptian Army keeps starving the worker.
They keep killing the people and selling out the nation to imperialism
Down with the military dictatorship supported by Obama, Zionism and the pirates of Wall Street!
- With fake elections and constituent assemblies
- With politicians who are representatives of businessmen and bankers, like Muslim Brothers and the “democrat” couper El Baradei
- With counterrevolutionary blows like the ones of Al Sisi and the massacres to the masses
- With savage devaluations, 30% unemployment and with new agreements signed with IMF…
Workers and the people haven´t conquered bread yet, they bleed in the streets of Egypt and the country is tied with dual chains to imperialism
In Egypt in 2011 a revolution against Mubarak´s dictatorship started, against starvation and against the regime of the Generals guardianed and financed by Washington and West Point. It was the flame of the hills of Maghreb and Middle East lightened by Tunisia´s spark. It was the beginning of a single worker, poor peasants and starving people revolution of Egypt and the entire region.
The revolution that started to conquer bread, end with imperialist plunder and to conquer freedom, can only succeed with workers and poor people seize power, with the victory of worker socialist revolution.
The fraudster and apologists of imperialism and ruling classes talk about “democratic revolutions”, “peoples´ spring”. The “democrats”, first Morsi and then El Baradei, supported at last the worst massacres against the masses commanded and guardian by the Military Board.
The veil had fallen. The coup of Egypt reflects the “spring” that everyone celebrated. This is “their democracy”: the one of the exploiters, imperialist powers that submit and plunder the oppressed peoples, the one of the electoral frauds, counterrevolution, genocide as in Syria, fascist gangs as in Tunisia, massacres in Bahrein, imperialist invasions as in Mali, increase of the Palestine colonization in hands of Zionism…In Egypt, as yesterday in Syria, a chapter of counterrevolution is being written.
With different revolutionary combats, general strikes, fights in the streets and taking Tarhir Square, the masses looked a way to triumph in their revolution.
They revolutionary fights were expropriated; their leaderships submitted them to the traps of parliaments and fake Constituent Assemblies. World Social Forum (WSF) and reformist left called them to submit to the bourgeois politicians disguised as “democrat”, opportunists who never fought against Mubarak. Tarhir Square gave exploited´s power to their executioners. It didn’t destroy or disarmed the murderous officer caste of Mubarak´s army, which is under the command of Pharaoh Obama and US imperialism.
Working class and exploited people didn´t seize power. The executioners of the people want to recover their stability and dominance. After the genocide in Syria, the new act of imperialist bourgeois counterrevolution started in Egypt.
Tarhir Square can´t delegate never again, it must conquer the weapons… in order to conquer bread it must take power, from the worker and solider committees.
Tarhir Square, the one of the exploited, is the only one that can decide who are the allies and who are the enemies of revolution. On it there is room for those who claim for bread, jobs, to end with the massacres of the murderous army and there won´t be room for those who kill, betray and sell it out to the exploiters.
There must be a break with the bourgeoisie, their parties and murderous Generals.
Egypt can´t be a new Syria. Worker and socialist revolution must set up.
Egypt: an expropriated revolution
In February 2011, after many years of fighting in the cities and factories of Egypt, in Tahrir Square Mubarak was defeated. The engine of this fight was the bread and against the sufferings, inflation and high cost of living.
In that revolutionary fight, totally different than Libya, the army started to repress the uprising masses; it was kept to confront face to face the masses. This was to prevent the horizontal split if it is as it was on risk that as in Libya the soldiers went to the side of the revolution.
The regime tried to save them selling out Mubarak. In this way it could prevent the escene of the regime which is the army forces. They have 40% of the companies and production of the country. Its officer caste recives 1.3 billion dollars a year, the second highest budget of USA supporting military forces to a country, the first one is the Zionist State of Israel.
The Armed Forces of Egypt are the favorite agents of imperialism in the region since they guarantee the Camp David Agreement with Egypt which recognizes and supports the borders of the Zionist occupation state on the Palestinian nation.
In its first revolutionary uprising, the masses got together in Tahrir Square, believing the fall of Mubarak -the army posing as neutral- will get democracy. What it followed was more repression and deepening the hunger and economic crisis. Prisons were full of political prisoners. Mubarak had fallen and everything was the same.
Late November 2011, the masses came back to Tahrir Square demanding what is theirs. Nothing they had fought for and had given their lives had been conquered. New revolutionary days in Tahrir Square carried out by a huge wave of workers’ strikes posed and raised that the real power was in this square which represented all the squares and workers and exploited ones of revolted Egypt.
The response of the ruling class and imperialism was to preserve the military junta so again the army, the backbone of the bourgeois state, will not crack. They placed Tantawi, calling to set up a “national salvation” government.
They made the masses believe it was set up a “civilian” and “democratic” government. There the Muslim Brotherhood went in the government to aid the military junta. In those revolutionary days, El Baradei (Nobel Peace Prize and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of the UN) walked around Tahrir Square, El Baradei and Muslim Brotherhood, who had never fought against Mubarak, met with Tantawi to organize a “national salvation” government and to take the masses and the exploited ones out of the streets and the square. It was there placed their power, the power of the exploited.
For second time in 2011 the revolution was expropriated from the masses.
In general elections for president, or course they were fraudulent and a fully rigged Constituent Assembly, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood won. The first resolution his government took was to sign the respects of Camp David Agreements and not to question in the constituent the private property of the armed forces who control 40% of the Egyptian economy and imperialist investments in the region.
Against the “fear of Islam” that cockatoos of Obama claim today, Morsi’s government was applauded by the establishment of all the imperialist powers as an example of “moderate” Islamic government. This government was so lackey and starved the people as it had been Mubarak. Morsi burden the crisis to the Egyptian working class and poor people and ended up signing a loan-agreement, which fully submits Egypt to the IMF.
Morsi, supported by the military junta, had to attack the masses, to divert their struggle with an electoral trap and finally attack them. The exploited ones fought and wanted to get bread for which they had given their lives.
Thus, a year later, in December 2012, the masses took again the streets and squared at the war cry of: “The Muslim Brotherhood is stealing our revolution” and “Morsi go out now”. In Greece’s street, in Wisconsin, in the fights of the European and USA working class it was herd: “We must fight as Egypt”.
The Syrian masses up surged, in Libya Kadafy fall. The working class and the exploited ones, who had started their revolution, did not take power. The chain of revolutions of Tunisia to Maghreb, it started to be expropriated.
This is and was the paradox of this huge chain of revolutions of Maghreb and Middle East. The exploited ones, the workers and peasants started their revolution and the ones from above, the bourgeoisie and its parties and imperialism expropriated it. They kept their power. The treacherous leadership sold out and then siege and isolated the revolution of the exploited ones.
In Egypt, Tunisia or Libya we saw the program and strategy of Obama’s left, from the WSF, lackeys of imperialism and other social-imperialist parties. There are their Constituent Assemblies, their fake elections. They poisoned the masses’ conscience when they said that our demands were conquered “1 man 1vote”. What it is worst is that where the revolution got the furthest as it was in Libya, the proletariat traitors wanted to make it dirty, they slandered it and they allied with the lackey of imperialism Khadafy, junior partner of British Petroleum and the Italian ENI. These traitors accused the masses who won for the revolution the rank and file soldiers that they were “ground-troops of NATO”.
When in Syria the fight started, they made the world proletariat believe that there was there a new “reactionary” Libya in order to siege the revolution.
In Egypt the “socialist” prepared themselves for many years of democracy, to refund the unions and even socialist chatter of the Queen dreamed to found a Labour Party as in London. The leaders of the “independent” unions submit the working class even more to the “liberal and democratic” bourgeoisie that from 2011 it was the main support to the military junta because they legitimate the junta in front of the revolutionary masses on behalf of democracy.
On the revolution in Maghreb and Middle East it was shown the Marxist theses that “democracy” is a privilege for rich countries and only they can have it sometimes. In Maghreb and Middle East, the parliamentary democracy can be a temporary disguise and a turn over to the revolution.
The parliamentary traps will be a result of hall to the counterrevolution, as Egypt, Tunisia or Libya showed it, if the masses do not take power.
Even more, when the thereat of the revolution was in Syria, Bahrain or Yemen, imperialism quickly understood this process and tried to smashed the masses before they made from this starting process new Libya or Egypt.
It is not about as the social imperialist left and the ones who cry for the coup in Egypt say about the backwardness of Maghreb and Middle East and the lack of “democratic culture”. It is about how to plunder the oil routes in order to make Egypt into a real sweat shop and submit to hunger the people in order to guarantee the borders of the fascist Zionist State of Israel, it is necessary to do that to rule under Mubarak or murderous army in power.
The counterrevolution hits in Syria and the ones starting in Egypt unmask the farces of the “Arab spring” and the “democratic” revolutions that started in the Maghreb and the Middle East, this was how the capitalism’s nurses called it.
The bourgeoisie knew and knows that they were revolutions for bread that the exploited had begun.
So from Syria and now from Egypt, the bourgeoisie started the road to smash them. What it had started were not “democratic” revolutions but revolutions by the class who engine it, by the means and demands expressed and because it attacked the power and property of the exploiters and bourgeois state, it was the beginning of socialist revolutions. Only if this revolution wins, the democratic tasks of national independence and end with the imperialist plunder and conquer the most elemental of the demands as it was bread could be achieved.
Moreover, only workers and peasants victorious revolutions could conquer the most democratic of the Constituent Assembly, because in order to do that it is necessary to disarm the counterrevolutionary armies of imperialism and expropriate the monopolies which impose their nation across Maghreb and Middle East.
Even, the only minimally democratic measure, elementally democratic and only temporary, was achieved in Libya. Months ago, militia men surrounded the puppet Parliament and with weapons in hand forced the parliament to vote a law that claimed no government official could have been in Khadafy’s government. This caused a huge political crisis. In that government they are all former Kaddafist. Even the Prime Minister had to resign. This question again who rules: if the militia men and the exploited or the expropriators of the revolution. This issue remains unresolved. If the militia men do not resolve it immediately as the advanced of workers and the exploited, the Khaddafist reaction will, now disguised as democrats. They will not hesitate to massacre the people equal or worse than Gaddafi did before.
The selective counterrevolutionary actions from fascist gangs in Tunisia attacking the worker vanguard and left, are an advance that if the proletariat and the masses do not armed and break with the “democratic” bourgeoisie, fascism will slaughter the revolution.
The role of the left reformist and fake Trotskyists throughout the region, with Stalinists and WSF is to submit the working class and its brave revolutionary vanguard to the “democratic” bourgeoisie, to numb their struggle and off the fire of revolution, so then the swords of the generals and the fascist gangs reinstate the order of exploiters.
This is what is happening in Egypt. Before the left of the WSF told the Egyptian workers to accept the Constituent Assembly and the election with Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood. They endorsed the call for a constituent assembly which could not touch a single economic interest of imperialism, Camp David Agreement and the Armed Forces by a supreme decree Morsi and the military junta.
We cannot lie anymore, there was no program of the left socialist world which has as axis to arm the masses and split the Army. They called the masses to vote in parliament and fraudulent constituent assemblies, while weapons were at the hands of the executioners and murderers of people. When the fight for the army was opened, for the rank and file of the army, for soldiers committees splitting with bourgeois, the treacherous leaderships talked about the democratic virtues of the Armed Forces of Egypt. The most radical of the left called first to vote for elections and then control them.
From the bowels of reformism emerged slander of the betrayal of the revolution, because in Egypt it was necessary a new Libya, it was necessary to split the army and get the rank and file soldiers. And they took time to slander the revolutionary masses of Libya saying that they were friends of Obama and NATO when they execution Khadafy… the story will not forgive them. Now it is clear who the “democratic” left leg of generals of Egypt was: just the very same ones who slandered the revolutionary masses of Libya.
El Baradei, the members of Tamarod and Movement April 6 called to intervene and their parties presented in the early rounds of the elections until they saw the masses abstained and boycotted the elections.
And as we see, a few weeks ago, these movements tied the working class to the “democratic” bourgeois of El Baradei, who at the same time legitimized the coup of the military junta.
The working class of Egypt tied by their leadership to its executioners could not give an answer and a solution to all the exploited classes of the nation. This could only lead the path to the counterrevolution. .
The world reformism and renegades of Marxism made the masses believe that the expropriation of their revolution and their semi-parliamentary diversion was expression of the success of the revolution and not the content of their expropriation which can only be settle with counter revolution blows as Syria proved it, as the Tunisia fascist gangs, as the reactionary demonstration in Libya, as the imperialist invasion in Mali and the blows against the masses as in Egypt.
Morsi himself to rule just one year, he had to mobilize the petty bourgeois forces, police semi-fascist gangs, to smash the masses. These forces came from the rich business middle class linked to trade and banks that Muslim Brotherhood manages.
Today we should not be surprised when we see bands in Egypt “with many people” going with the army to smash the unarmed masses defending the Muslim Brotherhood. Masses that were never armed by the Muslim Brotherhood, because they know that the exploited ones with their weapons, even the ones they manipulate, will go against them as part of the propertied class they are. Muslim Brotherhood are just a huge fraction of the bourgeoisie of Egypt, such as the military junta.
Today we see “civil command” supporting the military repression, slaughtering the unarmed masses with women and children. These commands are just para-police forces of the most privileged state employees and the companies that the military controls.
The one who did not achieved a path to weapons to conquer bread was the working class of Egypt, who is the one that really has fought for this revolution in tough struggles since 2008 … and this is the other paradox of the revolution in Egypt: the working class that most fought against the armed forces and Mubarak dictatorship since 2008, the working class who has left more martyrs and had thousands of prisoners, the working class that has carried out true revolutionaries uprisings from that year to date. The working class with general strikes has defined in more than two or three times, having Tahrir Square, for their side.
The Egyptian Army soldiers are children of the working class, the unemployed workers. It was the working class and its allies the ones that did not armed the ones that did not set up soldiers committees.
In thousands of opportunities in their pickets, in factories and in Tahrir Square the exploited ones search that path. Their leadership closed it, placed the working class at the feet of the “liberal” and “democratic” bourgeoisie and the proletariat, without a revolutionary leadership, moved away from bread.
Even today, after the coup openly triggered, the Marxist renegade who support the “democratic” generals, the ones who support El Baradei, today are horrified by the crimes of the military junta. Even the ones that are calling to defeat the coup and the military dictatorship, they all refused the task that poses the decisive clashes between revolution and counterrevolution: who the army rank and file wins. If the bourgeoisie wins it, the counterrevolution will win.
From July 3 that the struggle of the masses in Tahrir square is again expropriated until the bloody Wednesday, August 14…
Under the command of Obama a new conspiracy is mounted against the revolutionary masses.
The military Junta, legitimized by the liberal bourgeoisie assumes once again and in direct control of the Government.
From the end of 2012 and all through 2013, it was a period of huge battles of the exploited that confronted the Government of Morsi. The latter attempted to proclaim himself as the new “Pharaoh” of Egypt.
That Pharaoh could only bring back to the exploited the 7 plagues. The prisons were filled with striking workers detained. Unemployment increased to more than 70% in the youth, the currency sank… the masses who had knocked down Mubarak of course did not accept this new Pharaoh and his plagues. The masses made fail and in fact boycotted the electoral trap of the constituent Assembly concocted by the military Junta and Morsi. After entering and being part of this fraud the liberal bourgeoisie of ElBaradei and his followers had no choice but to resign and stop participating. ElBaradei took a plane heading to Austria.
To divert and expropriate this third and great revolutionary onslaught of the exploited, a conspiracy was mounted on a large scale.
The same Morsi had tried to put himself above everybody as the arbiter of all bourgeois fractions and become into a new Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood tried to control the business as their moderate Muslim brothers of Turkey do: as loyal lackeys of imperialism and NATO.
They did not perceive that Egypt has already an owner and a Pharaoh: his court is the military Junta and the Pharaoh lives in New York. This Pharaoh did not hesitate in releasing Morsi’s hand and letting him go to keep the imperialist regime’s domination unabashed before the hatred of the masses. Morsi could not be a new Mubarak, the former’s bourgeois faction maintains and centralizes business in the North of Egypt and the Gaza strip in Palestine with Hamas… With the State of Israel and its borders, playing or negotiations are neither allowed nor can businesses be made.
The attack on the working and popular base of the brotherhood that is underway (while negotiations are in course with their bourgeois leaderships) also pursues the objective of disciplining and punishing the bourgeoisie of Hamas in Gaza, accepting without question the “peace accords” of Camp David between the military Junta of Egypt, Zionism and imperialism, of full occupation of the Palestinian nation.
The caste of officers of the armed forces, as in any bourgeois state, defend the interests of all possessor classes as a whole, including amputating a section of them if it is necessary, to ensure the property of all.
The masses had already resolved the fate of the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi in their fighting, but the bourgeois state and its armed forces could not allow the fall of a second Government at the hands of the masses.
It was necessary for them to prepare a counter-revolutionary offensive. The bankrupt bourgeois regime, under these conditions, ran the risk of collapsing. It was necessary to put an end to the power exercised by the masses on the streets and within the enterprises; the ruling elite thought: “We must impose the IMF plan, we must defeat them”.
With the fall of Morsi a true counter-revolutionary conspiracy was launched and this was concealed by the “democratic” bourgeoisie of ElBaradei and Tamarod, which is linked to the military and all its business in Egypt. They made believe workers and the people and the masses coming back to Tahrir square that Morsi had been thrown by them with signatures and petitions and the backing of the armed forces and not with hundreds of deaths and fighting all over Egypt.
The “democratic” snake oil vendors and expropriators of the revolution with alleged 22 million signatures gave themselves the legitimacy to assume together with the military Junta in the new Government. Including trade unions sent one of its leaders to the Ministry of Labor.
They sugared and sweetened over and over a palace coup of the military Junta that was actually which took the power, announcing now, effectively, the promise of free elections… Meanwhile it appointed generals as governors in all provinces and began to attack the striking workers as in the steelworks of Suez Steel, imprisoning all leaders. In those steel mills the revolutionary struggles of the 2008-2009 in Egypt had started.
There the workers had tried to block the road that goes from Suez to Ain Sokhna, and they were brutally suppressed by the military police, while the union bureaucrat in the Ministry of Labor had pledged to “work for the release of the workers”. They were nothing more than left poodles of Al-Sisi’s dictatorship… which in turn negotiated with Morsi, in a luxury prison, a new “transition Pact” on the basis of the Muslim Brotherhood accepting their political defeat and legitimizing this new transition Pact, what included ceding part of their business.
The masses were removed from the scene by the “democrats” and “liberals”. The military Junta took control of the State and the Government. A new political crisis opened in the heights. Morsi Pharaoh refused to follow the fate of Mubarak. Enough merit had he and his bosses’ politicians made in saving Egypt’s “democracy” from the onslaught of the hatred of the masses!
In this political crisis the risk of an intervention of the masses was every day sharper. The exploited that had thrown Morsi and those who camped now unarmed defending him, had nothing to do with the business defended by the bourgeois gangs that are scrambling to be junior partners of imperialism in the looting of the Egyptian nation.
The road to this counterrevolutionary chapter was liberated by USA. This cynically announced that it withdrew all its ambassadors from North Africa and the Middle East since the first days of August, since he said to have discovered a plot that threatened its embassies. Actually the only thing that it did was organizing a plot to launch a massacre in Egypt. Suddenly there appeared “democrats” -who yesterday praised the moderate Islamism in Tunisia and especially Egypt- that quickly turned to talk about the “terrorist danger” that this moderate Islamism meant.
Counter-revolutionary action against unarmed masses was underway. The new plan of submission of the Palestinian nation to Zionism is already underway. This includes the massive settlement of Zionist settlers in the West Bank and submitting the Palestinian masses to squeeze in small camps there and in Gaza.
Punishing the masses in Gaza, crushing the base workers and the people of the Islamic movement in Egypt, is an essential feat for this plan; so it is also starting to act in offensive manner within Egypt by imposing manu militari a steady power which is able to crush any fight by the workers and revolutionary masses in the time ahead..
Necessarily Mubarak army had to try against the masses its fire power of after the 2011 revolution. Hadn’t it done that after the fall of Morsi it ran the risk of breaking down, either by the Muslim Brotherhood, either by the masses who saw the fall of Morsi as a victory. The conditions were optimal. The cowardly bourgeoisie of the Muslim Brotherhood had commanded his followers –unarmed- to a struggle of pressure on the streets. Their followers are who are falling by the bullets of the army and not their chiefs, who, in the luxury prisons, are still negotiating a quick surrender, or a new –conditional- location within the regime.
Was an attack coming in the region against the American embassies as Obama denounced in early August, for which reason he withdrew its ambassadors? No, a brutal attack came by Obama mercenary troops in Egypt against the helpless masses. We are witnessing one chapter of this counterrevolutionary conspiracy. The “liberal” and “democratic” bourgeois and the trade union bureaucracy cannot say they weren’t there; the Tamarod movement either. Some of them are now fleeing from the bloody dictatorship that they themselves had legitimized, saying: “If they do this, Egypt will burn”. In this way these frauds are preparing from left towards the future as they are afraid the struggles of the working class and the masses could defeat this true counter-revolutionary offensive of the armed forces; meanwhile, the latter will not stop killing at close range the Muslim Brotherhood rank and file: they will pursue the worker struggles to cities further away from Cairo.
All of them are who legitimized, and now cannot look the other way, this military dictatorship, since they entered and supported its Government. They may not claim that they were lured with tricks… they went to support the generals of Mubarak, and they knew that beforehand.
The truth ought to be said, those who die since 2011 in the Egypt revolution, attacked either by the police and the army, or by the bourgeoisie of the Muslim Brotherhood, or by the military blessed from the left by the hierarchy of the Coptic Church and ElBaradei… those who always, but always, die on the streets of Egypt are THE WORKERS, THE UNEMPLOYED AND THE RURAL AND URBAN POOR. BOURGEOIS, BANKERS OR MURDEROUS MILITARY OFFICERS DO NOT DIE IN EGYPT.
The counter-revolutionary plan is that never again Tahrir square meet or that it expressed the power of the exploited. The cynical policy of the exploiters is that everybody confronts against each other; that is, to create a river of blood between the exploited, so that afterwards the forces of order, crushing the masses come to restore order in the lackey regime born in Camp David.
We insist, the chastising to the unarmed masses which were cynically used by the bourgeoisie of the Muslim Brotherhood as blackmail to negotiate with the military Junta, will be repeated to a thousand times higher extent against the working class of Egypt if it dares again to rise, with strikes, factory takeovers, fighting for bread and returning to Tahrir square.
After the massacre in Syria, today in Egypt a new chapter of the counterrevolution in the Maghreb and the Middle East has begun.
The last word has not yet been pronounced, the masses and their heroic assaults will have it.
The working class of Egypt is set to be again the main protagonist of the revolution throughout the region.
Yesterday, imperialism concentrated its forces in Syria. This couldn’t be a new Libya. The fall of Al Assad and the emergence of a weak government, fenced by the masses, threatened to jeopardize the borders of the state of Israel. The masses that revolted against Morsi in Egypt were questioning its role as a container and negotiator with Zionism and United States with the bourgeois Hamas in Gaza.
Imperialism knows very well that it is facing a single and only revolution in the entire region, from Tunisia to the bloodstained Palestine. The bourgeois leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood had guaranteed imperialism to support Mubarak and after his fall the Military Junta.
The Muslim Brotherhood was the guarantor of the negotiation with Hamas, with whom the United States negotiates the plan of the two states in the Palestine occupied by Zionism.
The fall from grace of the Brotherhood before the Egyptian masses debilitated these containment dams in the region. An attempt of this to revolt pushing for their businesses in the region with pacific demonstrations threatens to ignite a powder keg.
The new balance of power, with Morsi defeated, imposes that the control in the border with the Gaza Strip is ensured by the army, the guarantor of Camp David. And it is discussed with it how to support Zionism and reconstitute a counter-revolutionary device to stabilize the region and ensure the commercial and above all military route of the Suez Canal.
These are the strategic issues for US imperialism. The fact is that precisely the revolution in Egypt for bread -apparently very innocent, very minimal, very democratic and liberal for the charlatans that speak in the name of Marxism- ended up questioning and severely jeopardizing all the imperialism’s power and dominion machinery in the region. Nothing more and nothing less than the Suez Canal and the Zionist state, as a counter-revolutionary device in the region.
Stop throwing dirt and grime to that huge revolution in Egypt that as an advanced guard of the revolution in the Maghreb and Middle East questions the dominion of imperialism in an entire region of the planet.
The planet is filled with several millions of morons that claim “the pacific way towards socialism” and the conquest of bread and national independence. They deserve to be demolished in Homs or Aleppo, or slaughtered with their children in the streets of Cairo.
The masses don’t have the leadership they deserve. The last word hasn’t been said. We must recover the revolution; we have to recover the Tahrir Square. We have to reunite the working class and the exploited of Egypt, who were divided by their leaderships, putting them at the feet of the different factions of the bourgeoisie.
The masses and the exploited can’t delegate to the Muslim Brotherhood or to the hypocritical bourgeoisie that speaks of “freedom” and “democracy” while supporting the bayonets of the murderous generals and the US imperialism’s dominion in the region!
We must stop the massacre in Egypt! We must stop the military coup! We must defeat it in the streets! If this advances and slaughters the worker and popular base of the Muslim Brotherhood in the streets of Cairo today, tomorrow it will have enough strength to do the same with the working class struggling for its demands.
We have to break with the bourgeoisie and their parties! All the organizations that speak in the name of the working class, starting with the union and struggle organizations’ leaders, those who speak in the name of the brave youth of Egypt, must break with El Baradei, Obama’s left-wing servant and agent of Zionism and Camp David.
Only in this way the unions and working class struggle organizations will be able to win the worker and popular base, composed of millions of unemployed workers, deceived with the begging of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Breaking with the “liberal” bourgeoisie will allow the unions and the working class struggle organizations to untie their hands and fight for the expropriation of the MSCs and the capitalists, to be able to fight together with the unemployed for an extra shift in all the factories, for jobs for all and to put unemployed committees alongside the factory committees. The workers may enter these committees regardless their religion.
The working class has to bring order to the Egypt ravaged by famine and threatened to be taken to barbarism by the counter-revolution.
The working class has to reunite all the exploited, without the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, without leaderships that collaborate with the murderous regime of the pharaohs. We must rejoin the ones who fought in the Tahrir Square when we overthrew Mubarak and Morsi, but without those who gave away the struggle of the workers and their demands.
We have to defeat the military coup by retaking the exploited the revolution in their hands. We have to set up again the demands that joined us: to end with the high cost of living; wage increase and decent jobs for all, the fertile lands of the Nile for the poor peasants; expropriation without payment of all the bankers and looters of Egypt and to break with the IMF.
Down the government of Al Sisi and the entire Military Junta!
Free all the political prisoners!
We can’t acknowledge the biggest murderers and thieves of the people and their accomplices the slightest legitimacy to judge, imprison or govern one more day a single Egyptian. OUT WITH THEM ALL!
The bourgeoisie, the counter-revolution and imperialism and their parapolice gangs have been armed to the teeth to slaughter the people. We must disarm the police!
We have to set up a defense committee and worker militias of all the exploited, from every organization in Egypt, by city and region and centralized nationally.
We have to defeat the military coup! We must set up the committees of soldiers, which are the sons of the workers and the impoverished classes from the city and the countryside. The fight is to win them. The workers’ sons in the army can’t be used by the officers and generals from the bourgeoisie and imperialism to kill workers.
Full organization rights to the soldiers to elect delegates, organize themselves with the unions and factory committees in struggle. And it is with them and with the guns that the people must have that this time we return to the Tahrir Square.
There is where we should march with the workers’, union, unemployed committees, with our militias and the soldiers’ committees.
The working class, with their struggle methods, the pickets, the strike, occupying the factories, has to lead the exploited masses in the Revolutionary General Strike until the murderous dictatorship is overthrown. Time has come to say: enough! Down the military coup! Revolutionary general strike!
The power of the exploited must be set up in Tahrir Plaza. The power of the above can’t be delegated ever again at the hands of their executioners.
This is the only power that can define who friends are and who enemies of the revolution are. The ones who live from a wage, that seek a job and land, they are the majority in Egypt, the owners of the revolution.
Out with the bourgeoisie from the fighting organizations, they are the friends of the murderous army’s Military Junta under the command of Obama and Wall Street!
The revolution of Egypt must triumph. Her power is immense. It is where the advanced to defeat the slavery plan of the Palestine nation, and of the two states of Obama, UN, Zionism and Palestine collaborationist bourgeoisie.
It is where there are the strengths to tear down Raffah Wall that Muslim Brotherhood tried to raise it up again when the Gaza masses brought it down.
It is where there are the strengths to break the fence to the Syrian revolution and be the best ally of the Libyan revolution.
Before, in hundreds of cities of the world we fought with the war cry of “Fight like Egypt”. The hit of Al Sisi and Obama is to silence that cry, is to defeat the ones who fence Wall Street and the indignados of Madrid. Today we must listen again that “fight like Egypt with the workers and soldiers councils to defeat the power of the bourgeoisie and the imperialism”.
Only a government of the workers, soldiers and poor peasants will be able the free Egypt of the yoke of the slavery, to break with the imperialism, to retake the control of the Suez Canal and bring down the sinister Agreement of Camp David between the Arab bourgeoisies, Zionism and imperialism.
To defeat, the masses must break with the “democratic” and “liberal” bourgeoisie which kneeled them to their executioners: the Military Junta. Only in that way, and we don’t acknowledge Obama’s military no legitimacy, even for imprisoning Morsi is how workers organizations will have the authority to win the most of the desperate workers and peasants that fight and die, deceived, under the flags of the Muslim Brotherhood bourgeoisie.
Yesterday we fought the praetorian guard of Muslim Brotherhood and their para-police groups of rich middle class that wanted to stop our fight to overthrow Morsi. Today we must face the “civilian commands” of the “democratic” and “liberal” bourgeoisie that support the bayonets of the Egyptian murderous army that only slaughters defenseless workers, women and children in the streets of El Cairo.
The bourgeoisie and imperialism with their counterrevolutionary hits only seek to tear down and divide the workers and exploited ranks so that never again the revolution started in 2011 raise its head.
They did it with Morsi and his fraudulent polls. Now they are doing it in order to legitimate the military dictatorship, with the 22 million fraudulent signatures which are supposed to add to Tamarod movement when Morsi was already overthrown by the masses with their fight in the streets.
Only a national congress with delegates of the entire worker movement in Egypt, of the unemployed worker and poor peasants will gather the requisites of representing the majority of the population and of taking over power.
The working class of Egypt needs a revolutionary leadership to triumph. There, in that revolution, every single recipe that leads to a dead end to the masses has been tested.
One of them was the kneeling to the “nationalist bourgeois” movements, or the one that pose of such thing to end up like Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, allied to the imperialism and slaughtering their own people or using it as cannon fodder to be slaughtered, to negotiate with their blood his own businesses.
It has also been proved the nefarious theory of the democratic revolution raised as a flag for the victory for the renegades of Trotskyism, sidekicks of the Stalinism. They told the masses that voting they started to solve their problems and not fighting nor raising their own armed bodies of self-organization, conquering the power.
They spoke of “people’s springs” and in the revolution of Maghreb and Middle East, it’s a hell to the masses and an infamous genocide in Syria over the one the entire left of Obama remains in miserable silence… while speaking of the “democracy”.
The events of Egypt show, as every single one in Maghreb and Middle East, that even to accomplish the tasks of the formal parliamentary democracy to the end, that means, guarantee minimally a National Constituent Assembly free and sovereign, that task can only be accomplished by the armed working class taking over the power.
In Egypt it is clear that in the oppressed countries the bread, the land and the national independency can’t be conquered if the working class and their allies, demolishing the state of the oppressors, don’t take over the power.
And that’s the theory and the program of the Fourth International that has past again the test of the events and allows the revolutionary movement to speak in their name. Only under their flags the vanguard and the most cunning and advanced of the working class in Egypt will be able to regroup their strengths and understand that he is a main actor of the revolution in the entire Maghreb and Middle East.
Under the standpoint of its program, the conditions to set up internationalist revolutionary parties that will lead to the victory to the single revolution that has started from Tunisia to Damascus and from El Cairo to Jerusalem will be opened.
From one side they are faced the program and the theory of the permanent revolution and the program of the 4th International; and in the opposite trench, kneeling the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, fencing the slaughtered masses as in Syria, supporting the strength of the counterrevolutionary Zionism, tying the hands to the European, north American and worldwide working class, so it doesn’t come up in aid of their class brothers of Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. it’s the WSF supported by the entire left of Obama’s and Wall Street’s lackeys.
The acts of the counterrevolution in the Maghreb and Middle East today accelerate the times to advance in setting up a committee for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International.
In the events of Egypt is defined in great measure who can talk on behalf of revolution. There, revolution and counterrevolution face each other.
The reformist is found hanged, as never before, at the skirts of the bourgeoisie of El Baradei and others, that means, the Popular Front, in Syria and Tunisia.
Again it is the fight to pass the test of the revolution and counterrevolution the one that defines the borders in the international Marxist movement. The ones who fight under the flags of the Fourth International have passed that test. It is about bringing back the masses the leadership they deserve.
The destiny of Egypt and the oppressed nation of the entire region are already cast in history… or the socialist revolution triumphs or the protectorates and colonies regimes will be established in all the oil routs countries.
The borders will be drawn again due to the plunder and imperialist domain. For the working class lives, imperialism must die.
For the destruction of the Zionist fascist state of Israel.
The socialist revolution in Egypt deserves to triumph.
For the Socialist United States of the Maghreb and Middle East.
FLTI- Collective for the Fourth International
