Monthly: February 2011

22 Feb

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The changing face of activism (or not)

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Members of the April 6 Movement in Egypt

Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have revealed new and surprising forms of political activism and reinforced long standing ones. The mass uprising in Egypt has sparked a wave of protest across the region as populations held down for decades under oppressive regimes have openly rebelled. Country after country has seen mass demonstrations met by varying degrees of bafflement combined with brute force from regimes unable to cope with the speed and visceral intensity of dissent from their deeply wounded but now fearless peoples. The use of state sanctioned violence against peaceful crowds has played very badly in the international media and brought great pressure to bear on Western powers that have sponsored the oligarchs and tyrants of the Arab world. Al Jazeera’s informed coverage has almost single-handedly provided a credible, sober antidote to the hysterical whining of the Fox News clowns and lesser species of nuts.

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Filed Under: democracy, Egypt, non-violent direct action, revolution, state

20 Feb

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Have the Australian Greens become Julia Gillard’s ‘useful idiots’?

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Since the dust from the August election settled, something strange has been going on in the Australian Greens camp. I think it’s probably a conscious “strategy,” but I’m not privy to the discussions in the party room, so I can’t be sure. But here is my stab at it, and why it worries me deeply.

Last week’s announcement on the flood levy is reflective of what is going on, so it’s worth quoting at length:
The Australian Greens will support the flood levy in the House of Representatives and the Senate after important gains from the Government on their proposed funding cuts, Greens Leader Bob Brown, Deputy Leader Christine Milne and MP Adam Bandt said in Canberra today.

“The Greens have taken our concerns directly to the government and have negotiated a good outcome that will release funding for flood recovery and protect key programs,” Senator Brown said.

The Greens have ensured that $100 million will be returned to the Solar Flagships program in the forward estimates and that a proper consultation process will be undertaken to develop long term policy for large-scale solar power. […]

The Australian Greens have also secured the restoration of the National Rental Affordability Scheme and commitments regarding funding for learning and teaching.
Their Senior Media Advisor, Marion Rae, managed to claim this as a victory on Twitter:
Details of the Greens’ win for flood recovery here, including full audio: http://bit.ly/gzrkfa Gillard just needs one more vote http://bit.ly/dKOabW
The levy in an ‘Age of Austerity’
It’s worth taking a step back and examining the meaning of the levy debate to see why this is such a problematic line of thinking. To do this I’ll look at the two measures being foregrounded by the government: the flood levy and the cuts to the budget.
The levy is set to raise a mere $1.8 billion, a tiny fraction of Australia’s annual GDP and only about a third of the $5.6 billion Gillard has estimated the floods will cost the federal government. According to one analyst, “It represents just 0.2 per cent of household disposable income or 0.3 per cent of total consumer spending,” and was driven by cries from financial markets (those great friends of working people) worried that reconstruction activities could “overheat” the economy and lead the RBA to raise interest rates. Their solution? Cut consumer spending. Much of the debate about whether such a one-off tax will “destroy the economy” or “drive people in to hardship” has thus been a smoke and mirrors exercise, with the Coalition playing a variation on its “great big new tax” trope.
But it is important to understand the politics (rather than economics) of why Gillard has focused on the levy. It has been to pose the entire debate in terms of how we pay for an apparently unexpected, “natural” disaster. This is Gillard’s own smoke and mirrors, using a set of moral arguments about helping flood victims to drive her much less openly declared austerity agenda, hatched long before the summer’s disasters and on which she and Abbott are in broad agreement.
Last September Left Flank reviewed the (redacted) Red Book, which set out Treasury bureaucrats’ wish list for the incoming Labor government:
Treasury’s Red Book message is crystal clear — that neoliberal reforms must remain central to the government’s actions. There are three main lines of argument in the document. First, that the Australian economy is doing so well that dangers of “wage inflation” need to be headed off at the pass. Second, that government deficit reduction must be prioritised. And third, that “market mechanisms” remain the best way to do… well, just about everything.
The second commitment is most important here, in line with Wayne Swan’s conversion from stimulus champion to sovereign debt crusader at last year’s G20 in Toronto. Faced with minority government and an inability to control the political agenda, Gillard has set out to prove herself a great (neoliberal) reformer.
But such reforms are not exactly popular with an electorate tired of decades of job insecurity, rising overtime (often unpaid), speed-ups at work, privatisations, running down of public services and the spectacle of bankers, financiers and corporate CEOs enriching themselves while everyone else is urged to show “restraint”. It’s especially hard to sell cuts when you’ve also spent the last few years telling people how successful you’ve been in (a) preventing recession and (b) minimising the budget deficit compared with just about every other rich nation.
Hence the obsession in having to reach a budget surplus by 2012-3 under any circumstances — it is a proxy for wanting to drive further cuts to public spending while still guaranteeing corporate tax cuts, maintaining the Howard-Rudd tax cuts for high income earners and delivering outlandish tax concessions — worth $25-30 billion and mainly going to the wealthy — for Australia’s scandalous superannuation system.
The levy debate is in reality a way of softening people up for austerity measures demanded by bosses and financial markets faced with increased competitive pressures driven by a world economy still mired in its worst downturn since the 1930s. And if governments like those of the UK — or US states like Wisconsin — get away with wholesale attacks on public sector jobs and services, accelerate privatisation and user-pays measures and break remaining bastions of union organisation, the cries from the business class to ramp up such efforts here will only grow more shrill.
Gillard’s linking of the levy with cutbacks is not just an attempt to mollify Abbott but a cynical move to pressure crossbenchers into agreeing to cuts as part of a “compassionate” response to flood victims. It’s a classic Trojan Horse strategy, beloved on American legislators and their “omnibus” bills.
The Greens and the political system
The Greens have effectively surrendered to this approach in the same week that Gillard’s watering down of the mining tax has been exposed as robbing the government of a staggering $60 billion in revenue over 10 years. The Greens’ press release sheepishly admits they would’ve preferred the original RSPT rather than agreeing to the cuts they have backed, but they backed cuts anyhow.
They could have added to this the outrageous level of state subsidy of the corporate sector that continues unabated under Gillard even as she talks of tightening the screws on public services and welfare, as Greg Barns has summarised:
There is, for example, the Australian Competitiveness and Investment Scheme, a Howard government baby. That has grown from $142.6 million in 2002 to $233.8 million this year, before reducing to a still sizable $137 million next year. Alongside this are three programs designed to commercialise business ideas. Together they are costing taxpayers $67 million in this year alone.

And business is also doing very nicely on tax concessions. The Industry R & D Tax Concession is worth $1.5 billion this year and next year will be even higher. It is a program which has grown like topsy since its introduction by the Howard government almost a decade ago. In fact it has risen every year from 2002 where it cost $370 million. The 2010-2011 Portfolio Budget Statement for the Industry portfolio also lists what it terms “other R&D support” at $94.4 million this year.

And of course then there are the specific industry programs. The textile, clothing and footwear industry has benefited from a package of funding worth over $400 million in the past two years. But the granddaddy of industry mendicants, the auto sector, leaves the TCF sector in the shade. It has squeezed a cool $3.4 billion out of the Rudd and Gillard governments to retool their plants.

Now, I’m not claiming that Greens MPs, or party members, are wedded to neoliberal austerity and corporate subsidies. The opposite is usually true. Adam Bandt has publicly attacked neoliberalism on more than one occasion. And I spoke on a Politics in the Pub panel with NSW Greens MP John Kaye a fortnight ago where he railed against neoliberal policies. However, the party is internally confused and divided on what a progressive economic policy looks like, with aspects of neoclassical orthodoxy sitting alongside Keynesian ideas and more radical notions.
There are two further weaknesses in the Greens’ strategy which leaves them looking like Gillard’s useful idiots on the question of which class interests the political system serves. First is their focus on parliamentary compromise as the sole arena of political struggle. They like to dress this up as winning “progressive outcomes”, but when the general thrust of government policy is regressive then “victories” are at best a softening of right-wing attacks rather than any forward movement. “A good outcome” means slowing the rate of neoliberalisation rather than mobilising a real fight against it. It is a strategy that cements the passivity of ordinary people while politicians play games that directly affect their livelihoods.
Second is their desire to appear cooperative with Gillard on those issues where they feel they cannot win ground from the ALP. So on refugees and climate issues they will often drive a hard bargain (so they rightly rejected the CPRS) but where they feel on shakier ground — with economics the key example — they tend to want to appear pliant and reasonable. Hence Sarah Hanson-Young’s performance on Insiders this morning, promising to keep being constructive as Gillard brings more cuts to the table in the months ahead! This will do nothing other than legitimise the austerity agenda Gillard is implementing.
After 2007, internal polling was interpreted by party strategists as showing that voters preferred the Greens to “help” Kevin Rudd fulfil progressive promises rather than attack him. Yet the Greens’ big vote in 2010 rested in part on an effective denunciation of Gillard dragging the ALP sharply to the Right. There is no sign that Gillard intends to arrest that trajectory, yet the Greens MPs have been cuddling up to her — including sitting on a secretive carbon price committee that has seen them outmanoeuvred on non-market climate measures — far more than guarantees of supply and confidence would require of them. Bob Brown’s public attack on Andrew Bolt last year was specifically in defence of Gillard.
In this, there is desperation to be seen as effective mainstream operators, acceptable to political and business elites, and shedding their image as a party of protest. The risk is that they will be tainted by the stench of the same “broken” political system (what I have suggested is a kind of not-politics) that Australian voters rejected so resoundingly last August. It is a system that many on the Left hoped the Greens would be part of transforming. Instead the Greens MPs risk being assimilated into it, thereby sending the message that resistance is futile.

Filed Under: age of austerity, ALP, Bob Brown, democracy, Greens, Julia Gillard, neoliberalism

16 Feb

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So you think you want a revolution?

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Photo by Counterfire

My latest piece on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed — “What Australia can learn from Egypt’s uprising” — dispelling the mythology around revolutions peddled by Western leaders and mainstream media:

The word “revolution” comes loaded with many preconceptions, but the 18 days that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt have deeply challenged views about what revolutions are and are not.


In large part this is because official politics in the West has treated revolutions as hazardous, destabilising and an unwelcome break from liberal democratic norms. It has wanted to warn people against getting dangerous ideas in their heads about seriously challenging concentrations of wealth and power. Revolutions are often equated with coups by tiny groups of armed militants, carried out over the heads of the people and almost invariably installing regimes more tyrannical than what came before. Or they are seen as mere chaos, proving yet again that ordinary people need strong leaders because they are incapable of governing themselves.

And:

As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, this revolution has been universalist in character, not only born of social causes but reviving eternal ideas of “freedom, justice and dignity”. The protesters have opened a new world of possibilities because through their actions “they suspended the authority of the state — it was not just an inner liberation, but a social act of breaking chains of servitude.” In a similar vein, the Russian Marxist V.I. Lenin called revolution “a festival of the oppressed”. It is a powerful descriptor of amazing scenes of millions of Egyptians rising up against their dictator and his bevy of torturers.


But the fall of Mubarak is only the beginning — revolutions are processes and not singular events. The success of a movement largely united around national-democratic demands will now give way to a plethora of debates and discussions as different social groups’ interests are refracted through movements and political parties, competing with each other (and the military) over the best way forward for Egyptian society.

Filed Under: Egypt, revolution

14 Feb

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The Egyptian Revolution: only the beginning — where to next?

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The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
How good was that?

Here we’ll let some Egyptian voices speak: First, a statement on Friday from the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt:
Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!
What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal “leaders” and their criminal system is destroyed.
Mubarak’s departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution
The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafiq is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.
The country’s wealth belongs to the people and must return to it
Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country’s largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90 per cent of the country’s wealth. They monopolise the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatisation, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.
Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people
We want the nationalisation of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.
We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel
This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator, was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of [the United States] and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of [the United States], participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soaring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region.
The revolution is a popular revolution
This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt’s youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.
A people’s army is the army that protects the revolution
Everyone asks: “Is the army with the people or against them?” The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.
This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 1973. This army is closely associated with [the United States] and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that “the army is on our side”. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.
Form revolutionary councils urgently
This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.
What we need right now is to push for the socioeconomic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organise ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.
Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution
The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.
The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!
Glory to the martyrs!
Down with the system!
All power to the people!
Victory to the revolution!

 Send messages of support to info@e-socialists.net
Striking oil workers hit the oil minister’s poster with their shoes (Photo from http://www.arabawy.org/2011/02/13/workers-oil-shoes/)  
And here is the analysis of Egyptian blogger and journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy from his blog on Saturday:
Since yesterday, and actually earlier, middle class activists have been urging Egyptians to suspend the protests and return to work, in the name of patriotism, singing some of the most ridiculous lullabies about “let’s build new Egypt,” “Let’s work harder than even before,” etc… In case you didn’t know, actually Egyptians are among the hardest working people in the globe already.
Those activists want us to trust Mubarak’s generals with the transition to democracy — the same junta that has provided the backbone of his dictatorship over the past 30 years. And while I believe the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who receive $1.3 billion annually from the US, will eventually engineer the transition to a “civilian” government, I have no doubt it will be a government that will guarantee the continuation of a system that will never touch the army’s privileges, keep the armed forces as the institution that will have the final say in politics (like for example Turkey), guarantee Egypt will continue to follow the US foreign policy whether it’s the undesired peace with Apartheid State of Israel, safe passage for the US navy in the Suez Canal, the continuation of the Gaza siege and exports of natural gas to Israel at subsidized rates. The “civilian” government is not about cabinet members who do not wear military uniforms. A civilian government means a government that fully represents the Egyptian people’s demands and desires without any intervention from the brass. And I see this hard to be accomplished or allowed by the junta.
The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.
All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. In Tahrir Square you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together with the workers, middle class citizens, and the urban poor. Mubarak has managed to alienate all social classes in society including wide section of the bourgeoisie. But remember that it’s only when the mass strikes started three days ago that’s when the regime started crumbling and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about to collapse.
Some have been surprised that the workers started striking. I really don’t know what to say. This is completely idiotic. The workers have been staging the longest and most sustained strike wave in Egypt’s history since 1946, triggered by the Mahalla strike in December 2006. It’s not the workers’ fault that you were not paying attention to their news. Every single day over the past three years there was a strike in some factory whether it’s in Cairo or the provinces. These strikes were not just economic, they were also political in nature.
From day 1 of our uprising, the working class has been taking part in the protests. Who do you think were the protesters in Mahalla, Suez and Kafr el-Dawwar for example? However, the workers were taking part as “demonstrators” and not necessarily as “workers”– meaning, they were not moving independently. The govt had brought the economy to halt, not the protesters by its curfew, shutting down of banks and business. It was a capitalist strike, aiming at terrorizing the Egyptian people. Only when the govt tried to bring the country back to “normal” on Sunday that workers returned to their factories, discussed the current situation, and started to organize en masse, moving as a block.
The strikes waged by the workers this week were both economic and political fused together. In some of the locations the workers did not list the regime’s fall among their demands, but they used the same slogans as those protesting in Tahrir and in many cases, at least those I managed to learn about and I’m sure there are others, the workers put forward a list of political demands in solidarity with the revolution.
These workers are not going home anytime soon. They started strikes because they couldn’t feed their families anymore. They have been emboldened by Mubarak’s overthrowal, and cannot go back to their children and tell them the army has promised to bring them food and their rights in I don’t know how many months. Many of the strikers have already started raising additional demands of establishing free trade unions away from the corrupt, state backed Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions.
Today, I’ve already started receiving news that thousands of Public Transport workers are staging protests in el-Gabal el-Ahmar. The temporary workers at Helwan Steel Mills are also protesting. The Railway technicians continue to bring trains to halt. Thousands of el-Hawamdiya Sugar Factory are protesting and oil workers will start a strike tomorrow over economic demands and also to impeach Minister Sameh Fahmy and halt gas exports to Israel. And more reports are coming from other industrial centres.
At this point, the Tahrir Square occupation is likely to be suspended. But we have to take Tahrir to the factories now. As the revolution proceeds an inevitable class polarization is to happen. We have to be vigilant. We shouldn’t stop here… We hold the keys to the liberation of the entire region, not just Egypt… Onwards with a permanent revolution that will empower the people of this country with direct democracy from below…

Filed Under: Egypt, imperialism, revolution, state

09 Feb

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Beyond an impasse — Egypt’s masses surge forth again

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From Al-Jazeera’s English-language website:

The square has become a mini-utopia in central Cairo. Political opinions aired, gender and sectarian divisions nowhere to be found. People feed and clothe each other here. Medical areas have been set up by doctors joining in with the protesters. The crime and sexual harassment so prevalent in the country seems absent in this square.

Now it is clearer what Tahrir Square’s function has become in the organisation of the Egyptian Revolution. It is no longer the space in which the regime can try to hem in the protesters and isolate them from Egypt, as it tried to do by deploying the military and its hired thugs. Rather, it is the centre of a growing and strengthening network of resistance, a focal point for all the energies and transformations that have burst forth since 25 January.
Many Western media reports have simply misunderstood the process unfolding around them. Every time Mubarak has refused to go, or to tell people to accept that his torturer-in-chief, Omar Suleiman, would be the great conduit of liberal reforms in the country it has not meant the end of the movement (even if it has exposed real divisions, sometimes along class lines). Instead, it has deepened organisers’ resolve to reach out and draw greater layers of the population into active participation. The concessions being offered by the regime at an increasingly desperate pace are being interpreted not as a restabilisation but as a sign of the ruling elite’s weakness:
The demonstration drew significantly larger numbers of Egyptians who have not attended the protests before — including women, children and government workers — in a sign of the broadening base of support for the uprising.
Importantly, protesters have taken to Cairo streets outside Tahrir Square, finding their numbers swelling in numbers as local residents and bystanders join them. Hossam el-Hamalawy’s joyous tweets (starting here) as part of a march of 3000 university professors give an excellent feel of the mood. At one point they face off briefly with the army, without incident, and are let through. Hossam tweets:
a soldier now murmured to me: we r with u
Then:
more soldiers r smiling, some shake hands. We r now passing by AUC
And here is the working class…
There is growing involvement of organised workers in the protests. Telecommunications workers have been out in Cairo protesting against the regime. Some 1300 workers at a steel company in the Suez have started an open-ended strike over pay.  Journalists at al-Ahram have gotten into the act, raising not just economic issues but demands over the corruption and politics of the publishers and editors, chanting: “Revolution everywhere in Egypt, revolution in Ahram!”
Clearly the journalists have won some autonomy, producing an extensive round-up of workers’ strikes and protests. To give you just a taste of it, I couldn’t resist this:
In Cairo, more than 1500 public authority for cleaning and beauty workers in demonstrated in front of the authority’s head quarters in Dokki. According to a statement by the head of the authority on Egyptian television, their demands include an increase in their monthly wages, to LE1200, and a daily lunch meal. The workers are also demanding for permanent contracts and the dismissal of the authority’s president.
Probably among the most important are signs that workers associated with the Suez Canal have gone on strike. As they are from subsidiary companies there is no disruption to the operations of the canal as yet. But the potential importance of this goes beyond Egypt’s economic and political interests tied to the canal. The Suez Canal is a major supply line for the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, one that is deeply unpopular among the Egyptian masses. Any truly democratic Egyptian government would be under extreme popular pressure to undermine the US military effort by denying access to the canal.
The local economic and the global geopolitical can suddenly be fused.
How revolutions unfold
In our era of the 24-hour news cycle, social media and rolling political crises it is too easy for mainstream media to lose interest in momentous events because it doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of how things unfold. The reasons for the lack of immediate regime change in Egypt is something I addressed in a reply to comments on our last post, suggesting that we are entering what Gramsci would have called a “war of position” within the revolutionary process. British Marxist Judith Orr, who was in Tahrir last week, puts it rather more succinctly and clearly:
Many imagine a revolution is one night of barricades followed by an insurrection that takes power or is defeated.
But a revolution is not a single event—it is a process. A process with ebbs and flows, advances and setbacks that can take place over weeks, months and even years.
At any time the end result is not predetermined. During this process both sides are organising, pushing any advantage they can get, looking for weaknesses in the other side.
Let’s think of Australia since 25 January, where political news has been rapidly shifting around an absence of genuine social change. Interminable debates about flood levies and politicians’ gaffes. It is this hollowness that we should recognise for what it is. For too long we have been experiencing a kind of not-politics, a shell masquerading as politics. Egypt is the return of real politics on a scale and with a beauty we should savour and unequivocally embrace.

UPDATE: Protesters have surrounded the Parliament and are putting up barricades:

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy

Filed Under: class, Egypt, revolution

07 Feb

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The Egyptian revolution and the working class

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Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy

It’s worth reading in full an interview on Saturday night, Cairo time, with Egyptian blogger and journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, on the excellent Occupied Cairo blog. But on the question of class polarisation and independent workers’ action he has this to say:
The uprising up until now contained elements from all Egyptian society, whether it is the urban poor, the working class, and even sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite could be seen in the protest. But as the revolution continues, some polarization has started to happen naturally. Between those who are tired, meaning the middle class and the upper middle class who are saying that we should stop now and try to reach some compromise with the government, and those who basically have nothing to loose and who have sacrificed a lot, like the urban poor and the working class.

The intervention of the working class in the movement is also another question mark, because definitely in some of the provinces where mass protests were organized they contained a majority of workers. But we still haven’t seen an independent movement by those workers. Except in very few cases. For example I received a report about a textile mill owned by a company called Ghazl Meit Ghamr in Daqahliya, which is a province in the Nile Delta. The workers there have kicked out the CEO, they have occupied the factory and are self-managing it. This type of action has also been repeated in a printing house south of Cairo called Dar El-Ta’awon. There as well the workers have kicked out the CEO and are self managing the company. There are two other cases in Suez, where the clashes were the worst with the security forces during the uprising. The death toll is very high in Suez, we don’t actually know the real death toll until now. In two factories there, the Suez Steel Mill and the Suez Fertilizer Factory, workers have declared an open-ended strike until the regime falls. Other than that we have not seen, at least to my knowledge, independent working class action.
Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood has entered centre stage by opening itself to negotiations with the regime, as well as rejecting publicly the Iranian regime’s in attempt to paint the Egyptian revolt as “Islamic”:
“The MB regards the revolution as the Egyptian People’s Revolution not an Islamic Revolution” said a statement published on the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website just hours after Khamenei’s remarks on Friday, while “asserting that the Egyptian People’s Revolution includes Muslims, Christians, from all sects and political.”

Filed Under: class, Egypt, revolution

04 Feb

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Who’s afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood?

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They are:

The tyrant’s strategy seems clear. After 30 years of brutality, repression and feathering the nest of his globetrotting fellow elites, at the moment his regime is in peril he will act as the reasonable one. He will act to reverse the “chaos” and “anarchy” in the streets as gangs of violent thugs attack and murder anti-government protesters.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Egypt, Gramsci, imperialism, Islamism

03 Feb

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The Egyptian revolution: Liberal democracy as the enemy of freedom

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In February 2003 I was part of the 400,000-strong rally in Sydney opposing the impending US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. It seemed for a moment that we were going to disrupt the plans of the self-styled Coalition Of The Willing by sheer force of numbers, part of probably the largest coordinated protest in Australian and world history — one that led the New York Times to famously declare the people on the streets as a “second superpower”.
I’d say that the feeling of our potential power then — a feeling gutted by the subsequent invasion — was only a fraction of what the Egyptian masses have felt over the last week. Not only have more than a million people turned out in Cairo, there have been hundreds of thousands more in cities around the country. And their goal is not the prevention of a faraway military action but the destruction of a tyrant who has brutalised, oppressed and belittled them for 30 years.

As I tweeted on Monday:
Can I just say the #Egyptian revolution is the most inspiring thing I have seen in over two decades of political activism? #Jan25
Yet, oddly for some, the festive and determined feeling of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo as they fight for democratic rights has not met with approval from many of the most ardent defenders of liberal democracy in the West.
“Stability” contra democracy
One could have predicted that the Israeli government, so fond of touting itself as having by far the healthiest democracy (if not “the only true democracy”) in the Middle East, to be uncomfortable with democratic change in Egypt. But Netanyahu’s pro-Mubarak line has upset even many pro-Israel commentators because of its blatant assertion that the right of the Zionist state to pliant neighbours is more important than the Egyptian people’s human rights.
Then there are the elite liberals whose names include Obama, Clinton, Blair and our own two-time foreign minister, Kevin Rudd. These are the foreign policy players who have long championed “free and fair elections” and criticised (certain) Arab dictators. Yet the events in Egypt have seen them scramble for the cover of promoting “regional stability” and “orderly transitions”.
It’s not like they don’t have form. For example, in 2009 Clinton was playing up her good relations with the Egyptian dictator, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.” As recently as Sunday she was still squirming about, refusing to back the Egyptian protesters against Mubarak, instead giving her support to some abstract “Egyptian People” despite claiming 30 years of support for “a democratic Egypt that provides both political and economic rights to its people.” Vice-President Joe Biden managed to be even more hamfisted, reluctant to admit that Mubarak was a dictator, saying he shouldn’t step down and even suggesting the protesters’ claims may not be “legitimate”.
Kevin Rudd, interviewed on Sky News last week, also dodged the question:
Newsreader: Mr Rudd, if I can turn now to what is happening there and what you see as the future, do you think the people want more freedoms in their country? What’s Australia’s view on that? Do we support that?
Rudd: Well, the political situation is highly fluid, as a number of my colleagues from elsewhere around the world have said. We have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East. We have equally strongly argued that this transformation should occur peacefully and without violence. That remains our view in terms of recent developments in Egypt as well.
Newsreader: The White House is suggesting that the Egyptians turn the internet back on and the social networks, that sort of thing, and of course to end the violence. You’d be supportive of that, would you?
Rudd: Well, I’ve not seen White House statements to that effect. I go back to what I said before. We ourselves have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East and across the Arab world, but equally we strongly emphasise the importance for those things to occur peacefully and without violence. Therefore we should be exceptionally vigilant about what is occurring in Egypt at the moment.
A large part of this stems from the seismic shifts in geopolitics threatened by a successful Egyptian revolution. The United States and its allies are desperately looking to prop up as much of Mubarak’s regime as possible so that their interests in the Middle East are as little disrupted as possible. The arch liberal imperialist Tony Blair has probably been the most honest regarding the wishes of elite Western interests, dreaming up sickening paeans to Mubarak as he goes, even suggesting the tyrant has “been immensely courageous and a force for good” before raising the spectre of an Islamist takeover if the political transition is allowed to happen too quickly. That transition issue has seen Obama work desperately to buy time, if only to ensure that pro-US figures are in place to take key positions in any post-Mubarak settlement. As Alex Callinicos has pointed out in his analysis of the dilemma facing the United States:
The New York Times reported after a meeting of the US National Security Council last week: “President Obama’s decision to stop short, at least for now, of calling for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was driven by the administration’s concern that it could lose all leverage over the Egyptian president, and because it feared creating a power vacuum inside the country, according to administration officials involved in the debate.”
Overshadowing these deliberations will be the memory of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9.
Then the US hung on to its ally, the Shah, for too long. When it dropped him the army collapsed in the face of the revolutionary movement. In Egypt too, the US will be relying on its close links with the military to influence the situation. But the Egyptian armed forces aren’t a homogeneous institution. They are vulnerable to external pressure.
Liberal democracy will not be saved by liberal democrats
But such concerns are not just the preserve of the elite circles that hold the reins of power. Even the Greens’ Bob Brown found himself unable to openly support the protesters in an muted press release on Sunday, a position that was probably to the Right of the US State Department’s fast-changing line at the time. Similarly, Adam Bandt’s statement to a solidarity rally in Melbourne was written in an oddly passive style, avoiding explicit support for Egyptian protesters’ demands for Mubarak’s immediate resignation.
This reflects a wider argument within the mainstream Left that the instability and uncertainty of the revolutionary process, not to mention its (relatively minor) violent characteristics somehow make it hard to support. Suddenly for many on the Left it has become harder to support a people’s movement against dictatorship and for democracy because it doesn’t fit neatly into preconceived criteria. Better to pass brief comment on how worrying the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood is, or to agonise that the result will be a replay of Iran in 1979, or even just get down to debating Gillard’s flood levy against that heartless Abbott.
Slavoj Zizek, back in form after his recent spate of dog-whistling around multiculturalism, nails the issues around Islamism well, asking “Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?” He stands wholeheartedly on the side of the revolution, accurately diagnoses its ability to sideline more conservative Islamist forces inside Egypt, points out that liberal democracy itself cannot deliver liberal democracy, attacks the Left liberal pining for a stable bourgeois state, and talks of the failure of the old secular Left in the Middle East.
His article gets to the heart of liberal democratic anxiety around Islamism. In reality, the introduction of a liberal democratic regime in Egypt would — while providing some welcome increase in political rights — do little to solve the country’s deep social and economic polarisation. In the longer term its inability to resolve those problems would provide a space for the Islamists to pose as a social alternative, and they indeed have a long record of doing so through their focus on social justice and networks of elite-sponsored charity (however partial such a solution would be).
The only thing that can save the ideals of liberal democracy (liberty, equality, fraternity) in this kind of situation is the struggle for a new social system, not a continuation of neoliberal (or even some mythical social democratic) capitalism. This is the great contradiction of capitalism, a social system that allows the formal political rights bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment while systematically denying economic justice because of its inbuilt class hierarchies and anarchic market relations. And it is why liberal democracy ends up repeatedly on the wrong side of revolutionary situations, with its utopian hope that capitalist social relations can somehow be smoothed away within a very limited range of political rights. In essence, it has to disavow the very freedoms it espouses in “normal times”.
While it is impossible to predict what will eventuate from the process underway in Egypt, one thing that we need to be clear on is that this is not a rerun of the Iranian Revolution. The balance of social and political forces is markedly different, as Juan Cole shows in his latest blog post.
But that doesn’t mean we can be sanguine about what happens next. The great danger is that the Western Left gets cold feet about the revolution and starts to ape our rulers in looking for safe, reasonable liberal democratic forces to support. Zizek cheekily suggests that only the radical Left can save bourgeois democratic ideals, and so the liberals will have to fall in behind the revolutionaries. There simply is too little social basis for a stable liberal outcome to the crisis currently spreading across the Middle East. We have to be open to the possibility that the only “stable” and just solution will be one based on fundamental social transformation that rids us of not just of this or that dictator, but breaks the ensemble of social relations that reproduces the rule of capital itself. That is, a new hegemony of the subaltern groupings to replace the very capitalist state the liberals hold dear. 

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Bob Brown, democracy, Egypt, Greens, imperialism, Kevin Rudd, revolution, Slavoj Zizek

02 Feb

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Not good enough. Try again

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From the New York Times:
CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not run for another term in elections scheduled for the fall, appearing on state television to promise an orderly transition but he would serve out his term. In comments translated by CNN, he swore that he would die in Egypt.
Television cameras showed the vast crowds gathered in central Tahrir Square in Cairo roaring, but not necessarily in approval. The protesters have has made the president’s immediate and unconditional resignation a bedrock demand of their movement, and it did not appear that the concession would mollify them.
From earlier in the day in Tahrir Square, protesters take a less lenient approach to the dictator:

Filed Under: Egypt

01 Feb

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Egypt: Revolution, counter-revolution and Islamism

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UPDATE: Now cross-posted at Overland Journal blog.

Great to wake up this morning to see that the Egyptian army is publicly stating it won’t use force against the protesters. Of course this could just be part of buying time for the regime, but it goes to the scale of the crisis facing Mubarak and his allies:

“The presence of the army in the streets is for your sake and to ensure your safety and wellbeing. The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people,” the army statement said.

“Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.”

The growing involvement of the working class in this story is ramping up the pressure on Mubarak, with capital wanting an end to the strikes and stayaways that are crippling its operations:

It is Mubarak, say an increasing number of the country’s business community, not the people who is costing them money.

Among those who appear to be distancing themselves from Mubarak is Naguib Sawiris, head of the Orascom international telecoms empire and one of Egypt’s most high-profile business figures, who said that he supported the ambitions of the protest movement, adding that a transition to democracy would be good for the Egyptian economy.

Foreign investors, on whom the economy depends, are also quick to retreat and, according to assessment by Credit Suisse, are not likely to return, at least until the crisis ends, which it believes is now most likely to happen with the departure of Mubarak. Instead, it warns, foreign and private investment risks collapsing even if Mubarak manages to cling on to power.

Mubarak, meanwhile, has been raising the spectre of “infiltration” of the protests by “people who use the name of religion”. At one level this is a message to the West about the threat of Islamists, chiefly his key political opponents in the semi-legal Muslim Brotherhood. But as Middle East analyst Juan Cole points out, it’s mainly directed at sowing divisions in a movement that has united ordinary people across religious groupings (not to mention secular organisations):

He implicitly blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the sabotage and arson that has been committed against government institutions, including police stations. He contrasted the hooliganism of the Brotherhood with the peaceful aspirations of most Egyptians, and pledged to work for economic and social reform (while giving the pledge no content). Mubarak is attempting to split the movement against him by sowing seeds of doubt among its constituents. These include Coptic Christians, educated middle and upper middle class Muslims, and non-ideological youth, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. By suggesting that the MB is taking advantage of the protests to conduct a campaign of sabotage behind the scenes, with the goal of establishing a theocratic dictatorship, Mubarak hopes to terrify the other groups into breaking with the Muslim fundamentalists. Since middle class movements such as Kefaya (Enough!) are small and not very well organized, Mubarak may believe that he can easily later crush them if he can detach them from the more formidable Brotherhood.

It is a desperate ploy and unlikely to work. Mainstream Muslim Egyptians and Copts do have some fear of the Muslim Brotherhood as a sectarian and fundamentalist tendency, but their dislike of the Mubarak government for the moment seems to overcome their anxieties about a theocracy.

The Guardian’s Jack Shenker provides a more nuanced look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s role to date. This quote from one rank-and-file member on the ground sums up what lots of reports are indicating:

“Like many others, I participated in these protests not as a Brotherhood member but as an Egyptian, even though both labels apply to me,” said Mohamed al-Assas, a 35-year-old media production worker in Cairo. “Many of the older political leaders, not just of the Brotherhood, but of other formal parties as well, were not so enthusiastic about the demonstrations. But that doesn’t matter because this is a youth revolution — we don’t need leaders to tell us what to do.”

Class Polarisation

Cole has also written on the growing class polarisation that lies behind the revolution, not just the IMF-loving Egyptian neoliberal elite’s enrichment of itself while most ordinary people live in poverty and insecurity, but also the sharp decline in living standards caused by the GFC and its global fallout:

The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.

The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.

He concludes:

The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK — and as a state for the few — the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president — and perhaps less.

Meanwhile, the ever-reliable Pepe Escobar gives his analysis of the confluence of factors that have led to the revolutionary situation, warning against those who want to try to renovate the existing, corrupt institutions of the Mubarak era as a basis for reform:

The Age of Rage in the arc from Northern Africa to the Middle East may be on — but still no one knows what the next geopolitical configuration will be. Will people have a say — or will it all be corralled and controlled by the powers that be?

Egypt won’t become a working democracy because of lack of political infrastructure. But it has to restart from scratch, with most of the opposition almost as reviled as the regime. The younger generation — empowered by the feeling of being on the right side of history — will be crucial.

They won’t accept an optical illusion of regime change that ensures continuous “stability”. They won’t accept being hijacked by the US and Europe and presented with a new puppet. What they want is the shock of the new; a truly sovereign government, no more neo-liberalism, and a new Middle East political order. Expect the counter-revolution to be fierce. And extending way beyond a few bunkers in Cairo.

Islamism and the secular Left

The question of “what to do” about the Muslim Brotherhood comes up for the Left in Egypt. Iran is an important example of how the radical Left got it wrong when dealing with Islamism in the midst of a revolutionary situation. I posted this in the comments at Larvatus Prodeo earlier today:

The secular Left in Iran, especially around the Communist Party which had deep roots inside the very radical workers’ movement at the time, didn’t see the overthrow of Iranian capitalism as being on the agenda and instead sought to accommodate more conservative forces in the interests of a post-Shah “national unity” in 1979. They literally had a theory that Iran had to go through a stage of capitalist development after becoming independent of the United States, before anything more radical was on the agenda. They even sowed illusions that the Islamists could be part of such a “progressive” alliance.

This gave Khomeini and the mullahs — an influential anti-Shah force but not a hegemonic one — more ground on which to argue that workers’ councils (Shorahs) and workers’ self-management of businesses — should be wound down. The Islamists argued that the Left was against national unity, and argument which they had no consistent response to.

Over a period of time the mullahs were able to witch-hunt the Left for undermining the revolution, with the repression being completed on grounds of national interest once the war with Iraq began.

There are certainly prominent socialists in Egypt today who have taken on board those lessons. Dealing with the MB is neither a matter of sectarian denunciation nor whitewashing their political limitations.

On the question of Islamism as political force, this 1994 article by the late Chris Harman is probably the best thing ever written on the rise of modern Islamism from a Marxist perspective. This is essential background reading.

When we do find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists, part of our job is to argue strongly with them, to challenge them — and not just on their organisations’ attitude to women and minorities, but also on the fundamental question of whether what is needed is charity from the rich or an overthrow of existing class relations.

The left has made two mistakes in relation to the Islamists in the past. The first has been to write them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common. The second has been to see them as “progressives” who must not be criticised. These mistakes have jointly played a part in helping the Islamists to grow at the expense of the left in much of the Middle East. The need is for a different approach that sees Islamism as the product of a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve, and which fights to win some of the young people who support it to a very different, independent, revolutionary socialist perspective.

Finally, for live updates by Judith Orr, editor of British newspaper Socialist Worker, including good interviews with protesters on the ground in Cairo, check here.

Filed Under: Egypt, Islamism, religion, revolution