En Passant

We will not accept a new pharaoh. The Revolutionary Socialists [of Egypt] call on the revolutionary people to save the revolution which has been stolen by an alliance between the Brotherhood and the remnants of Mubarak’s regime. We call on people to come out into the streets with the slogans: bread, freedom, social justice.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi has won the Egyptian Presidential election. Now to win power back from the generals he’ll have to mobilise the Egyptian people.

What do you do as a revolutionary socialist in the midst of this ongoing struggle in Egypt? One should not stop exposing the hypocrisy and the counterrevolutionary politics of the MB leadership. But we should not give up trying to attract the youth and those in the MB who are sincerely pro-revolution to the revolutionary camp and even winning them to socialist politics, something that I’m also increasingly witnessing.

The polarisation within the Islamist movement will only increase with every betrayal and compromise the Islamist leadership brokers with SCAF, with every confrontation with the state, with the growth of a revolutionary left that could provide an alternative for the disillusioned youth, and more importantly with the escalation of the strike wave.

But in all cases, we must be vigilant enough to remain organisationally independent, move under our own banners, with our own literature, and never compromise.

We should be sometimes with the Islamists, never with the state.

An Egyptian Revolutionary Socialist statement issued on 29 December said that the Brotherhood was being used as “tool of the state” in an assault on revolutionary activists. “The main actor in this attack is the same security and ‘exceptional’ judicial apparatus which previously oppressed the Brotherhood,” it continued.

The swift retreat of Tag-al-Din and those in the Brotherhood who wanted to work with the military council to attack the revolutionary forces, shows the pressures and contradictions faced by the Islamists as they stand on the verge of political power.

But it is likely that there will be other such attacks on revolutionary activists in the near future. As Sameh Naguib warned in a meeting on Monday night “the campaigns of repression and smears have only just begun and organised solidarity between all the revolutionary forces is crucial. But the Egyptian mass movement has broken the barrier of fear.”