the me revolutions sr pamphlet print version

8/2/2019 The ME Revolutions SR Pamphlet PRINT VERSION

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A Scas Rw a The Middle East revolutions 1

Review

stsocial


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2 A Scas Rw a The Middle East revolutions A Scas Rw a The Middle East revolutions 3

Chapter one

tuniSiA

the ARAbSpRing beginS

Car

tsa: Ara Sr s

Anne Alexander, Hla Yousfi, Fathis Chamki

and Dominic Kavakeb 2

Car w

e a tsa: rr r

Mark L Thomas, Anne Alexander, Mohamed Tonsi

and Simon Assaf 17

Car r

bara a la: rss a r

Tim Nelson and Simon Assaf 42

Car r

e: Srs, cs a isass

Phil Marfleet, Sameh Naguib and Anne Alexander 53

Car

Sra: r a ras

Simon Assaf and Jamie Allinson 79


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The Battle o TunisAnne Alexander

First published in February 2011

The revolt in Tunisia has sent shivers down the spines of

dictators across the region. Anne Alexander looks at the roots

of the revolution and considers its broader implications, while

Tunisian activists Hla Yousfi and Fathi Chamki give their

accounts of the uprising and Dominic Kavakeb examines the

role of the internet

there is no doubt that the uprising in Tunisia has cast a chill over the

dictatorships of the Middle East while millions around the region

have been inspired by the hope that their struggles against unem-

ployment, poverty and corruption can break the machine of state

repression. Street protests and cyber-activism have (albeit belatedly) caught

the imagination of the global media, but the unfolding revolutionary process

in January 2011 shows clearly that something more profound has shifted in

Tunisia.

The fall of Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali demonstrates that the stresses imposed

on the states of the region by the combination of neoliberal reforms andglobal economic crisis have the potential to fracture regimes by triggering

popular revolts which can neither be managed by co-option nor broken by

repression. More importantly, the way in which social and political demands

have been interwoven throughout the protests, and the emergence of the

trade unions as a key force in the uprising, opens up the possibility of a more

far-reaching process of revolutionary transformation from below.

Unions

The role of the Tunisian trade union federation, the Union Gnrale des

Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), was crucial in breaking Ben Ali, a fact recog-

nised by the remaining leaders of the old regime as they scrambled to cling

on to power by appointing a coalition cabinet on 18 January which includ-

ed three UGTT representatives. These appointments were significant on a

number of different levels. Firstly, they recognised that the UGTT's decisionto call local general strikes on 12 January and then a national general strike

on 14 January played a profound role in the collapse of the Ben Ali regime.

But the appointment of UGTT ministers was more than a gesture of co-op-

tion to a powerful opponent; it was a desperate attempt to revive a partner-

ship between the ruling party and the trade union leadership that had helped

to maintain the stability of Ben Ali's regime during much of the 1990s. Cru-

cially, this initial attempt to reconfigure the old alliance between the UGTT

and the regime's RCD party failed. Within hours protesters were mobilising

again in the streets, demanding the dissolution of the RCD. The UGTT cabi-

net members resigned, further emboldening the demonstrators who were

joined by police and members of the National Guard.

Fractures

This withdrawal from the coalition cabinet points to a double fracture, which

runs between the old regime and the UGTT leadership, but more importantly

within the UGTT between rank and file activists and the bureaucrats at the

top.

Olivier Piot, reporting for Le Monde Diplomatique, travelled across Tuni-

sia in the week before the fall of Ben Ali. He found local UGTT activists con-

stantly debating whether and how to force the national leadership to break

with the regime. On 7 January the local secretary of the UGTT in Tozeur told

him the national leadership was planning to call a national strike by school

teachers in three weeks time. In response to the journalist's stunned silence,he added, "I know it is a long time to wait, and I'm not sure if it won't be too

late. I've told the union leaders, but they are closely tied to the authorities.

For my part, I feel that from now on we risk seeing poor districts across the

cities of the centre and the south going up in flames."

But within four days the national leadership of the UGTT had authorised

regional general strikes, shutting down key urban centres such as the port

city of Sfax on 12 January. Trade union activists Piot spoke to that morning

in Sfax reckoned that around 90 percent of the local population had sup-


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ported the strike call. Only 48 hours later, as street protests spread to the

centre of the capital, Tunis, Ben Ali fled the country.

As US academic Eva Bellin points out, since independence in 1956 the

Tunisian state has oscillated between strategies of repression and co-option

when dealing with the trade unions. The UGTT played a vital role in thestruggle against French colonial rule in the 1950s and, although its member-

ship was entwined with that of the main nationalist party, the Neo-Destour,

it emerged into the post-independence period with an independent base of

its own.

Habib Bourguiba, a key leader of the anti-colonial struggle and Tunisia's

first president after liberation, eventually brought the UGTT leadership un-

der the domination of the state after a series of confrontations during the

1950s and 1960s. A period of co-option was followed by an explosion of

workers' protests and strikes in the 1970s and further repression in the final

years of the Bourguiba regime during the 1980s.

Ben Ali's coup against Bourguiba in 1987 marked the beginning of a new

phase in relations between the UGTT and the state. Conscious of the rising

challenge for the Islamist movement, in particular the Ennahda Party, Ben

Ali bolstered the UGTT as a counterweight. He was also concerned, in the

early years of his rule, to paint himself as a democrat, in contrast to Bour-

guiba. Ben Ali released trade unionists from prison, restored confiscated as-

sets to the UGTT, gave the trade unions an expanded role in advising the

regime on economic and social policy, and supported regular wage rises for

workers, despite at the same time embarking on a programme of reforms

designed to reduce the role of the state in the economy.

Social revolt

Ben Ali's neoliberal restructuring won praise from the World Bank and West-ern governments, but failed to deliver on its promises of prosperity for all.

The overall official jobless figure of around 14 percent hid much higher

levels in towns such as Sidi Bouzid, where the uprising began, as well as

extremely high levels of youth and graduate unemployment. The rebellion

which rocked the phosphate mining region of Gafsa in early 2008 showed,

on a localised level, how protests by the unemployed could both explode

contradictions within the UGTT and trigger a broader social revolt. On 5

January 2008 young unemployed protesters occupied the headquarters of

the Gafsa region UGTT.

They were quickly joined by miners' widows and families, triggering a

wave of strikes and protests uniting workers, the unemployed, school stu-

dents and local people. The motor behind the Gafsa protests was not low

wages but high levels of unemployment, leading to growing numbers ofunwaged family members dependent on one working miner. Local UGTT

leaders played a key role in the protest movement, despite the fact that the

union had been historically implicated in corrupt deals with the mining com-

pany to maintain low levels of recruitment to the mines. Several UGTT ac-

tivists, including Adnane Hajji, who became a prominent spokesperson for

the movement, were sentenced to long jail terms, although Hajji and others

were pardoned by Ben Ali in 2009.

The 2008 miners' rebellion was

eventually quelled by massive re-

pression, and did not spread out-

side the Gafsa region. By contrast,

in December 2010 demonstrations

in Sidi Bouzid over the police's

treatment of Mohamed Bouazizi, a

26 year old vegetable seller who set

himself on fire after his handcart

was confiscated, triggered a longer-

lasting cycle of protests. Students

played a crucial role in the demon-

strations, prompting the Tunisian

authorities to close schools and colleges in an attempt to halt the protests.

Students were joined by lawyers, 95 percent of whom were reported to have

joined a general strike on 6 January in protest at police attacks on their col-leagues at earlier demonstrations and rallies.

Thus there was, from relatively early on, a dialectic between spontaneity

and organisation in the development of the uprising which made the revolt

increasingly difficult for the authorities to contain. Individual acts of des-

peration, such as Bouazizi's self-immolation, triggered local solidarity pro-

tests and sometimes - thanks to their transmission by the mainstream and

social media - echoes across the country. However, it was the intervention of

organisations capable of mobilising on a national scale, such as the Lawyers'

There was, romrelatively early on,

a dialectic betweenspontaneity andorganisation in thedevelopment o theuprising.


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Bar Association and finally the UGTT, which appears to have finally shifted

the balance of forces between protesters and state.

The question now is whether the workers' movement in Tunisia can not

only continue to drive forward the process of sweeping away the whole old

political order but also whether it can begin to challenge the economic rootsof exploitation. Workers are reported to have driven out corrupt managers

associated with the Ben Ali regime in some places, but if this develops into a

movement for workers' control inside the workplace, combined with the re-

assertion of the social and economic demands which sparked the Sidi Bouzid

intifada, it can begin to challenge capitalism itself.

It is the possibility that the process begun in Sidi Bouzid may spread to

Algiers, Cairo and beyond which has alarmed repressive governments across

the region. Even before the fall of Ben Ali rising food prices had triggered

riots in Algeria, while the collapse of his regime opened the door to a wave

of protests mingling social and political demands in Jordan and Yemen. It is

the impact of the Tunisian Revolution on Egypt that will be most closely ob-

served by the US and its allies, however. There are many structural similari-

ties between the regimes of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak - both have presided

over economic reforms which have brought privatisation, foreign investment

and, until recently, glowing praise from the World Bank.

Unemployment

At the same time, Egypt, like Tunisia, suffers from high levels of youth and

graduate unemployment and spiralling food prices. Mubarak's regime has

sought to contain social and political protests using a variety of mechanisms,

including manipulation of food subsidies - although the process of neoliberal

economic reform has made this increasingly difficult to do. The relationship

between the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) and Mubarak's party,the NDP, has many historic parallels with that between the UGTT national

leadership and Ben Ali's party. In both cases the regime co-opted the na-

tional union leaders through a combination of financial inducements and

integration into the ruling party.

In contrast though to Tunisia, the most important gains of the recent strike

wave in Egypt so far have been the emergence of fledgeling independent

unions, rather than any serious signs of rupture within the ETUF. Neverthe-

less, it is clear that neoliberal economic reforms, as they have weakened the

ETUF's ability to deliver benefits and jobs for its members, have thus hol-

lowed out a key institution of Mubarak's regime. The Egyptian presidential

elections scheduled for September 2011 will also revive tensions within and

outside the ruling party over the looming succession crisis, prompted by the

need to find a suitable replacement for the ageing Mubarak.There are differences in the configuration of the opposition forces in

Egypt, which will shape whatever events unfold there. There is no opposi-

tion group in Tunisia which has the social and political weight of the Muslim

Brotherhood, for example, and the Brotherhood's recent retreat from conflict

with the state has made it more difficult for many other opposition groups to

mobilise in the streets.

Potential

Despite this, in Egypt, even more than was apparent in Tunisia, the potential

for popular revolts to widen cracks in the regime remains greater than it has

been for many years, after a decade in which a "culture of protest" has flour-

ished. And the greater degree of transformation within Tunisia, the more

opportunities there will be for similar dynamics of protest to take root in

Egypt and elsewhere. The longer that pressure from below continues to vis-

ibly shape the decisions of the government in Tunis, and even to discipline

or break it, the greater self-confidence will be gained by those challenging

the state on the streets of Cairo, Amman and perhaps even London.

Anne Alexander


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Reused by the

streetsHla Yousfi


Hla Yousfi is a Tunisian activist based in Paris. She spoke to

Socialist Review about the driving forces behind the revolution

iam from Sidi Bouzid, and a big part of my family live there.

You've had a lot of people in the media saying that this is something

that happened very fast. But in Tunisia you've had a lot of social pro-

tests. For example, in 2008 you had big protests in Gafsa, a mining re-

gion. They were repressed by the Tunisian police.

You had a long period with a lot of social protests over lack of civil liber-

ties and economic problems, but the official media didn't talk about them.

So what happened in Sidi Bouzid and the Tunisian Revolution is the result of

a fight over many years. For me it wasn't a surprise.

The economic crisis helped accelerate the regime's collapse. People from

the south used to go to the coastal region or emigrate to find jobs. But nowthey don't have jobs in the tourist areas because of the economic crisis, and

the European Union just closed its doors. The corruption of the Ben Ali re-

gime and its clans increased people's frustration.

People are stuck in an open prison, caught between unemployment, cor-

ruption, lack of civil liberties in Tunisia and the "wall" built by Europe to

control immigration. For example, my 24 year old brother couldn't get a visa

to visit me in France because he doesn't have a job. This also explains why

the protests were so huge.

Tunisians are highly critical of the silence from Western governments over

Ben Ali's regime. Western governments supported Ben Ali, saying, "Yes, we

acknowledge that there are some problems, but it's not really a dictatorship

in Tunisia." For a long time Europe supported his regime, justifying this by

saying that "you need to fight Islamism".The role of the trade unions was very important in this revolution. The

oldest union, the UGTT, used to be very powerful in the period during the

fight against colonialism. However, the central leadership had become to-

tally corrupted by the regime. But the local union organisations were very

effective and dynamic in supporting the revolution.

It was a spontaneous revolution but it was highly supported by the local

unions in Sidi Bouzid, Gafsa and elsewhere. These people pushed the cen-

tral leadership who were pro Ben Ali to make a decision to give the order to

go onto the streets.

Some figures from civil society, for example lawyers, also played an im-

portant role. The lawyers' association was the only elected and independent

association in Tunisia. All the others had been corrupted by the regime. The

lawyers were then followed by some doctors, and of course the bloggers.

After Ben Ali left, you had a deal between some people who were very

important symbols of the old regime, like Mohammed Ghannouchi, the

prime minister, with some leaders of the opposition. The army supported

this deal.

This deal was refused by the street, by the people who made the revolu-

tion. They pushed the unions' representatives to leave the government.

When Ben Ali left he had the police with him. He had his own militia

within the police, so the police were divided. The people causing trouble in

Tunisia just after Ben Ali left were his militia, but you have people from the

police who are against them.The army is not as strong as people outside Tunisia might think. Ben Ali

managed to weaken the army and didn't give it a lot of money. People say

the army is supporting us.

At the beginning of the revolution people were demonstrating against

the corruption of the regime and against Ben Ali. Now it is interesting that

if you go to the streets of Tunisia you have a lot of people starting to say it's

not only Ben Ali that caused the problems, but also the whole system of the

regime's RCD party. They are now asking the government to fire the manag-


7/45


ers of big firms (especially the ones that were privatised). They are seen as

symbols of the corrupt Ben Ali regime.

The challenge now is to protect the revolution. Tunisians don't want the

mess of Iraq.

They are talking about the example of the parliamentary system in Brit-ain. They don't want a presidential system any more.

People are debating the future of the revolution. They talk about Portugal

after the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship and about what happened in

Iran.

Hla Yousfi is a member of Le Collectif de Soutien aux Luttes des Habitants de

Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia

The revolution

aces a trial ostrength

Fathi Chamki


tunisia has just lived through an extraordinary month. A revolution-

ary movement has succeeded in sweeping from power a dictator

who seemed only days earlier assured of remaining on his throne

for life.

How can we explain this social explosion, which has rapidly turned into

revolution?

In the first few days the demands focused on the material conditions of

existence, summed up in the slogan "Work is a right". Then the widening of

the movement, together with the repression meted out to it by the dictator-

ship, accelerated its radicalisation to the point of challenging the establishedorder. Political demands became associated with social demands, the con-

centrated expression of which was "Ben Ali, get out!"

It is very difficult to try to analyse a political situation when it is evolving

so rapidly, sometimes even leaping ahead. But the key trends remain clear.

The day after 14 January, the day of the great mobilisation, particularly in

Tunis, was when the regime decided to rid itself of Ben Ali. But even while

we had not yet had time to celebrate this historic victory, the dying regime

made an attempted comeback with a "the government of national unity" in


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the hope of containing the groundswell that threatened to overthrow the

established order.

The counterrevolutionary manoeuvre by the authorities had some success

during the first three days, above all thanks to the leaders of the UGTT trade

union rallying in support of the government.On 18 January the announcement of the composition of the government

of national unity acted like a spur to the revolutionary movement, which

responded with a wave of demonstrations in most towns, above all in Tunis.

At the same time, the rank and file of the UGTT forced the setting up of an

administrative commission to act as a counter to the position taken by the

executive bureau, which was very close to the authorities. This commission

forced the resignation of the three ministers nominated by the union.

The announcement of the decisions of the administrative commission, on

the afternoon of the same day, destabilised all the political partners in the

government of national unity and pushed one of the three opposition parties

that had joined the government to withdraw.

The revolutionary movement also went into action over the key political

question - the future of the RCD. Just about everywhere the demonstrators

have taken over its local offices, which were completely deserted (the total

number of full-timers was said to be 10,000 - all paid for through public

funds). Several have been wrecked. This movement has now spread to pub-

lic enterprises and to state administrative offices, from which, thanks to ini-

tiatives by employees, the managers of these institutions are being expelled.

There is a trial of strength between the revolutionary movement deter-

mined to dismantle the old order and the counterrevolution that makes end-

less political concessions to try to protect what is fundamental, that is, the

economic and social capitalist regime.

True, for now this issue is completely missing from the debate and fromthe demands, in view of the importance of what to do in respect of the RCD

and its future. But we should expect the social question to bounce back to

the surface very shortly.

Fathi Chamki (RAID-ATTAC, Tunisia)

No substituteDominic Kavakeb


As the events of the Tunisian uprising unfold there has been an

abundance of blogs and articles championing the role of social

media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, with some even call-

ing this "the first Wikileaks revolution". While both Wikileaks and

social media have had an effect on the Tunisian people, to characterise this

revolt as being caused by either of these things is to overstate their impor-

tance and at the same time massively understate the revolutionary strength

of the Tunisian masses.

Undoubtedly for those of us outside of the country it has been fascinat-

ing to follow the latest events via Twitter and watch videos of the protests

on YouTube. With the Tunisian authorities imposing a ban on the state-run

media from covering the events, people have been forced to use the gener-

ally much freer internet to release information.

But it has been often overlooked that these protests actually began four

weeks before the world's mainstream media picked up on them. In that time

the level of internet activity from the Tunisians hadn't changed but was

mostly ignored until the fleeing of President Ben Ali. It took nearly a month

for the coverage on social networks to hit the headlines in any meaningful

way.Perhaps the area of social media that is most overstated is its ability to or-

ganise. Much was made of how Iranians used Twitter to liaise during their

protests in 2009 and the same has been said of Tunisia. It's wrong to alto-

gether dismiss this notion - every generation uses the tools at their disposal

to organise. Also we can't downplay the need for activists to use online me-

dia to express political thought in countries where it isn't always easy to

do so openly. But the idea that Tunisians took to the streets after seeing a

Facebook status is to dismiss the decades of frustration and anger that has


9/45


built up in the country. Technological advancements have the ability to help

mass movements but they do not cause mass movements.

The same is generally true with Wikileaks. We should always support the

brilliant work done by the whistle-blowing website, but its revelations about

Tunisia brought no surprises for the people who had been living in that au-thoritarian regime. CNN reporter Ben Wedeman said, "No one I spoke to in

Tunis today mentioned Twitter, Facebook or Wikileaks. It's all about unem-

ployment, corruption, oppression."

The mass media does not purposefully set out to deny the ability of people

to bring about change by themselves, but the constant talk of Twitter revolts

and Wikileaks revolutions is the reality of looking at the world in a top-down

way. Tunisians have used social media, not the other way around.

The hope now is that the revolution can spread across the Arab world.

The internet can help to spread the idea and give confidence to the working

classes of other nations, but it has always been and will always be ordinary

people who change the world.

Dominic Kavakeb

Chapter two

egypt And tuniSiAthe RetuRn ofRevolution


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The myths that

tumble with tyrantsMark L Thomas

First published in March 2011

The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have set the entire region

ablaze with revolt. Mark L Thomas opens our coverage by

considering the historic significance of these events

the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt - the Arab worlds most popu-

lous country - are of historic importance. They have set the whole

region on fire as protests have spread from Yemen to Jordan to Iran.

As we go to press the fate of the heroic uprising against Gaddafis re-

gime in Libya is unclear. Even the small Persian Gulf state of Bahrain is being

shaken by mass revolts at time of writing. Further upheavals and revolutions

across North Africa and the Middle East cannot be ruled out.

But if the immediate political reverberations of the events of January and

February are clearly visible on the streets, the ideological fallout is no less

significant. The fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak at the hands of a vast mo-bilisation by the Egyptian masses has struck a powerful blow to many of the

dominant ideological assumptions of our age.

The brutal US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were accompanied by

loud talk of a clash of civilisations. The Islamic world in general - and Ar-

abs in particular - were held to be incapable of internally generating democ-

racy. Democracy could only be brought in from the outside - by F16 fighter

planes and the US marine corps.

But this was always a lie. It was not Islamic culture that stood in the way

of democracy in the Middle East but the suppression of political freedom by

dictatorial regimes fully backed by the US and the West over decades. It is

the Arab masses themselves who are the force capable of bringing democ-

racy to the Middle East and beyond - as is now being proved in practice.

But as one myth is swept aside another is resurrected. The famous claimmade by Francis Fukuyama in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

that liberal democracy had triumphed historically is being dusted off to

suggest that Tunisians, Egyptians and millions across the region are really

yearning after American values.

US support for Ben Ali and Mubarak, as well as the ongoing backing for

dictators and sheikhs who (for the

time being at least) remain in their

palaces, is something of an embar-

rassment for this argument, though

it hasnt stopped the likes of former

leading neocon Paul Wolfowitz and

the Financial Times newspaper from

making it. They all agree that liberal

democracy represents the outer limit

of possible social change.

In fact, of course, even the battle

for democracy is by no means over in

Tunisia or Egypt. The key to securing

it will be the deepening of the wave of

workers struggles that have marked

both revolutions. This development also challenges the widely accepted

claim that the spread of neoliberal globalisation has destroyed the collec-

tive power of workers as footloose capital and insecure employment suppos-edly erode their bargaining strength. The opposite is the case. Globalisation

has created powerful new concentrations of workers around the world. The

Egyptian working class in 2011 is far bigger and makes up a far greater per-

centage of the population than the Russian working class that overthrew the

tsar in 1917.

But the role played by workers, especially in Egypt, opens up possibilities

that were largely absent, or at least much weaker, in the revolutions in East-

ern Europe in 1989, Indonesia in 1998, Serbia in 2000 and Argentina over

The potential or ademocratic revolutionto grow over, as LeonTrotsky put it, into afght or a socialistrevolution can beglimpsed in Tunisiaand Egypt.


11/45


the winter of 2000-1 (let alone the string of colour revolutions in former

Soviet states, which were often little more than manoeuvres inside the rul-

ing class encouraged by the competing imperial powers).

It is this return of the organised working class to the centre of political

revolutions that can throw up struggles that have the potential to go beyondthe framework of liberal democracy and to strike blows at exploitation and

the hierarchy of class. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they

must be broken, wrote Rosa Luxemburg about the strikes that swept Ger-

many after the overthrow of the monarchy in November 1918.

The first phase of the Egyptian Revolution is over. The popular unity that

seemed to stretch across classes - with even a section of the capitalist class

in some sympathy for the demands for reform, or even for Mubarak to go - is

likely to be replaced by growing class polarisation (Mohamed Tonsi, on page

13, shows this has already started to happen in Tunisia).

Long ago Karl Marx noted this feature of revolutions. Writing about the

way the February 1848 Revolution in France, which enjoyed support across

the classes, gave way to the bloody battles of July, when the bourgeoisie

turned its guns on the workers, he noted:

The February Revolution was the nice revolution, the revolution of uni-

versal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in it against

the monarchy were still undeveloped and peacefully dormant, because the

social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an ephem-

eral existence, an existence in phrases, in words.

The June Revolution is the ugly revolution, the nasty revolution, because

the phrases have given place to the real thing, because the republic has bared

the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and con-

cealed it.

Workers power

The working class in Egypt today is vastly more powerful than in France in

1848. But key tasks lie ahead: deepening the strike wave, of electing work-

ers councils that link together workers across factories and industries, which

can become the embryo of organs of workers power and of a more decisive

confrontation with the core of the Egyptian state machine. This will involve

the attempt to break the army along class lines.

In this sense the revolution in Egypt has not yet reached the scale of Feb-

ruary 1917 in Russia, where workers councils were set up immediately

(drawing on the memory of the first Russian Revolution in 1905) and the

Petrograd garrison mutinied within days.

But the potential for a democratic revolution to grow over, as Leon Trot-

sky put it in his theory of permanent revolution, into a fight for a socialistrevolution can already be glimpsed in Tunisia and Egypt.

The hope is that this process can continue and become stronger and in

turn renew the belief that the real alternative to liberal democracy lies not in

authoritarian versions of capitalism, from China to Iran, but the abolition of

capitalist exploitation itself.


12/45


The gravedigger o

dictatorshipAnne Alexander

First published March 2011

There have been many conflicting interpretations of events in

Egypt. Anne Alexander argues that the working class is the key

force in Egyptian society with the power to drive the revolution

forward

Afew short weeks into the Egyptian Revolution the number of con-

tradictory labels it wears is already growing with dizzying speed. In

the Western media it is painted as a flower revolution - a heart-

warming example of a leaderless people power movement. A

considerable body of deluded neocon opinion in the US sees the overthrow

of dictator Hosni Mubarak as a confirmation that George W Bush was right

to try to impose democracy on the Middle East through the barrel of a gun.

Military analysts at Stratfor and a good part of the BBCs senior journalists

seem to think it is an old-fashioned military coup. Other voices clamour forthe recognition of the Egyptian Revolution as an internet-driven revolt or a

sinister Islamist conspiracy.

This article takes a different perspective. I argue that the Egyptian Revo-

lution demonstrates, with a force not seen in the Arab world for more than

half a century, that the power that can liberate society from below lies with

the organised working class.

The strikes which spread like wildfire across Egypt in the last days before

Mubaraks fall suddenly made workers power visible. Yet it was deeper and

longer-term processes of both global and local economic change which frac-

tured the Egyptian state and created the conditions for the revolt. In particu-

lar, the toxic chemistry between the neoliberal reforms, promoted by Hosni

Mubaraks son, Gamal, and his cronies, and the backwash from the global

economic crisis played the central role in breaking workers materially andideologically from the regime.

Yet the first phase of the revolution - the 18 days of mobilisation on a

scale recalling scenes from the 1848 revolutions or Russia in February 1917

- was also the product of Egypts culture of protest, nurtured by a decade of

struggles between the state and the people in the streets. Western journalists

and Barack Obamas advisers may have been surprised by the sudden erup-

tion of popular anger against a stable ally, but anyone who had watched

the ebb and flow of protests since 2000 - over Palestine, against the war on

Iraq, for democracy and constitutional reform, for better pay and trade un-

ion rights, and against police torture - should not have been.

However, analysis of the dynamics of the uprising itself shows that the

25 January revolution was more than an aggregator of disparate political

and economic demands. Rather the scale of mobilisation from below and the

pressure it exerted on the state transformed and deepened the relationship

between the economic and political struggles. In Mubaraks final days it was

the deployment of workers social power against the state, and in particular

the strike wave which erupted on 8 February, which finally cracked the re-

gime. The fact that the people were still in the streets as Mubarak was forced

out of power opens up possibilities for further extending the revolutionary

process, already glimpsed in the explosion of strikes in the week following

the dictators fall.

Fracturing the state

The junior army officers who seized power and overthrew the monarchy in

1952 set Egypt on the path to state capitalist development. Under the leader-

ship of Gamal Abdel Nasser they used the states resources to found heavy

industries, took control of the Suez Canal in order to finance the building

of the Aswan High Dam, and built up manufacturing to supply Egyptian

markets.

This economic strategy was connected to the creation of political institu-

tions which sought to bind workers and peasants to the state. Workers were


13/45


offered a social contract where in return for renouncing their political inde-

pendence they could expect some gains, such as subsidised housing, educa-

tion, other welfare benefits and relative job security. Nasserist rhetoric, par-

ticularly in its late phase, idealised workers for their contribution to national

development. But the Nasserist state crushed independent workers organi-sations and in their place built an official trade union federation which was

subservient to the government.

Infitah

The conditions which allowed Nasser and his colleagues to pursue this par-

ticular strategy for economic development had started to change by the late

1960s as ruling classes on a global scale began to search for alternatives

to state-led development. After Nasser died in 1970, his successor, Anwar

Sadat, broke with the USSR and by the end of the decade had sealed a new

partnership with the US. Sadat pioneered a policy of economic opening

(infitah) in order to receive loans from international financial institutions.

During Mubaraks later years the process of infitah continued and deep-ened, with the imposition of a structural adjustment programme following

the 1991 Gulf War. The percentage of workers employed in the state sec-

tor shrank from 40 percent in 1981-2 to 32 percent in 2004-5. However,

these figures hide a more dramatic story of increased unemployment, rising

job insecurity and the destruction of large parts of the welfare system. Be-

tween 1998 and 2006 the percentage of workers with an employment con-

tract dropped from 61.7 percent to 42 percent while the percentage covered

by social insurance fell from 54.1 percent to 42.3 percent during the same

period.

Nasser constructed a political system which, despite some tinkering by Sa-

dat and Mubarak, survived decades after his death. Although his successorsdid allow fake opposition parties to exist - so long as they remained weak

and subservient to the ruling party - they did not fundamentally change the

basic political system. Until the 2011 revolution, Egypt had a two-class elec-

toral franchise, with workers and peasants voting for one set of parliamen-

tary representatives and middle class professionals voting for another set.

So the state-controlled trade union federation was not merely an instrument

of social control within the workplace, where it sought to manage workers

discontent in the interest of the state, but also a giant electoral machine de-

livering pro-regime voters to the polling stations and turning out crowds of

workers to cheer Mubarak and his cronies.

At an ideological level too, the legacy of Nasserism outlived its creator by

several decades. Workers identification with the goals of state-led national

development could be seen even at the sharpest moments of class struggle.Workers resistance did explode from time to time - for example in Mahalla

al-Kubra in 1984, at the Helwan iron and steel plants in 1989 and in Kafr

al-Dawwar in 1994. But rather than withdrawing their labour and stopping

production, workers generally chose to stage work-ins - a gesture meant

to signify that they, unlike their leaders, were still committed to a vision of

common sacrifice for the sake of the nation.

The reforms of the 1990s and beyond fractured the Nasserist system on

several different levels. Privatisa-

tion removed hundreds of thousands

of workers from state industries and

transferred their bonuses and work-

place-based welfare benefits to thebank accounts of private sharehold-

ers. Deprived of its role in channel-

ling welfare to workers, the state-run

trade union federation rotted from

within. It continued to mobilise voters

for ruling party election rallies and to

harass and intimidate workers who attempted to organise resistance from

below, but in large areas of the country its organisational structure was a

hollow shell of paper members and a handful of self-serving bureaucrats.

In late 2006 a strike by around 25,000 textile workers at the Misr Spinning

and Weaving Company in Mahalla al-Kubra opened the gates to a prolongedwave of workers mobilisation. Strikes spread rapidly from sector to sector,

and among some groups of workers, particularly the Mahalla textile work-

ers and the property tax collectors, took on an explicitly political character,

demanding the right to organise independent trade unions and calling for an

increase in the national minimum wage. The widespread adoption of strikes

as a weapon, rather than work-ins, was a testimony to the shift in workers

consciousness.

It is important to understand that these developments are not simply the

The reorms o the

1990s and beyondractured theNasserist system onseveral dierent levels.


14/45


result of local factors, but are intimately connected to global processes. The

imposition of neoliberal economic reform programmes on variants of state

capitalist regimes has been played out across the world. Short-term shocks

have also played a central role, particularly the international rise in food

prices which was driving workers protests against the spiralling cost of liv-ing even before the onset of the global economic crisis.

Holes in the wall of dictatorship

The strike wave of 2006 erupted into a context which had already been

changed by popular protest. Although compared with the millions of demon-

strators who took part in the 25 January revolution the numbers of protesters

were often relatively small, the ferment in the streets since the second Pales-

tinian Intifada in late 2000 marked a dramatic shift in the Egyptian political

landscape. The first really significant breakthrough came in 2003, when tens

of thousands of demonstrators took control of Cairos Tahrir Square in pro-

tests against the US invasion of Iraq, punching a hole in the wall of dictator-

ship, as one Egyptian socialist activist put it at the time.Further holes appeared in the dictatorship over the following few years. In

2005 a loose alliance of radical Nasserists, liberals and socialists - supported

by some elements in the Muslim Brotherhood - launched a campaign oppos-

ing Mubaraks renewed candidacy for presidency and his attempts to hand

power over to his son, Gamal. Street protests crystallised around the slogan

Kifaya - Enough! and began to draw in growing numbers of young people.

Today it is hard to remember what an unusually daring step this was for the

small forces of the radical opposition groups. They were publicly crossing

the red line preventing criticism of the president.

The following year saw a revolt by judges incensed at the regimes bla-

tant election-rigging and persecution of those who spoke out against it. Hun-dreds of judges in full official regalia marched through Cairo in protest at

the disciplining of two reform-minded members of the Court of Cassation.

The sense of the state at war with itself was palpable, as riot police beat

judges on the steps of their club building and tear-gassed lay supporters of

the judges campaign.

Rising levels of workers struggles intersected with a revival of youth ac-

tivism in 2008, which saw the regime face its biggest challenge before the

2011 revolution. A call for a strike by textile workers at Misr Spinning in

Mahalla was taken up by networks of youth activists. A Facebook group sup-

porting the Mahalla workers and calling for a general strike in solidarity

gained around 70,000 members. On 6 April 2008 the actual strike in Ma-

halla was aborted by the police, but their attack on demonstrators touched

off a near-insurrection in the town. Meanwhile, the Facebook strike foundan echo in large demonstrations on most university campuses and shuttered

shops across the capital. The final surge of protest before 25 January came

in the summer of 2010, when the murder of a young internet activist, Khaled

Said, by the police provoked demonstrations of thousands in his home city

of Alexandria.

It would be easy with hindsight to plot a smooth upward curve of struggle

from 2000 to 2011. In reality, these waves of protest were mostly discon-

tinuous, with one set of demonstrations petering out, or being beaten off

the streets, a few months before the eruption of the next. The gap between

the economic demands raised by workers and the highly political claims of

largely middle class professionals calling for constitutional reform was, some

argued, a sign that attempts to unite opponents of Mubarak were doomed tofailure.

The spell of fear

Despite this, Mubaraks last decade played a crucial role in his downfall.

It was on these disparate protests that a generation of activists from dif-

ferent political traditions - Islamist, Nasserist, liberal and socialist - learnt

techniques of political organisation. In the space of these ten years the radi-

cal opposition groups acquired sustained experience of organising protests,

maintaining activist networks and building tactical alliances across different

political traditions. Above all, they collectively broke the spell of fear around

street politics which the regime had enforced for more than a generation.Of all the protests, it was the strike wave which established a dynamic

of what Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg called reciprocal action

between the economic and political struggles against the regime. As Lux-

emburg observed during the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the interaction be-

tween economic and political struggles could not simply be understood as a

linear progression from bread and butter economic demands to the politi-

cal question of state power. The process of reciprocal action could be seen

at work in a pendulum motion between political and economic struggles,


15/45


she argued, where after every foaming wave of political action a fructifying

deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle

shoot forth. However, in the case of workers struggles, their social power

and collective organisation invested even their everyday battles in the work-

place with a political dimension which opened up new horizons for furtherpolitical action.

Egyptian workers took by storm the same rights which other political

campaigns for democracy had been forced to abandon under pressure from

the state: the right to assembly, the right to protest, the right to free speech.

The strike wave carved out spaces for discussion and organisation in thou-

sands of workplaces across the country, driving the struggle deep into the

fabric of Egyptian society.

After 25 January 2011 processes which developed over a decade - wresting

control of the streets from the police, protest demands directly challenging

Mubarak, the increasing interaction between economic and political strug-

gles - were suddenly compressed into the space of days. The opening moves

came from opposition activists who seized the opportunity created by theoverthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia to call for nationwide protests. A Facebook

group calling for the demonstrations, We are all Khaled Said, named after

the activist murdered by the police in Alexandria in summer 2010, gathered

hundreds of thousands of members.

An alignment of the radical opposition groups took shape, bringing to-

gether revolutionary socialists, liberals, democracy activists, Nasserists, in-

dependent trade unionists and eventually the Muslim Brotherhood. Protest

organisers agreed a new tactic to beat police blockades: a range of different

assembly points, rather than one central march or rally.

Early on 25 January it was clear that the scale of the demonstrations was

greater than anything Egypt had witnessed for years - possibly decades. Firsta dozen, then a hundred, then thousands of holes were punched in the wall

of dictatorship. Tens of thousands of people poured through them: in Nasr

City, Giza and Shubra; in Alexandria, in Mansoura, in Suez, in Assyut.

Over the following days the demonstrations gathered pace. Friday 28 Jan-

uary was the movements first major test. The police locked down the city

centres, and the regime shut down the mobile phone networks and the in-

ternet. Protesters used mosques as rallying points and marched to retake the

streets. Estimates of the numbers on the streets ran into hundreds of thou-

sands, as huge crowds of demonstrators battled with the police. Mubarak

sacked his cabinet, withdrew the police from the burnt-out shells of their

police stations and deployed the army. Local popular committees sprang

up across the country to protect homes and neighbourhoods from attack by

thugs, many believed to be policemen in plain clothes. Further demonstra-tions over the weekend culminated in a march of millions on Tuesday 1

February, which finally wrung grudging concessions from Mubarak. In a tel-

evised speech he said he would not stand again for election and promised to

rewrite part of the constitution.

The regime struck back on Wednesday 2 February, mobilising its plain-

clothes thugs to attack demonstrators in Alexandria and Cairo. Demonstra-

tors in Tahrir Square faced a surprise assault by columns of attackers armed

with stones, knives and Molotov cocktails, riding the horses and camels which

normally give tourist rides near the Pyramids. For two days the battle for the

square raged back and forth, but eventually the demonstrators gained the

advantage. Hundreds of thousands again marched the following Friday, this

time labelled Departure Day. Meanwhile the regime hunted desperatelyfor potential partners in a dialogue. Some of the opposition groups, includ-

ing the Muslim Brotherhood, sent representatives to meet Omar Suleiman,

Mubaraks newly appointed vice-president and former spymaster in chief.

Sections of the ruling class, including figures such as businessmen Ahmed

Bahgat and Naguib Sawiris, began to openly back some of the demonstra-

tors demands, while attempting to position themselves to play a political

role in the expected transitional period.

Still tens of thousands held their ground in the streets and, despite the

violent rhetoric coming from the regimes spokesmen and hired reporters,

new people began to come. Families with young children mingled with the

crowds in Tahrir Square and a young couple were married there on the Sun-day afternoon.

Strikes

It was on Tuesday 8 February that the balance of forces shifted again - this

time decisively against Mubarak. A ripple of strikes spread from a few work-

places - the Suez Canal service workers, telecom workers in Cairo and the

Helwan steel workers were among the first - gathering force as it washed

across Egypt. By 9 February the Egyptian Centre for Social and Economic


16/45


Rights estimated that up to 300,000 workers were on strike across 15 gov-

ernorates. From hospital technicians and cement workers to postal workers

and textile workers, they occupied and struck, raising a potent mixture of

economic demands and support for the revolution.

Delegations of striking workers now joined the crowds in Tahrir Square,and outside the presidential palace and the radio and television building by

the Nile. Amid swirling rumours that he would resign, Mubarak made a final

televised statement on Thursday 10 February but still refused to step down.

Small numbers of army officers could be seen addressing the crowds in Tahr-

ir Square. One officer telephoned Al Jazeera to resign live on air and an-

nounced that he had joined the peoples revolution. While the army com-

manders met for hours behind closed

doors, the crowds swelled again.

Cairo seemed poised on the brink of a

final insurrection.

The edifice of the state finally

cracked on 11 February. The seniorarmy commanders took power and

removed Mubarak from office.

Three key things stand out from the

story of the 25 January revolution.

Firstly, the 18 days of confrontation

were shaped by many of the same dy-

namics of protest as the previous decade, but operating at a deeper level and

across a much shorter timescale. Protesters seized key areas of the major cit-

ies, particularly Tahrir Square, and turned them into strategic assets for the

revolutionary movement. Tahrir Square, with its self-organ ised security com-

mittees, scavenged barricades, volunteer medics and street sweepers, sound

systems, tents and banners, became - like the hundreds of occupied factories

over the previous five years - liberated territory. It was a place to debate, but

also an organising centre from which activists went out to win arguments for

bringing factories, offices and neighbourhoods into the revolution.

Defence of this space rested not only on the sheer weight of numbers,

but also on political organisation. The Muslim Brotherhood youth activists,

for example, played a central role in protecting the square from attack by

the government thugs and at the checkpoints around the perimeter. Yet the

Brotherhood did not dominate the space inside but rather remained caught

within its own contradictions - held in balance between its young members

identification with the broader revolutionary movement and the aspira-

tion of its leadership to strike a deal with the state. That equilibrium not

only helped to keep the streets open for protest but also created a spacein which, despite their smaller numbers, voices from the revolutionary left

have reached new audiences and won new recruits.

Secondly, however, if the revolution had only remained in the streets,

even in the numbers which came out after 25 January, it is uncertain wheth-

er this would have been enough to cause the state to crack from above. Just

as during the previous decades struggles for democracy and reform, the al-

liance of different social and political groups mobilised for change did not

make a breakthrough until the revolution crossed from the political to the

social domain, going from the streets into the workplaces and rousing work-

ers to take collective action, fusing their own demands with the wider goals

of the movement. Moreover, the cracks in the regimes machinery of political

and social control which allowed this process to take place did not simplyappear on 25 January, but rather have their origin in the long-term impact of

neoliberal reforms on the structure of the Nasserist state.

The role of the military

Finally, there is the question of the role of the military. In essence, what the

mass movement from below achieved was to force one part of the state - the

Armed Forces High Command - to cut out the cancer that Mubarak had be-

come in order to save the state as a whole. This is clearly not the same as the

mass movement seizing power on its own behalf. Nor have the armed forc-

es disintegrated either vertically, with splits appearing between rival com-

manders, or horizontally, along class lines as the Russian army did in 1917.

Yet it would be a mistake to see the removal of Mubarak as simply a coup

d tat, or to underestimate the difficulties military rulers face if they try to

demobilise the revolutionary movement by force. The situation is fundamen-

tally different from that of 1952, when a small circle of junior army officers

acted after the mass protest movement had temporarily exhausted itself. The

streets were empty when Nasser led his forces to seize the palace, radio sta-

tion and barracks. Here the turn towards the social struggle again becomes

crucial. In February 2011 the revolution had already entered the workplaces

Tahrir Square, like thehundreds o occupied

actories over theprevious fve years,became liberatedterritory.


17/45


before the military acted. In 1952 one strike by textile workers at Kafr al-

Dawwar threatened the new military regime and it was crushed by the army.

A week after Mubaraks fall hundreds of workplaces were on strike, includ-

ing the giant Mahalla textile plant with its workforce of 24,000.

If there is to be real change for the millions in Egypt, and not just the mil-lionaires like Naguib Sawiris and Ahmed Bahgat, the revolution needs to

deepen further. Organised workers are becoming a social force within the

developing revolutionary movement, and they have consciously deployed

their collective social power to achieve the movements first political goal:

the removal of Mubarak. In only 18 days Egyptian workers have travelled

further down the road to human liberation than their parents and grandpar-

ents managed in a lifetime. But there is much still to do: kicking the ruling

partys henchmen out of every workplace and neighbourhood, building inde-

pendent unions and, above all, creating new institutions of workers democ-

racy which can start to act, at least in embryo, as alternative centres of state

power.

The revolution has

only just begunMohamed Tonsi


With dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali long gone, media attention

on Tunisia has waned. But there is now an ongoing battle to

cleanse the country of Ben Ali's cronies, reports Mohamed

Tonsi

the flight of dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali was only the first chap-

ter of the Tunisian Revolution. The mobilisation of the people,

organised in neighbourhood militias, foiled the first attempt at

counterrevolution by the remnants of the president's loyalists. The

liberation caravan which came from regions where the revolution started

and blockaded the prime minister's office for more than a week led to the

reshuffle of a government - formed less than two weeks previously - which

had kept ruling party figures in key positions.

This success encouraged the masses to demand the full removal of the rul-

ing party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD). Finally, the minister

of the interior had to bow to popular pressure and froze the activities of the

RCD, banning any meetings of its members pending its dissolution. In cities,

towns and villages across the country, governors, mayors and municipal as-

semblies close to the old regime were forced out of office. When I phoned

my cousin, who lives in the coastal village of Korba, to ask how the family is

doing, he told me, "We are doing fine. Today the people gathered together

and we managed to expel the mayor and the municipal assembly. They are a


18/45


bunch of RCD cronies!"

The new foreign minister, Ahmed Ounais, faced the same fate after a press

conference in Luxembourg. Here he refused to describe the events in Tuni-

sia as a revolution, and praised the French foreign minister Michle Alliot-

Marie, who had offered to help Ben Ali's police before his fall, calling her avisionary and a friend of the Tunisian nation. Finally, he refused to comment

on the events unfolding in Egypt. Two hundred outraged employees of the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs walked out and besieged the minister's office be-

fore issuing a communiqu in support of the Egyptian people.

Mutual inspiration

There is a reverberation between the revolutions in the two countries. The

main slogan used in Egypt - "The people want to bring down the regime" -

originated in Tunisia, and the 50,000-strong demonstration in Sfax, the sec-

ond biggest Tunisian city, was called as a "day of rage" just one day after the

first day of Egyptian rage. The recent success of the Egyptian Revolution has

inspired the Tunisian people to match the Egyptian achievements and callfor the dissolution of parliament and the upper house, and for the formation

of a constitutional assembly.

Following the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, inspired by the swift suc-

cesses in the two countries, and intoxicated by the infinite realm of new pos-

sibilities, crowds started chanting an even more daring slogan: "The people

want to liberate Palestine!"

Although the momentum of the revolution has not faltered, the danger of

counterrevolution is still present. Counterrevolutionary forces will always

try to diminish, if not reverse, the achievements of revolutions. The latest

attempt has been the formation of a government of ultra-liberal technocrats

who, while having no links with the old regime, have been hand-picked by

the bourgeoisie to defend their interests.

To add insult to injury, prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi has hired

as an adviser an ex-banker, and expert in "political marketing", who advised

Ben Ali during his final days in office. This can only fuel the social discontent

and the industrial action already taking place in many areas, not simply over

pay but mainly to win permanent contracts for the large contingents of tem-

porary workers.

It is very interesting to notice the spontaneous and organised reactions of

the bourgeoisie to these demands. Groups with tens of thousands of mem-

bers have been formed on Facebook with slogans like, "This is a revolution of

free men not of beggars" and a sarcastic, "The unemployed have started the

revolution and the employed want a pay rise".

The class struggle is becoming increasingly obvious and is starting to po-larise those who were united in calling for Ben Ali to "get the hell out". The

revolution has achieved all the demands of the bourgeoisie by ousting the

dictator and his party. According to them, the nation, meaning the workers,

should go back to hard work. Leading these efforts to tame the revolution

is the wealthy Mabrouk family - a member of which is Ben Ali's son in law

- who are still free to continue their business as usual. They are trying to

transform the revolution of the people into a "palace coup" and are happy to

throw other families to popular vengeance. The adviser to the prime minis-

ter and at least three other new ministers have historical links to this family

and their business empire.

The revolution gathered momentum through the formation of local coun-

cils for protection of the revolution in several cities and towns. These pushedthe opposition political parties, the UGTT union federation, the union of stu-

dents and many other civil society associations to declare the formation of a

nationwide council for the protection of the revolution. In total, 28 groups

signed this declaration, including communists, social democrats, national-

ists, Islamists and even the association of veterans of the anti-colonial strug-

gle. This offers accountability over the actions of the transitional govern-

ment and an overview of the task of changing legislation over electoral law,

media and justice in order to pave the way for democratic elections.

The UGTT presented this declaration to the transitional government who

declined it on 16 February. As I write, calls are being made for countrywide

demonstrations demanding the resignation of the transitional government.


19/45


Mubarak: ally o

imperialismSimon Assaf


For 30 years Egypt has been the linchpin of US and Israeli

domination across the Middle East. Simon Assaf charts the

history of Western support for Mubarak and the consequences

of his downfall

When the mass demonstrations that swept Egypt turned into an

insurrection, US president Barack Obama demanded to know

why Middle East experts in Washington failed to predict that a

revolution was about to sweep away its most important ally in

the Arab world.

That the Middle East is a huge pressure cooker of anger and frustration

was known to all. But some Israelis, neocons and many Arab leaders had

convinced themselves that if the Arab masses had not risen in rebellion al-

ready, they never would. The Egyptian Revolution has dispelled those illu-

sions and thrown into doubt decades of US military, political and economic

thinking designed to break an alliance of Arab states that emerged out of the

anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s.

The cornerstone of this strategy was to keep Egypt "neutral" and isolate

any country that challenged imperialism and Israel. Egypt's peace treaties

with Israel, signed by Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak's predecessor, at Camp

David in 1978-9, shifted the balance of power dramatically in the region.

Stabilising Egypt meant stabilising Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen and a host

of other countries. It was key to isolating Syria and Iran, nations that refused

to bow to US diktats in the "new Middle East".

Measured in hard cash, the Israeli-Egyptian peace dividend, known as the

"cold peace", remained at a modest $500 million a year in trade. Israeli tour-

ists could take Nile cruises or smoke hashish in Sharm el-Sheikh holiday

resorts, and Israeli businessmen could set up free enterprise zones - mainly

to guarantee the US market for Egyptian cotton. But the rewards for Israel

were far greater. Before 1978 Israel dedicated some 23 percent of its GDP to

military spending; after Camp David this dropped to 9 percent.

Cold peace

The treaty had more dramatic consequences. It allowed Israel, virtually un-

hindered, to turn its full might on the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria. The

1978 Camp David Accords were signed as Israel staged its first invasion of

Lebanon. Israeli troops completed the final handover of the Sinai in 1982,

before launching the second, and more devastating, invasion of Lebanon. An

Egypt friendly to the US guaranteed the safety of the Red Sea and key sup-ply lines for the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Egypt was a great

strategic asset. Camp David was hailed as a master stroke.

The cold peace became the cornerstone of imperial strategy in the region,

but Egypt also began to matter economically. Some 8 percent of global sea-

borne trade passes through the Suez Canal, which links the Red Sea to the

Mediterranean. The strategically vital Sumed pipeline than runs along its

banks is part of a network of global oil distribution. Egypt has recently dis-

covered vast reserves of natural gas, oil and coal, and has big industry, with

steel foundries, textile mills and car plants.

So Egypt is an economic as well as strategic prize, and China has been

hovering for a while in its attempt to displace US and Western capital in

the region. Egypt straddles Africa and the Middle East, and in Africa, China

matters. Chinese investment in the continent has mushroomed over the past

decade, and Egypt is part of this expansion. In 2002 Sino-Egyptian trade was

worth $500 million; by 2006 it had reached $3 billion and in 2008 a stagger-

ing $6.24 billion. Chinese money is funding a huge expansion of the contain-

er terminal in Port Said that will serve as a key hub for its goods bound for

European markets. It is modernising the car industry and building high-end

electronics factories and other manufacturing plants along the "enterprise


20/45


zones" near the canal. It has much at stake in Egypt.

China was cautious of drawing too close to an Egypt allied to the US, but

now it sees an opportunity and it brings little ideological baggage with it.

The US might have a deep political connection with Israel, but China doesn't.

Arab protesters do not burn the Chinese flag. So China can present itself as

an honest broker in the same way the US did during the dying days of Brit-

ish and French colonial rule. The more aggressive and narrow US and Israeli

strategy is, the more it stonewalls even the most moderate peace plan, the

greater the risk that Egypt will slip further into the arms of China.

Israel has a second pressing problem - its disastrous relationship with Tur-

key, a key Middle East nation once considered, like Egypt, to be friendly.

The Israelis have been slowly burning

their bridges with Ankara, and rela-

tions soured further following Israel's

bloody attack on the Mavi Marmara,

the Turkish aid ship which attempted

to break the siege of Gaza. Turkey,once a dependable ally, had already

resisted US demands to use its terri-

tory as a launch-pad for its invasion

of Iraq. Now the Turkish regime has

started its "turn to the east", reheat-

ing its once frosty relations with its

neighbours - it recently sealed its rap-

prochement with Syria and has warm relations with Iran.

With the Egyptian state now under massive pressure from below, Israel

may find it has few friends left. Even before the Egyptian Revolution, Is-

rael was learning that its military power had limits. The failed occupation of

southern Lebanon, which ended in a humiliating retreat in May 2000, was

followed by a disastrous war in 2006, when it was outfought and outthought

by Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance. Even its grip on the Palestinians

was not assured, with stubborn resistance in the West Bank and an untamed

armed opposition in the Gaza Strip.

A combination of the US's disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well

as Israel's clumsy attempts to suppress Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Pales-

tinian Hamas movement, already set nerves jangling. In the weeks before

the Egyptian Revolution the parliamentary alliance headed by Hezbollah

forced out of office the US-backed prime minister of Lebanon. Israel already

had a delicate situation on the "northern front"; now it has a disastrous one

in the south.

The region has seen some fundamental social changes in the era of the

cold peace. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s Israel confronted societies that

were overwhelmingly rural and economically stagnant, by the turn of this

century the Arab world had become urban, sophisticated and relatively ad-

vanced. Even countries such as Lebanon, vastly poorer that its oil-rich neigh-

bours, have been transformed. In the 1960s three out of four Lebanese lived

off the land; now some eight out of ten live in cities. This is true of most

other Arab nations, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states becoming

fully integrated into global capitalism.

But these historic social changes are not reflected in the Arab regimes,

whose leaders owe their position to events that took place in a world that has

long gone. The dysfunctional relationship between the rulers and the "street"

had long been seen as a problem by Western governments, but they weretoo timid to press for meaningful reforms. This problem was compounded

by Israel itself.

Israel was already finding the Lebanese and Palestinians difficult to tame.

But it could reassure itself that neither resistance movement, even with the

help of Syria and Iran, could field an army of millions and march on Tel

Aviv. Egypt can, and it brings some hard facts to the table. Its 82 million

population dwarfs all others. More people live in the city of Alexandria than

in Lebanon, and the population of Greater Cairo is bigger than that of Syria.

The Israelis can ill afford a repeat of the war of attrition that culminated in

Egypt's devastating 1973 offensive. Israel survived that war, but it was very

close.

Having relied on Israel to break the alliance of Arab nationalist regimes,

the US found itself unable to rein in its ally's territorial ambitions. The US

fell into a strategic trap of its own making. It dangled the prospect of a two-

state solution and normalisation to the friendly Arab states, but could not

get Israel to make the necessary concessions. And, as was revealed in the

recently leaked Palestine Papers - which exposed negotiations between the

US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority - it never intended to.

Israeli governments engineered the collapse of the Oslo Accords that set out

The US is bankingon skilully talkingdown the EgyptianRevolution and it isattempting to sellitsel as a riend o thepeople.


21/45


a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and rejected a key Saudi peace

plan that offered "Arab normalisation" in return for all the lands seized after

the 1967 war. By rejecting these plans, Israel slapped in the face Arab lead-

ers who banked on an "honourable deal" they could sell back home. The

Saudi plan and Oslo Accords were rotten for the Palestinians, but still insuf-

ficient to satisfy Israel's appetite.

Arab leaders began to demand that the US put more pressure on Israel.

Obama initiated desperate and unsuccessful attempts to reign in Israeli am-

bitions - even offering advanced warplanes in return for a temporary freeze

on its settlements in the West Bank. Israeli stonewalling destroyed the Pal-

estinian Authority's credibility and with it any real prospect for peace on its

terms. Now Israel and imperialism face a nightmare scenario. Should Israeli

troops rush to seize the Gaza Strip (as some Israeli generals are demand-

ing) and risk dragging Egypt into war, or tread warily so as not to provoke a

country in the grip of revolutionary fervour? The advice coming from the US

is unequivocal.

Stratfor, the renowned US think-tank, used some blunt words to sum upIsrael's "strategic distress": "The worst-case scenario for Israel would be a

return to the pre-1978 relationship with Egypt without a settlement with the

Palestinians. That would open the door for a potential two-front war with an

intifada in the middle. To avoid that, the ideological pressure on Egypt must

be eased, and that means a settlement with the Palestinians on less than

optimal terms.

"The alternative is to stay the current course and let Israel take its chanc-

es. The question is where the greater safety lies. Israel has assumed that it

lies with confrontation with the Palestinians. That's true only if Egypt stays

neutral. If the pressure on the Palestinians destabilises Egypt, it is not the

most prudent course."

The US is banking on skilfully talking down the Egyptian Revolution and

it is attempting to sell itself as a friend of the people. Yet there is an immedi-

ate and pressing question: what happens when Gaza asks for the siege to be

lifted? What will be the response of an Egyptian government, whether mili-

tary or civilian, that has set up shop in Mubarak's presidential palace?

Either way the US is attempting, under Obama, to tread delicately. Israel

could decide to gamble on a repeat of its 1967 victory, but the risks are sud-

denly very high. For imperialism the Egyptian effect is posing wider strategic

concerns. The waves generated by the revolution are already lapping at the

shores of other Middle East countries. The uprising has emboldened already

existing movements for change, with almost daily protests and demonstra-

tions in Bahrain (home to the US Fifth Fleet), Yemen (a key US ally in the

"war on terror") and Jordan (the second Arab country to make peace with

Israel), as well as Algeria and Morocco.

Similarly it is worth repeating that Israel is a mighty power, and the more

the US loses its footing in the region, the more dependent it is on maintain-

ing this power. Crucially for the US, the Israeli regime has vastly greater in-

ternal stability than the Arab dictatorships, as it is based on a racially exclu-

sive settler state that owes its survival to imperialism. The US understands

that, whatever the outcome of the revolution, Israel still has the ability to

mete out some harsh military punishment. The US is not about to abandon

Israel; it just wants it to behave, for now.

The biggest fear is not only that the Egyptian Revolution reproduces itself

in the rest of the region - although this seems increasingly possible - but that

in the process of revolution the Arab masses have rediscovered their powerand proved what is possible. The question of the direction for the Egyptian

Revolution remains open-ended. But it already casts a shadow over Israel,

imperialism and its allies in the region.

Over the past 30 years Israel and the US were forced to look over their

shoulders at a resistance armed with stones and crude rockets. Now they

have come face to face with a giant.

42 A S R Th Middl E t l ti A S R Th Middl E t l ti 43


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Chapter three

bAhRAin And libyARepReSSion &inteRvention

Bahrain: uprising

and interventionTim Nelson

First published April 2011

The arrival of Saudi Arabian troops has raised the stakes for

Bahrain's fledgling revolution. Tim Nelson reports on the

uprising in the Middle East's smallest state

on 14 March Saudi troops crossed the causeway between Saudi Ara-

bia and Bahrain. The United Arab Emirates has also sent about 500

police into the country. They were invited by the Bahraini govern-

ment after it was becoming increasingly clear the security forces

were unable to contain the mass protests against the authoritarianism of the

ruling Al Khalifa family. Since 14 February there have been mass protests

against the regime, demanding democratic reforms and, increasingly, the

removal of the ruling family. On 13 March protesters successfully resisted a

renewed onslaught by the regime's security forces.

Bahrain's largest trade union federation, the General Federation of Bah-

rain Trade Unions, which represents 25,000 employees from 70 unions,

started strike action on 13 March in support of the movement. The strike in-

cludes workers at Bahrain's two largest companies, Aluminium Bahrain and

the Bahrain Petroleum Company. Trade union leaders have also announced

their intention to join the opposition committee, which is leading the resist-

ance. This sort of action is essential to victory. In Egypt and Tunisia the key

to toppling the dictatorships was the working class organising and taking

strike action.



23/45


A small island, with a population of little over one million, Bahrain is the

smallest of the oil-rich Gulf states. However, in February the people of Bah-

rain, following those of Tunisia, Egypt and across the region, came out onto

the streets. From

4 February there were small demonstrations in solidarity with the Egyp-

tian and Tunisian revolutions, and a large day of protest was called for 14

February. Thousands marched. The Bahraini government responded with a

level of repression which has become all too familiar in the Arab revolutions,

with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition used against peaceful pro-

testers. The Bahraini people have responded to this violence with further

protests and the occupation of the landmark Pearl Roundabout. They also

targeted state buildings and the financial district.

Like many countries in the Middle East, Bahrain is marked by both the

brutal nature of its authoritarian regime and deep divisions among its peo-

ple, which the ruling class encourages and intensifies. The Al Khalifa family

has ruled Bahrain since it was installed by the British Empire in the 19th

century and ever since has relied on the support of either British or US im-perialism to maintain its power. Bahrain's security forces are equipped with

US weapons, tanks and aircraft, and the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is harboured

there. Since the 1930s Bahrain's economy has overwhelmingly centred on

oil. Since the 1970s Bahrain has also become a financial hub for the Mid-

dle East, making the state central to Western imperialism's economic and

military regional dominance. The House of Saud, the ruling family of Saudi

Arabia, has long supported the Al Khalifa family. Despite the vast wealth of

the country, few people see its benefit.

Oppression

Large-scale youth unemployment has been an ongoing problem in Bahrain,

as have low wages for the majority of people. Although the majority of Bah-

rain's population are Shia Muslims, the Al Khalifa family, as well as most of

the ruling elite and the hated security services, are Sunni. Shia people are

often discriminated against for jobs. The elite uses discrimination and op-

pression of the Shia majority in order maintain support among Sunnis.

Despite the overwhelming majority of protesters being Shia, and the in-

volvement of Shia Islamist organisations in the opposition, the people of

Bahrain have continued to stress that this is not an exclusively Shia move-

ment, nor is its aim to replace the oppression of Shia with that of Sunnis. The

significance of the movement in Bahrain, and its implications for the region,

should not be underestimated. It is the first of the Arabian absolute monar-

chies to face mass protests on this scale. If the movement wins in Bahrain it

can prove to the people of the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, that the

monarchies can be beaten. Also, in order to defeat the Al Khalifa family, the

Bahraini people will have to overcome the deep sectarian divisions which

have been exploited by the Bahraini ruling class, and that of the Middle East

as a whole, for so long.

A revolution of the kind we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt would send

shockwaves throughout the region and beyond. That is why the Saudi inter-

vention in Bahrain must be actively opposed by all those who stand in soli-

darity with the Arab people. The absolute monarchy of the House of Saud is

one of the most reactionary regimes in the region. In Saudi Arabia any criti-

cism of the regime, and its widespread human rights abuses, is punishable

by imprisonment, torture or death. Women are treated as second class citi-

zens. This brutal regime is supported by Western imperialism. After Israel,and the military dictatorship in Egypt, Saudi Arabia is the most important

US ally in the region.

The House of Saud fears the spread of the movement beyond Bahrain into

the other Gulf states and Saudi Arabia itself. The movement that began in

Tunisia, and

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