In support of the struggle of the Egyptian working class against the bourgeois State, its army and its lay and Islamic lackeys, enemies one and all

In support of the rebuilding of working class economic organisations and of the revolutionary communist party

   
After the street battles, the massacres and the general slaughter in Egypt over the course of the last few days, the response of the bourgeois commentators, hiding the real issues as always behind a kind of reactive emotionality, has been to talk of ‘civil war’. No attempt, of course, has been made to explain the various opposing class interests which lie behind the various clashes and confrontations. Everything can be explained, supposedly, in terms of the struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood (alleged defenders of a ‘legality’ violated by the coup-d’etat) and the army (who are simply trying to restore order and are supported by a broad secular front).

Let us not be fooled by the symbols, the slogans, the objectives written on the banners of the demonstrators. In a country which is modern and fully capitalist it is certainly nothing to do with a struggle for ‘legality’, or for ‘democracy’, or for ‘Islamic law’. What is clear, given Egypt’s current circumstances, is that the demonstrators are motivated by material interests and vital necessities, and that neither front has any hope of coming up with a solution. Neither the army chiefs nor the Muslim Brotherhood can promise a decent future to the millions of Egyptians who have mobilised and taken to the streets.

The working class, the one class powerful enough to take on the bourgeois regime, has been absent from the struggle. The demonstrations to restore ‘legality’ organised by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Morsi government haven’t enthused the proletariat; there have been no reports of strikes or declarations in support of the movement in the streets by the unions. In fact all there has been, denounced in a leaflet put out by the independent unions, have been the declarations of the official unions, which have called on workers to demonstrate in support of the Al-Sisi coup.

In the army, as far as we know, there have been no cases of desertion, and certainly not mass desertion. And despite authorising harsh repression the State apparatus has held firm.

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the oldest parties in Egypt. They have a capillary-type organisation which is distributed throughout the country, and which evolved over a hundred years or in response to the need to act in secret; although in reality it was tolerated by the regime, which every now and again would release one of their leaders from prison to deploy them against the proletariat.

A capillary organisation, along with the welfare services which the movement has traditionally offered to the less well-off, and which rely on the considerable economic resources at its disposal, are factors which may explain how it managed to achieve the level of mobilisation it did in the middle of August. Most of the demonstrators seem to hail from the ranks of the disinherited classes (who make up a substantial portion of Egypt’s population) or from the middle class, but not from the rural or industrial proletariat.

Forcing its followers into a confrontation with the army (which had many times announced its intention to break up the demonstrations by force) may have been a cynical ploy on the brotherhood’s part to regain credibility after its brief spell in government, when its hostility to the less well-off classes became very obvious, along with the seamless continuity of its policies with that of the previous Mubarak regime. For the army’s part, it went in for open provocation, and some commentators have speculated that that the army imprisoned the Brotherhood’s main leaders precisely so the young extremists would be unleashed to take the bait. The wave of repression, costing the lives of hundreds and possibly thousands of Muslims, and of dozens of soldiers, has stoked up the myths both of the army as sole defender of law and order and of the Brotherhood as Islamic martyrs.

It seems that the familiarity of this tired old game hasn’t escaped the notice of a section of the Egyptian proletariat. We read in an Appeal to the Workers dated July 26, issued by a consistent minority within the Executive Committee of the Independent Unions: ‘Ask yourself this: in whose interest is it to continue these struggles, this spilling of blood? It is in the interests of both sides, of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the Army. Just as the poor are cannon fodder in the wars between States, so do the poor in Egypt end up as the fuel for domestic conflicts and in the domestic war’. Yes: a domestic war against the proletariat!

The blood of the dead and wounded spilled in the streets of the main cities in Egypt was intended, above all, as a terrible warning to the proletariat and oppressed classes of Egypt; the classes which the global economic crisis, and the Egyptian one in particular, is threatening to set into motion.

To the proletariat in Egypt, crushed by starvation wages and capitalist exploitation, and living a horrible life with no prospects, we say this. The proletariat is not ‘the people’; it isn’t an anomalous mass that acts without any precise aim which can be easily swayed by demagoguery. The proletariat is a social class with a determined programme and with characteristic forms of struggle and organisation. It has the potential to become an army capable not only of bringing down the capitalist apparatus of production but of confronting and destroying the State machine and installing its class dictatorship. When the proletariat finally gets going all the institutions of bourgeois repression which today seem so invincible will quickly reveal their impotence and be undermined by capitalist society’s inner contradictions.

In order to become a disciplined and powerful army, the working class in every country of the world will have to fight to rebuild organisations which defend the class at the economic level. The first important steps have already been taken in Egypt with the formation of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions, outside and against the government federation of trade unions. But the class will also have to reconnect with its class party; the one party which is totally ‘biased’ in its favour, and which won’t expect it to compromise its demands in the name of the firm, the nation or the national economy.