En Passant

Revolutions usually begin with a temporary and apparent unity among all those who oppose the old regime. However, with the beginning of the fall of that regime, opposition forces quickly become divided according to the interests which they express, their conceptions of revolution and the limits of their goals, between the completion of the revolution and its halting, between the political demands and social demands of the revolution.

For capitalism, both global and Egyptian, is in a state of collapse and the Egyptian working class is in a constant state of near uprising. These historical conditions do not recur often, so either we progress toward the second Egyptian Revolution or our fate will be the victory of the counterrevolution.

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 organised pressure of the masses is the only way to achieve the goals of our revolution in Egypt. The revolutionary front has become an indispensable necessity, provided that it is founded upon real roots, that it adopts the social and political demands of the people, organizes them, and supports the struggle to attain those goals.

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.

It is the class struggle in Greece which offers hope. It is the class struggle in Egypt which offers hope.

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.

On the first anniversary of the mass mobilizations of January 25th 2011, we have launched an international solidarity campaign with the Egyptian revolution.

For the text of the petition and to sign on, please visit http://www.egyptsolidaritycampaign.org.

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 problem is how the revolutionary groups can succeed in building a social programme which transforms the slogan of social justice adopted by the revolution –and which sets them apart from the liberals and the Islamists – into concrete, practical steps linked to wages, prices, rights to housing, health, education and employment, inter-connecting the achievement of this programme with the presence of a revolutionary government in power.

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.”