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The popular uprising in Egypt has reached a new and decisive stage.
The U.S.-backed Mubarak regime has unleashed a reign of terror. Thousands of people have been shot, stabbed, beaten and arrested in the last 24 hours.
The so-called pro-Mubarak mobs are nothing other than the agents of the Egyptian state joined by recruits from the business elite and comprador bourgeois elements—the section of Egypt’s capitalist class allied with foreign investors and transnational corporations—who have benefited while the masses of people in Egypt have been afflicted by poverty, unemployment and oppression.
The regime’s agents are arresting foreign and domestic journalists who are chronicling both the uprising of the people and the fascist-like repression that is being visited upon them by Mubarak’s agents.
Meanwhile, the state-run media is attempting to demonize the popular uprising as the work of foreign agents. The ridiculous characterization of the movement as the work of the Israeli regime or the Iranian government is a transparent effort to generate a fascist-type response from the Egyptian masses in opposition to the protests.
In the last week, more than 150 people have been murdered by the regime’s agents. What began as a popular protest movement developed through a rapid succession of various stages into a genuine uprising of the people.
U.S. government hedging its bets
When police murder and repression—which began on Jan. 25 in response to the first protests—led to a major expansion of the uprising on Friday, Jan. 28, the Mubarak regime was thrown off guard. Its primary backer, the U.S. government, was likewise thrown into a state of temporary disarray. Mubarak’s regime, which has functioned as a central proxy for U.S. imperialism for the past 31 years, suddenly seemed—for the first time—to be in danger of overthrow.
Washington did not contemplate that the regime they prop up with $2 billion in aid per year could be so seriously threatened. With nearly 250 meetings between Egyptian officials and U.S. lawmakers and their aides in the first seven months of 2010 alone, the Mubarak dictatorship seemed like an unbreakable client regime.
The uprising spurred the Obama administration to huddle with its senior military and diplomatic advisors. They began to prepare for the dispatch of Mubarak and his replacement by other personalities, specifically Omar Suleiman, the head of Mubarak’s intelligence operation and a close ally of Washington. Suleiman worked closely with the CIA, expediting the rendition of detainees in U.S. custody to Egypt where they suffered vicious torture.
The Obama administration also opened a visible line of communication with bourgeois figures from within the opposition camp, including Mohamed ElBaradei, who functioned as the chairperson of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the Bush years.
The Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has been in constant contact with his Egyptian counterpart, Lt. Gen. Sami Annan.
From the point of view of the United States government, any of the personalities in its foreign proxy or client regimes are entirely disposable. When Ferdinand Marcos became the lightning rod for a mass people’s uprising in the Philippines in 1986, the United States quickly transitioned its support away from Marcos to others. Similarly, and at the virtually the same time, when the people of Haiti rose up against “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the U.S. government appeared at the last moment to change its position and demand that Duvalier leave the country. Washington is always prepared to sacrifice an individual puppet in order to stop an even deeper, more thorough-going revolution that threatens a system that benefits U.S. imperial interests.
This threat is what is fueling the Obama administration’s thinly veiled calls for Mubarak to “begin the transition now.” Washington is concerned that if the fascist counterrevolutionary forces do not succeed in quickly crushing the uprising, a true people’s militia could rapidly develop.
Mubarak and his henchmen are all too familiar with the game plan and have made it clear that they will use the considerable resources of repression available to the regime and its supporters within the Egyptian comprador bourgeoisie to mount a deadly assault against the people’s uprising.
The regime must be overthrown
The popular people’s uprising has a particular vulnerability. It is an entirely spontaneous movement. It is confronted by the organized violence of the regime, which also dominates the mass media. Still, by achieving organization through the struggle itself the movement can create a kind of dual power that co-exists alongside the official power of the regime. Only the struggle itself in the coming days will determine the outcome.
The spark of this spontaneous uprising was lit by the equally spontaneous protest movement in Tunisia. It is a multi-class movement. In its first days, it prided itself on the peaceful nature of the protest. The participants identified Mubarak, the individual, as a synonym for all the oppression and problems facing the Egyptian people. For instance, the vast poverty of the country—45 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day, and upwards of 2 million people live in cemeteries—was identified as a consequence of the Mubarak clique’s looting of the country. Also attributed to Mubarak are the brutal attacks against workers who have been attempting to unionize in recent years. In the popular consciousness, it is Mubarak who is responsible for the tens of thousands of prisoners who languish in jail because of their political differences with the regime.
Thus, in the popular consciousness of the people it is the removal of Mubarak and his closest cronies that is considered to be the most important solution to address Egypt’s problems.
But how was the regime to be overthrown or replaced?
The severe repression of the past three decades—and even earlier—has severely damaged and weakened leftist organizations and parties. The decades of repression has also severely limited the distribution of communist, socialist and class-conscious agitation and propaganda.
This popular movement was initiated by young people using Facebook and other social media. It is against the Mubarak dictatorship, but it lacks a coherent ideological or political program. Nonetheless, the masses in struggle have, even without a political program and organization, shown the remarkable capacity of the people themselves to organize to defend their actions, their neighborhoods and to organize all sorts of socially necessary functions normally carried out by state institutions.
The people can take the power
As we know, the masses of people in the course of revolutionary struggle rapidly acquire knowledge and experience from which they draw political conclusions. All of the contradictions of class society and, in particular, the role of the state are fully revealed in the course of revolutions.
Still, in order to topple the regime it must be overthrown.
It is clear that Mubarak is not prepared to walk quietly into the sunset. Before yesterday’s violence, there was a feeling by the people’s movement that they would succeed in ousting the regime somehow.
Absent a leading political party or organization that was directing the popular uprising against the Mubarak regime, many of the participants were hopeful that Mubarak would either flee the country or that the military would act to replace him.
Although the movement had prided itself on its peaceful character, it is now clear that only a massive mobilization of the people and a determined effort to actually take the power from the regime can succeed in toppling the dictatorship.
Yesterday and today, the spontaneous people’s movement—although it was unarmed—is heroically and steadfastly responding to the armed terror to which the Mubarak regime has resorted. As of this moment, the people can see that the Egyptian military has maintained, at least so far, its allegiance to the regime.
For our part, we in the PSL are doing all that we can to build solidarity with the people of Egypt and to expose the criminal character of the U.S. imperialist government, which continues to finance the Mubarak regime. The efforts of the Egyptian people, if successful, could have an epoch changing impact on the entire Middle East.
