YESTERDAY, millions of Egyptian workers and youth, from Alexandria to Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the city of Luxor and Ports Said and Suez, marched and rallied demanding the immediate departure of President Mubarak from Egypt.
Their huge numbers put the secret police and the regime’s hired gangs of thugs to flight, leaving Egyptian military and political leaders, including the Defence Minister and members of the General staff, to visit Tahrir Square to pay their respects to the revolution.
Behind the scenes US officials were doing their best to get Mubarak’s bags packed and to see him on his way into exile, along with his family to enjoy the deposits in their Swiss bank accounts, so that an alternative group of US puppets could be put into their place.
But the revolution that began in Tunisia and spread to Algeria and then to Egypt and Jordan is not going to be halted by any petty political manoeuvring.
The source of the revolution is not just the political dictatorships through which the ruling classes hold power in the Arab world.
What has made the Mubarak and other regimes unbearable is the world capitalist crisis and the way that it has destroyed hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide, while setting the prices of the essential items that people need rocketing upwards completely out of control.
Bread, meat and vegetables have been placed beyond the reach of tens of millions of ordinary people and this, combined with wage cuts and rapidly growing mass unemployment, has revolutionised millions.
The fall of Mubarak will set the scene for Kings, Emirs and Presidents all over the Arab world to lose their thrones and their palaces – driven out by the developing revolution.
However, the fall of Mubarak will not mean the end of the struggle; it will in fact set the scene for the decisive struggle, for the socialist revolution to overthrow the lackeys that the US manages to put into his place, who will attempt to proceed with exactly the same policies of supporting the super-exploitation of the masses and the propping up of the state of Israel, that were Mubarak’s hallmarks.
What is required in Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Arab world is the building up of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead victorious socialist revolutions to drive imperialism and Zionism out of the region and expropriate the bourgeoisie, who are merely servants of the international banks.
However, it must be remembered that this struggle did not begin in Tunisia. It began in Greece and Ireland, in the EU, where the international banks set out to make the working class pay for the worldwide banking crash by massive increases in prices, the elimination of benefits, the slashing of pensions and the development of mass unemployment.
The essence of the situation is that world capitalism is in crisis and this crisis is driving forward socialist revolutions and, as a whole, the world socialist revolution.
The explosions that we have seen in Egypt are just tremors of the earthquakes that are on the point of eruption in the major capitalist states – such as Greece, Ireland, the UK and France – where the ruling classes are attempting to put the working class and the majority of the middle class to the sword.
The working class of the EU and the US will show the same courage, determination and fearlessness as the Egyptian workers have shown.
The world socialist revolution is now under way.
When the masses of the UK and Ireland and France and Greece rise up and are met head-on by the police and all the state forces that the ruling class can muster, what they will need is to have a revolutionary leadership at their head that can organise the taking of power and the ending of the capitalist system.
This revolutionary leadership must be of the same type as the Bolshevik Party, that was led by Lenin and Trotsky and organised the working class to overthrow Russian capitalism in 1917, and begin the world socialist revolution.
We have a duty to prepare for the revolutionary situations that are now rapidly developing by building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the major countries to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
