MUBARAK has gone, while the revolution that removed him, at the cost of hundreds of dead, is continuing to develop.
Workers and the middle class yesterday resisted the attempts of Mubarak’s military chiefs to empty Tahrir Square, to get workers back to work, and get the government that was left behind by Mubarak working again, for the benefit of the imperialist powers, led by the US, and Israel.
Imperialist policy and Israel’s security hinge on the defeat of the Egyptian revolution by the general staff reimposing the Mubarak military police jackboot onto the working class and the middle class – this time without Mubarak.
This scenario, which is being driven from London and Washington, is doomed to failure since the working class and the majority of the middle class are not prepared to give up the freedom that was won by the first stages of the Egyptian revolution, at the expense of hundreds of dead.
Mubarak is now skulking in his protected compound in Sharm el Sheikh, from where he, no doubt, harbours hopes of making a comeback, when the revolutionary ‘furore’ has been doused by the military.
However, the call has already gone up from the Syndicates of Lawyers and from the newly liberated trade unions for Mubarak to be put on trial for his crimes against the Egyptian and the Palestinian people, and for all of the ill-gotten gains, the loot that has been salted away in banks all over the world, believed to amount to billions of dollars, to be returned to its rightful owners, the working class and the poor of Egypt.
The working class is now making use of its freedom from the jackboot to mount massive strike actions to win wage rises to keep up with the leaps in the cost of living, and to win jobs for the tens of millions of the unemployed.
In fact, as the military attempts more desperately to replace the Mubarak prison onto society, and refuses to advance to a general election open to all political parties, the working class will take the road that the Russian workers took in 1905 and 1917. This is to organise ‘soviets’ or workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils in the cities, towns and localities to defend its interests and the interests of the rural and urban poor against the frenzied attempts that will be made to reimpose the imperialist-backed dictatorship.
The existence of the two powers in society and the class struggle between them, the ruling class and its imperialist and Zionist allies, and the working class backed by the rural poor and sections of the middle class, will be formalised through the emergence, in embryo, of the new form of state within the old order.
The question will then rest on the working class winning the support of the majority of the population of both town and country and winning the support or at least the neutrality of the majority of the soldiers in the Egyptian armed forces.
This process began in Russia in 1917 when the masses overthrew the Tsar in February and reformed the workers soviets that had appeared in 1905. The process was completed in October when the Bolsheviks organised the armed seizure of power, and then presented that power to the Congress of the Soviets that was then in session.
The key to that development was Lenin’s return to Russia in April and Trotsky’s in May, when they joined forces to convince the Bolshevik party that a campaign had to be mounted to convince the masses of the need for the soviets to take power and overthrow the provisional government that replaced the Tsar.
Today, Mubarak the pharaoh has gone, and his military men are seeking to organise a government to replace him that will carry on with exactly the same policies.
The key to the situation in Egypt, and in many other countries that are being driven along the same revolutionary road by the world crisis of capitalism, is founding and building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the victory of the revolutions that are developing in the only way that the Egyptian revolution can triumph, as a socialist revolution led by the working class.
