GENERAL Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s army chief, whose force is paid for by the United States, has warned that the current political crisis ‘could lead to a collapse of the state’.
His statement followed a huge military deployment in three cities along the Suez Canal where a state of emergency has been declared and defied by tens of thousands of workers and youth campaigning for the removal of the Mursi-Muslim Brotherhood regime, which is serving the interests of the US just as Mubarak did, leading to Mursi being called ‘Mubarak with a beard’.
The centres of the workers and youth uprisings are Cairo and the cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Port Suez where the working class is concentrated.
In the three Suez Canal cities the masses have simply ignored the curfew and martial law and have taken control of the streets.
General Sisi, who doubles as Egypt’s Defence Minister, has 490,000 soldiers under his command, and handles a huge military budget – $1.3bn of which is US military aid. The military budget is used as decided by a National Defence Committee made up of military chiefs and cabinet members, over which the puppet parliament has no control.
The military is also said to control 40% of private business. In Egypt’s belated capitalist development the army leadership is an inferior substitute for a viable bourgeoisie.
Sisi, in the course of his threatening remarks, described the army as ‘a pillar of the state’s foundations’.
There is no doubt that the US and Israel, which has a peace treaty with Egypt, will favour the army putting an end to the revolution by imposing its dictatorship, as the only way that the bourgeoisie can rule Egypt.
The imperialists are, however, in a state of shock at the power of the working class and the youth, and the rapidity of political development which has seen the Mursi regime lose all credibility in days.
Workers everywhere have been marching in opposition to the millionaire Mursi’s authority. Despite promising to form a government ‘for all Egyptians’ he has been accused by the opposition of being a bourgeois autocrat governing for the rich and driving through a new constitution that attacks trade unionism, freedom of expression, democratic rights and freedom of religion.
‘Down, down with Mohamed Mursi! Down, down with the state of emergency!’ crowds shouted in Ismailia and all of the Suez Canal towns.
In Port Said, men attacked police stations after dark. A security source said some police and troops were injured. A medical source said two men were killed and 12 injured in the clashes, including 10 with gunshot wounds.
‘The people want to bring down the regime,’ crowds chanted in Alexandria. ‘Leave means go, and don’t say no!’
The masses are in a state of permanent revolution. ‘Martial law, state of emergency and army arrests of civilians are not a solution to the crisis,’ said Ahmed Maher of the April 6 movement that helped organise the 2011 uprising. ‘All this will do is further provoke the youth. The solution has to be a political one that addresses the roots of the problem.’
Egyptian capitalism has come far too late in the day, and is now faced with a powerful working class with its own class interests, that is not taken in by religious forms and is demanding jobs, wages, basic rights and socialism.
As in Tunisia, the working class and the youth are driving forward, as the reactionary Islamists prove that they stand for capitalism and subservience to US imperialism.
What is required now, all over North Africa, is the building of sections of the Fourth International to organise the workers and the youth to lead the rural poor in carrying out the tasks that the bourgeoisie carried out in western Europe, before rapidly going over to carrying out socialist measures. The revolutions in North Africa and Palestine are in fact a vital part of the world socialist revolution.
