PRESIDENT MURSI of Egypt has followed up his successful negotiation of the end of the current round of Israel’s war with Gaza – which won him great praise and support from President Obama – to reveal that he is indeed Mubarak with a beard, by making himself the absolute ruler of Egypt, on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, continuing Mubarak’s alliance with US imperialism.
His word and his decrees are now law, and any opposition to his measures is illegal, in itself.
He has been transformed in weeks into the Islamic Mubarak, a would-be great dictator, working hand in glove with US imperialism, which only has very good things to say about him, and continues to finance the Egyptian army with over a billion dollars in aid every year.
The same military that under Mubarak was breaking heads in the streets for him, is now performing the same service for Mursi.
The great democrat President Obama, who cannot tolerate the Syrian Ba’athist, the Iranian government or Hezbollah because of their alleged ‘anti-democratic’ tendencies, has no such problems with Mursi.
In this respect, Obama has followed the Bush standard of cooperation with the Arab feudalists, who reach for their swords as soon as they hear the word democracy. Obama concentrates his fire on the anti-imperialist Arab nationalist movements, as the murder of Gadaffi and the war to overthrow President Assad illustrates.
Mursi can now be expected to move to re-impose the chains of dictatorship on Egypt, and in particular to ban strikes and ban the revolutionary movements that erupted to overthrow the Mubarak regime.
Internationally, he will support the counter-revolutionaries in Syria and help the US and Israel to attack Iran, while at the same time insisting that the peace treaty with Israel is a strategic necessity for Egypt, as is the two-state solution for Palestine.
He will not put an end to the blockade of Gaza by fully opening up the Rafah crossing to all who want to trade with Palestine or aid it in any way. The blockade that has been the source of so much suffering to Palestinians will remain.
However, Mursi’s return to the old counter-revolutionary dictatorship in Egypt is only an apparent return to the old, since the revolution is still seeking to advance.
Mursi’s manoeuvre has revealed all the more clearly that the carrying out of the historic tasks of the bourgeois revolution, in countries like Egypt, falls to the working class, which must carry the revolution forward along the lines of the model pioneered by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia.
There, the working class became the leader of all of the oppressed, especially the millions of rural poor.
In five days, in February 1917, the workers in the capital, and in Moscow, and a number of other cities brought down the Tsarist empire. They formed a dual power, through establishing soviets, which were forced to challenge the right of the provisional government to rule.
The Russian workers had the Bolshevik Party at their head which won the majority the people, through the struggles that emerged in April, July and October, against the various attempts of the counter revolutionary forces to turn back history – to take the power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the leading role of the working class through handing the land over to the peasantry.
The Egyptian workers need to form their Bolshevik Party – today that means a section of the International Committee of the Fourth Interational – to complete their revolution, through the working class taking power, in alliance with the rural poor, before spreading the revolution throughout the Middle East and the Gulf. This is the way forward.
