EGYPTIAN workers and youth have reoccupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, and are keeping the military and the police at bay, following Saturday’s deadly clashes in which the state forces killed two workers, arrested scores more, and injured more than 800.
The Egyptian workers are not prepared to accept a military police dictatorship, even if it is fronted by a parliamentary facade. They are demanding that trade unions and trade unionists must be allowed to stand for election and want to establish a Labour Party to take the working class and the poor forward.
This development is being fought tooth and nail by the military regime which has the full backing of the US and the UK in its struggle against the working class.
In fact, the imperialist powers are now locked in battle with the Arab masses who have been driven into action by the impact of the world crisis on North Africa and the Middle East.
Where revolutionary eruptions have taken place, the imperialists are seeking to prevent the working class taking these revolutions forward.
The US Secretary of State, Clinton, has recently stated the obvious, that the US, which is in close alliance with the feudal Islamic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait is not opposed to working with Islamic regimes of the type that have emerged in Tunisia, and was imposed on Libya by NATO.
Even before the days that the CIA and the UK worked with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan against the Red Army, the US and the UK have favoured Islamic movements and used them to bomb, assassinate and attack Arab nationalist regimes – from Nasser’s Egypt after he nationalised the Suez Canal, to Algeria, Iraq, and now Libya and Syria – who were and are opposed to imperialist domination of their countries.
In fact, the world crisis that has bankrupted the US, EU and UK has driven the imperialists into a frenzy to drive the world revolution back, not just in their own countries but throughout North Africa and the Middle East with their colossal oil and gas resources, which the imperialists must seize hold of.
In Libya, the Gadaffi leadership was suckered into disarming and allowing the great oil monopolies back into the country, and then the Islamists were brought back into the country from the UK and the US to be used as NATO’s ground forces.
Now, the extremely desperate imperialists, who acknowledge that their system is disintegrating are preparing another desperate use of the Libya tactic to advance their cause and the cause of the Israeli Zionists by removing the Assad leadership of Syria.
Assad has committed the unpardonable crimes of allying Syria with Iran and refusing to sign a peace treaty with Israel unless all of the territories that Israeli seized from the Arabs are returned, including the Golan Heights.
Hague is meeting with the pro-imperialist ‘Syrian revolutionaries’ this week, while Turkey and Jordan have announced that they are to establish security zones inside Syria.
The object is not just regime change in Syria to benefit Israel, but to prepare a major war against at Iran to enable the imperialists to restore the whole region as a conquered area of cheap-labour slaves and stolen oil and gas resources.
This is the way that the imperialists are fighting the world revolution that the crisis of their own capitalist system is driving forward every day in North Africa and the Middle East.
However, they are fighting this same world revolution at home. They are now threatening to use, and using, pepper sprays, rubber bullets and new anti-union laws against the working class and youth at home, to smash the Welfare States that they say capitalism can no longer afford.
This means that the workers of Egypt, Syria, the US and the UK are in the same trench, and that a victory for one section of workers is a victory for all workers.
The slogan of the US, UK and EU workers must be that the enemy is at home. The policy for the workers of the world must be the building of sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory, to put an end to capitalism and imperialism on a world scale, and take humanity forward.
