I think the army was for a time watching, unsure and divided on what course to take, as was Washington. It probably would have preferred a restoration of fear and gave Mubarak ample chance to try to accomplish it. But when in Suez, Cairo and elsewhere workers went on strike, it became clear that intimidation had failed. Mubarak had to go. The hope was that this would defuse the situation. I expected that it would indeed do so, at least for a while, but that was a mistake, reflecting an underestimation of the combativity of the workers in Egypt. I could have known though, given the intensity of class struggles in Egypt in recent years. It is a very hopeful sign that those strikes continue and even spread, it shows the workers realize the limits of the symbolic victory that the departure of Mubarak means. That they want ‘independent unions’ as means to give their solidarity an organized expression beyond the present struggle, is to be expected. That these ‘independent’ unions will become a voice of capital like their colleagues in the more developed countries is also inevitable. The intervention of pro-revolutionaries should perhabs focus less on the form –they should always advocate forms that express the collective ‘ownership’ of the struggle but they can do so only when there really is a collective struggle- and more on the content: the refutation of protectionism, nationalization, anti-imperialism and other ‘solutions’ which the unions and others advocate on the base of the illusion that these will improve the lives of the working population. Promoting these goals serves to obscure the sense of the struggle, which is pointing towards global solidarity, towards producing for needs instead of for profit, towards ending the dictatorship of the value-form over human life.
The Egyptian proletariat has advanced us all in this direction. As Raoul V observes in a recent text on the francophone side of this discussion-list, the international reverberation of its struggle is so great that the (“communist”) authorities of the People’s Republic of China deemed it necessary to censure all internet searches containing the word “Egypt”. As Raoul writes, the working class in Egypt has to wage a struggle on three levels: maintaining the freedom of speech and action conquered in the streets, snatching some improvements in their living and working conditions, and not letting themselves being hoodwinked and marshalled by ‘democratic’, ‘patriottic’, religious, syndicalist forces undertaking the task of massaging society back to normality. That is our fight too.
Sander
