SOCIALISTWORKER.org
Special
supplement
February
2011
Revolt against the tyrants
The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have fired the imagination of people around the world
ANY OF the great struggles of the past
can be brought to mind by their year
alone: 1917 and the Russian Revolution. 1968 and the French May. 1989 and the
revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe. 1979 and the fall of the Shah of Iran.
2011 is only a month old, but it already
seems likely that it will be remembered as the
year of the great revolt across the Arab world.
One dictator has been toppled already—
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia after 23
years of iron-fisted rule. Another may be gone
by the time you read this—Hosni Mubarak’s
reign over Egypt hung by a thread at the end of
January. In Jordan, Algeria, Yemen and elsewhere, other tyrants are facing their most serious challenge in decades.
No one can know the outcome of the struggles underway now. In Egypt, the ruling elite
will try to find a new face to put in charge of a
“peaceful transition,” as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton has pointedly called for—but
will the masses accept a new face on the old order? Mubarak might still try to order a bloodbath—but would the military and the regime’s
security apparatus follow those orders? Millions of Egyptians will rally around moderate
opposition figures like Mohamed ElBaradei—
but will the emerging working-class movement
push to the fore a more radical alternative?
No one knows the answers to these questions
now, but we do know this: The revolt against the
tyrants has put the word “revolution” on the lips
of people everywhere and reshaped the politics
of the Middle East and the world.
The images from the streets of Cairo, Tunis
and elsewhere are electrifying—even the U.S.
cable news networks, so used to peddling
celebrity gossip and Washington’s political
trivia, seemed to grasp the importance of the
struggle before their eyes.
The scenes bring to mind Leon Trotsky’s famous words about the revolution he was a part of
making in Russia: “The most indubitable feature
of a revolution is the direct interference of the
masses in historic events. In ordinary times, the
state—be it monarchical or democratic—elevates
itself above the nation, and history is made by
specialists in that line of business—kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists.
But at those crucial moments when the old order
becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they
break over the barriers excluding them from the
political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference
the initial groundwork for a new regime.”
The early stages of such a revolution are unfolding today, and they have much to teach
people around the world who have been radicalized by the failures of capitalism and awakened to the hope that the struggle from below—whether it comes on the streets of Tunis
and Cairo, or Paris and London, or more modestly in cities in the U.S.—has the potential to
change the world for the better.
M
CCORDING TO just about every mainstream media analysis, the revolts in
Egypt and Tunisia “came out of nowhere.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The struggles in these countries and elsewhere in the Arab world have been brewing for
years, as Egyptian journalist and activist Hossam
el-Hamalawy told an interviewer for Al Jazeera.
“[R]evolt has been in the air over the past few
years,” he said. “Revolutions don’t happen out of
the blue.”
In Tunisia, the wave of mobilizations that
drove out Ben Ali are traced back to a single
horrifying act. After police assaulted him and
confiscated his stand, Mohamed Bouazizi, a
university-educated resident of Sidi Bouzid who
survived as a street vendor, set himself on fire.
But this became the symbol for millions of people who felt their lives were pushed beyond endurance by a system of vast economic inequality and vicious repression.
This backdrop of grinding poverty made
worse by the world economic crisis is as important to understanding events as the corruption of the regimes in Tunis and Cairo. In particular, rising prices for food—which have shot
up several times in recent years not because of
worldwide shortages, but because of financial
speculation in rich countries—were tinder for
revolt in Egypt in 2008 and again today.
Western political leaders now claim to be
glad that Ben Ali was pushed out—and they
sternly warn that reforms are necessary in
Egypt. But the U.S. and other Western powers
backed the dictators to the hilt before—and
celebrated these countries, despite their vast
gap between a wealthy elite and the impoverished majority, as economic “success stories”
and models of stability.
But when the rebellions came in Tunisia and
A
“The most
indubitable
feature of a
revolution is
the direct
interference
of the masses
in historic
events.”
䡲 LEON TROTSKY
Egypt, they spread with incredible speed. So did
the political questions they raised—anger over
unemployment and high food prices quickly expanded into discontent over political freedoms
long denied. In Tunisia, the chant of the demonstrators was “Bread, water and no Ben Ali.”
Nadia Marzouki of the Middle East Research and Information Project described
Tunisia’s uprising as “an organic convergence
of various currents of discontent,” ranging
from the unemployed and poor residents of the
country’s south to students, lawyers and professionals in the cities—with “each group harboring specific grievances and using its own
symbolic vocabulary, but all united in overall
purpose,” Marzouki concluded.
Once Ben Ali was toppled, the political differences between these social forces—rooted
above in social class—emerged in the form of
conflicts over what should come next. But the
virtually unanimous hatred of Ben Ali gave the
rebellion its seemingly universal character.
Likewise in Egypt, where Tunisia’s toppling
of Ben Ali was the final inspiration for an upheaval that was years in the making, the determination to see Mubarak fall has been the heart
of the mass protests. This turned the streets of
Cairo and other cities into what the Russian
revolutionary Lenin called the “festival of the
oppressed”—as the images of struggle sent
around the world by Internet make clear.
A wave of revolt that began with the selfimmolation of a street vendor in a rural
Tunisian town was crashing against a police
state backed to the hilt by the U.S. government—one that had endured decades of previous challenges and seemed, just weeks before,
to be firmly in control over a docile population.
In Tunisia, the Ben Ali regime recognized
the threat represented by the mobilization and
offered concessions, but too late. In Egypt, too,
Mubarak dismissed the government and tried
to install new figures not tainted by their association with his regime. But far from satisfying
demonstrators, this only emboldened them to
continue their protests. This is another echo of
the great struggles of the past—the old order’s
offer of reform can inspire confidence among
the masses of people to fight for revolution.
After Ben Ali fled for Saudi Arabia, the
country’s elite tried to impose a “unity governContinued on back 䊳
SOCIALISTWORKER February 2011
Revolt against
the tyrants
Continued from front
ment” that incorporated figures from the
opposition, but left power in the hands
of officials from the dictator’s old ruling
party. This opened up a new stage in the
struggle, with the rural poor organizing
a caravan to the capital of Tunis to demand that the government exclude Ben
Ali’s cronies.
Salem Ben Yahia, a filmmaker and
former political prisoner in Tunisia, was
surely speaking for the demonstrators on
the streets of Cairo as well when he told
the Guardian: “We don’t want our revolution hijacked. We forced a dictator out
the door, and now he’s come back in the
window…Police have already shot at us
and beaten us to stop us protesting, but
we come back again like a tide.”
䊳
S IN every previous social upheaval
that has shaken the old order, a critical question asserted itself in
Tunisia and Egypt: How to overcome the
armed force of the state that the rulers use
to maintain their grip on power?
Ben Ali’s regime depended on a
huge security apparatus—some 150,000
police out of a population of 10.6 million—and the dictator ordered these
forces to put down the first protests by
whatever means. But rather than be intimidated, demonstrators only became
more determined. They battled police
and confronted the military when it was
deployed.
News footage of the protests in Tunis
and elsewhere showed a scene common
to every revolution—of protesters trying
to engage with rank-and-file soldiers
and convince them not to fire on them.
When the revolt spread to Egypt, the
same scenes were repeated. Mubarak’s
police attacked demonstrators with their
usual savagery, but they were pushed
back—and eventually forced to retreat
from the streets for days at a time.
Egypt’s military has been armed to
the teeth by the U.S., but here were the
tanks manufactured in the U.S. and sent
to Washington’s most important Arab
ally to bolster the imperialist order in the
Middle East—now surrounded by a sea
A
of protesters who reached out to poorly
paid Egyptian soldiers to call on them to
join the revolutionary movement.
The top brass of the Egyptian military
recognized the threat. Their forces remained deployed through the last week
of January, but seemingly with orders not
to attack. Meanwhile, the top military officials were part of the scramble to find a
façade for the “peaceful transition.”
Of course, the Egyptian military is no
ally of the struggle for democracy, and
its forces may still be called upon to
crack down. But no matter what follows,
the scenes in Cairo and elsewhere at the
end of January echo similar ones in Russia in 1917 and every other revolution—
where the masses have confronted the
rank and file of the army and convinced
them to not turn their guns on the people.
As for the police, when they were defeated in the first street battles in Tunisia
and Egypt, the regime gave them new
orders—to act as terrorists, carrying out
violence in the hopes of causing enough
chaos to derail the revolution. In Tunis
following Ben Ali’s flight, witnesses described squads of security officers driv-
ing around the city, wreaking mayhem.
In Egypt, reports suggested that at a
large part of the looting and violence
breathlessly reported by the media was
instigated by security forces.
But here again, the movement from
below responded. In Tunisia, according
to blogger Dyab Abou Jahjah, “people
have organized themselves in committees that have spread all across the country in every neighborhood and in every
city, and started patrolling the streets
and protecting the people.”
EVOLUTIONS CAN start with
the toppling of a hated dictator, but
they don’t end there. The fall of a
U.S.-backed stooge like Ben Ali and the
democratic changes won in the aftermath should be celebrated, but with the
understanding that new questions will
come to the fore. Those questions will
reveal differences among the opponents
of the old order—over how far the revolution should go and what comes next.
In Tunisia, the new government is
promising to prosecute the kleptocracy
around Ben Ali that looted the country,
R
SOCIALISTWORKER.org
—for news of the struggle in North Africa and the Middle East
Make SocialistWorker.org your first stop for reporting
on the revolts unfolding in Egypt, Tunisia and across
North Africa and the Middle East. Our daily online
coverage features eyewitness reports from Cairo,
Egypt, by Ahmed Shawki, as well as analysis and history from Egyptian-American activist Mostafa
Omar and SocialistWorker.org’s Lee Sustar.
Recent coverage includes an interview with Viva
Palestina’s Kevin Ovenden on The revolt shaking the
Arab world and historical analysis from Eric Ruder in
From Nasser to Mubarak.
Also—look to SocialistWorker.org for reports
on protests and other actions in solidarity with the
people of Egypt.
but it has no answers for the desperation
of people like Mohamed Bouazizi,
forced to scrape by in a country with
great natural wealth. A government
without Mubarak in Egypt may promise
free elections, but it won’t curb the
power of the rest of the elite, much less
respond to the demands of ordinary
Egyptians for a better life.
How these next challenges are answered by the mass movement that shook
the dictators will determine the future.
Demonstrations in the street can’t be
the only answer in confronting them—
the movement will need organization
that goes beyond this kind of mobilization. It will need to exercise economic
p ow e r — t h e p ow e r o f t h e wo r k in g
classes of Tunisia, Egypt and beyond to
paralyze the production of wealth that
their rulers depend on.
The working people of Tunisia and
Egypt have confronted hated dictators,
but they have an even greater power to
challenge the whole system of exploitation and oppression. The demonstrations that rocked the tyrants can be the
stepping-stones for the struggles of the
future—the first taste of action that can
give confidence that further change is
possible.
The outcome of the struggles taking
place now will determine the shape of
the future Tunisia, the future Egypt and
more besides. It will be important for
every fighter for social change, everywhere in the world, to engage in the discussions to come—with the goal of
building a movement to transform a society that can’t provide a decent living
standard for workers, whether they live
in Detroit or the Nile Delta.
One more lesson of past struggles
flows from this—the importance for socialists to be organized to make our
voices heard in the struggles to come.
The socialist vision of a new society
based on workers’ power—a world
where inequality and injustice are ended
forever—shows the alternative to the
crisis-ridden capitalist system, and how
that system can be transformed. But that
alternative needs to be made part of all
the struggles in society, whether in
Tunisia or Egypt or the U.S., if it is to
become a guide for the future.
That’s why it’s important for socialists everywhere to be organizing and
building our numbers—as part of waging
the struggles of today, as well as looking
ahead to the fight for a new world.
2011 will certainly be remembered
as the year of rebellion in the Arab
world. Right now, it’s a year that we can
look forward to with a renewed sense of
optimism, thanks to the struggles of the
people of Tunisia and Egypt and across
the Middle East.