Followers

Monday, July 8, 2013

Egyptian Army Coup Topples Islamist President Mursi By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

The ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi, following four days of nationwide mass protests, has placed power in the hands of a military junta which is committed to the defense of the economic interests of the country’s ruling class and to the geo-political aims of American imperialism.
The removal of the hated Mursi regime has evoked jubilation. However sincere and deeply felt this sentiment may be, the fact is that Mursi’s overthrow has placed the army, not the masses, in power. None of the essential demands that motivated the mass protests—for decent jobs, livable wages, adequate social services, and democratic rights—will be met by the military regime.
The military has intervened for one overriding purpose: to pre-empt and suppress the growing political movement of the Egyptian working class. The coalition government that it unveiled last night is in no way a genuine expression of the democratic strivings of the working class. Rather, the new ruling structure is a sinister coalition of reactionary forces, which includes long-time henchmen of Hosni Mubarak, various Islamic politicians, and several liberal politicians with close connections to the US-based International Monetary Fund. None of the individuals and organizations has either a mass social base or advances a popular social program.
After seizing control of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) television stations and reportedly arresting Mursi, the head of the military junta, General Abdul Fatah Khalil Al-Sisi, unveiled a political “road map” that includes the immediate suspension of the constitution and the formation of a so-called “national technocratic” government.
The term “technocratic” is being bandied about to evoke the image of politically neutral experts who stand above partisan class interests. In reality, the so-called “technocrats” are steeped in the reactionary nostrums of the international banks.
The anti-working class character of the government emerges clearly from examining the list of reactionaries who flanked al-Sisi as he announced his “road map” yesterday evening. These included several generals, Coptic pope Tawadros II, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, and opposition politicians including National Salvation Front (NSF) leader and former UN official Mohamed ElBaradei, Younis Makhioun of the far-right Salafist Al Nour Party, and Mahmoud Badr of the opposition Tamarod (“Rebel”) coalition.
Each one of these figures was selected to create the impression of broad support for the new regime across key political and religious divides in Egypt.
The army chose the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour, as president. Mohamed ElBaradei has been named prime minister. There are vague promises of early elections.
Mansour had long ties to the old Mubarak regime. ElBaradei, who worked for years as an official of the United Nations, has close ties to the economic and foreign policy establishment of the United States. ElBaradei supports austerity measures worked out in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which favors cuts to subsidies for basic goods such as grain and fuel.
In the political maneuvers that set the stage for the military coup, a key role has been played by the Tamarod coalition. This is a thoroughly pro-capitalist political movement. Founded at the end of April as a campaign to collect signatures against Mursi, it quickly became a rallying point for a range of opposition parties—liberal, Islamist and pseudo-left alike—and remnants of the former Mubarak regime who oppose the MB. Its supporters include El Baradei’s NSF, the Islamist Strong Egypt Party of former MB member Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the April 6 Youth Movement, and the pseudo-left Revolutionary Socialists (RS). The movement also accepted an endorsement from General Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister under Mubarak.
Although the United States had been backing Mursi, the Obama administration entered into talks with the Egyptian military once it became clear that the regime could not be saved. The Egyptian army launched the coup after intensive discussions with General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a statement yesterday evening, US President Barack Obama backed the removal of Mursi, while taking care to avoid the word “coup.” Using vague language that imposed no restraints on the military, Obama sanctimoniously requested that the army “move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible, through an inclusive and transparent process.”
Once again, the Revolutionary Socialists—the most prominent of the pseudo-left groups in Egypt—has adapted its rhetoric to the political maneuvers of the bourgeoisie. In February 2011, the RS backed the military junta that came to power after Mubarak’s ouster. In 2012, as the military faced mounting popular opposition, they hailed Mursi’s election as a victory for the revolution. Now that the working class has moved into struggle against Mursi and the MB, they have aligned themselves with a coup to bring back the army and elements of the old Mubarak regime into power.

The only consistent element of the RS’s reactionary politics has been their opposition to the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class. They speak for sections of the upper middle class, closely connected to the Egyptian bourgeois establishment and its imperialist backers.

2 comments:

Snuze said...

The winners of this revolution are those with political and economic interest in Egypt's instability. The people are all the losers.

But then, when you have a president who wants to tweak the constitution to keep him in power, it just kinda makes the desire to topple him just so much more. =P

IT.Sheiss said...

Anas, whilst this seemi8ngly cogent analysis of the situation in Egypt in class and imperialist terms seems compelling, and whilst I do not endorse nor support the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt, I would be wary about the sectarian agenda behind this article.

The original article comes from the World Socialist Web Site, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which is one of the several international Trotskyist factions.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/04/egyp-j04.html

You can read more about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_of_the_Fourth_International

The Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt belong to a rival Trotskyist faction, the International Socialist Organization.

www.internationalsocialist.org

Here is some background about the rather convoluted world of Trotskyist factionalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cliff

Another Trotskyist faction is the Spartacist League US which spawned several other Spartacist Leagues in many of the major western countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacist_League_%28US%29

The Revolutionary Socialists have adopted a tactic to join a united front with the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve an objective such as the ouster of Mubarak and to bring what they thought was more democracy and this tactic could have turned out wrong and their Trotskyist rivals pounce on them over it.

Now they seem to have joined a united front with other left parties and organisations in Egypt.

The WSWS does not seem to have much of a presence in Egypt, being based mostly in the liberal democratic, imperialist countries of the west wher they operate openly without fear of persecution, well for the time being at least.

This last two paragraphs of the WSWS article were left out of your post.

"The World Socialist Web Site warns the working class against the illusions in the military. The army will seek to enforce the policies demanded by finance capital. In the final analysis, the conflict between the military on the one hand and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood on the other is a fight between conflicted factions of the ruling class. The main target of the repression that the military is preparing will be the working class. The stage has been set for the denunciation of further protest actions by the working class as harmful to the “national interest” and illegitimate."

"There are no progressive solutions to the revolutionary crisis that has been shaking Egypt in the last two years, outside the coming to power of the working class, mobilizing the great mass of urban and rural poor on the basis of a socialist and anti-imperialist program."

Whilst I wouldn't say the above is wrong in principle, it seems rather rich for them to preach to the workers of Egypt what they should do from their comfort zones in the west.

The Egyptians have a long history of practical experience of battles against colonialism and so on, unlike these condescending "saviours" in the west.

No so-called "Stalinist" party will patronise people in the third world in such manner. They would instead offer their messages of support and solidarity to parties, organisations or grouping in the conflict which they have carefully analysed to be fit to receive their political support.

Whilst these western Trotskyists talk so much about internationalism, international proletarian unity, etc., they betray their own westerns ense of superiority over people of the third world who have fought most of the socialist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist battles in history, with or without success.