The Egyptian Revolution - Part 2

The Egyptian Revolution, as I have set out in my posts Egypt What Is To Be Done?, is a Political Revolution. That is to say that its object is not to change the class nature of the Egyptian State, but is merely to change the nature of the Political Regime, the form of Government. It is the equivalent of the changes that have occurred in places such as Chile, or Argentina over recent years, where a Military Junta has given way to bourgeois democracy. It is clear, from these previous examples, that such a transformation is quite possible for Capitalist States to effect, and that in such cases the theory of Permanent Revolution, does not apply.

In fact, like the vast majority of countries that freed themselves from Colonial Rule, Egypt, at the point where the theory of Permanent Revolution might have applied, instead developed down a different path than that, which Trotsky had described in The Permanent Revolution, or that Lenin had discussed in Two Tactics Of Social Democracy In The Democratic Revolution, or indeed that discussed by the Second Congress of the Comintern in its Draft Theses On The National & Colonial Questions. There are very good reasons for this.

The latter thesis states,

“In conformity with its fundamental task of combating bourgeois democracy and exposing its falseness and hypocrisy, the Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions; second, on a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class; third, on an equally clear distinction between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations, in order to counter the bourgeois-democratic lies that play down this colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population by an insignificant minority of the richest and advanced capitalist countries, a feature characteristic of the era of finance capital and imperialism.”

Yet, many of those who claim to base themselves on these ideas do base themselves on “abstract and formal principles”, and do not base themselves on “the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions”. And, although they focus on the “distinction between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations”, they do so by ignoring the “clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class”.

As a result they remove any class content from the struggle, and end up forcing the working class into a position of merely acting as cannon-fodder for the bourgeoisie in all of its guises from the democratic, to the quasi or not so quasi fascist, just so long as those forces are deemed to be “anti-imperialist”. The proponents of such an approach are in reality not socialists, but nationalists.

One of the clearest examples of that is the fawning, and crippling support that many such people have given to various Islamist organisations and regimes. That support stands in marked contrast to the Comintern Thesis, which states:

“the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries; 

third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”

“fifth, the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;”

Exactly, what epithets Lenin, and the other members of the early Comintern would have flung at those such as the SWP, who created the cross-class, communalist “Respect”, or declared “We Are All Hezbollah”, we can only imagine. Less still would they have understood the position of the AWL, which today not only gives support to the reactionary bourgeois and Islamists forces in Libya, but also apologises for the role of Imperialism, and its alliance with those forces.

But, these policies of Popular Frontism were applied by the Stalinists in China in the 1920's, and in Spain in the 1930's with predictable results, indeed results that had been predicted by Trotsky.

So how does the actual development of Egypt from being a semi-Colonial Dependency of Britain to its current state fit into this?

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