Lessons from the Egyptian Revolution John Molyneux Those who make a revolution 15 million protesters exceeds the halfway, dig their own graves! - total number of people who par- St.Just ticipated in all the protests that took place in all the countries The Egyptian Revolution of January 25 of Eastern Europe at the time to February 11 2011 has been the greatest of the fall of the Berlin Wall in revolutionary struggle of the 21st century to 1989. date. It is true that young people led the charge on January 25, and that most of the 400 martyrs who were killed during the up- rising were under the age of 30. But young people were not alone in the streets. From day one, the Egyptian uprising was a popular revolution. From day one, mil- lions of workers, poor peasants, poor housewives and all sectors of society took part in the mobi- lizations across the country.2 Second, it was immense in terms of its This is true first in terms of the level immediate and concrete achievement. In of mass mobilisation involved. For Trotsky, just eighteen days of mass revolutionary ‘the direct interference of the masses in his- struggle it secured the downfall of a hugely toric events’ was ‘the most indubitable fea- 1 powerful dictator, previously seen as the ture of a revolution’ and as Mostafa Ali unassailable strongman of the region.. As wrote at the time, ‘The sheer numbers of I wrote at the time, the fall of Mubarak those who participated in the uprising as well as their percentage compared to the to- was nothing short of miraculous. tal population is unprecedented and aston- Hosni Mubarak had ruled Egypt ishing.’ for thirty years, during which time he had been the world’s sec- It is estimated that between ond biggest receiver of US aid January 25, when the demon- (after Israel, of course) and had strations started, and February built the most formidable appa- 11, when the dictator Hosni ratus of power and repression. Mubarak was toppled, at least No one seems to be quite sure of 15 million people out of a the size of the Egyptian State Se- population of 80 million–that curity, but, as everyone who has is more than 20 percent of visited the town knows, Cairo the population–took part in the on an ordinary day seemed to mass mobilizations. have cops on every street cor- A friend of mine in Cairo re- ner. Cairo, when anything un- minded me - and he was prob- toward was afoot - an opposi- ably bragging a little bit - that tional conference or a protest of 1Leon Trotsky, Preface to The History of the Russian Revolution. 2Mostafa Ali, ‘The Spring of the Egyptian Revolution’ http://socialistworker.org/2011/03/30/ spring-of-the-revolution 18 some kind - resembled a city un- could hardly be more stark. der military occupation. More- And precisely this stark and bitter con- over what every Caireen and, trast obliges Marxists to reflect on the ex- probably, every Egyptian knew perience, draw up a balance sheet, and see was that these cops, these num- what lessons can be learnt. berless State Security men, were systematic abusers and tortur- ers.[See Aida Seif El Dawla ‘Tor- What not to learn ture: a state policy’ in Rabab El- After every serious defeat there are always Mahdi & Philip Marfleet, Egypt: those who fall into despair. The rise of the The Moment of Change, London revolution radicalizes people like wildfire be- 2009 ] And yet this formidable cause it raises their confidence in their own apparatus of power and oppres- power and widens their horizons. The vic- sion was smashed, beaten in tory of counter revolution, inevitably, has open combat by an unarmed the reverse effect driving people back into people fighting, more or less with the isolation and alienation of their individ- their bare hands.3 ual private lives. To many, especially those Third, it was outstanding in terms of newly radicalized, it seems that their rev- its inspirational effect internationally. Of olutionary hopes were just a passing illu- course, the Egyptian Revolution was itself sion. They fall back into the received wis- inspired by the Tunisian Revolution which dom of what Gramsci called ‘common sense’, secured the overthrow of Zinedine Ben Ali, i.e. that mixture of nostrums, prejudices, just 11 days earlier, but it was events in partial truths, superstitions and impressions Egypt that really set light to the Arab handed down to them through a multiplicity Spring. Egypt lacks oil but in other respects of channels from the ruling class, the most is the most important Arab country. With important and most deadly of which is ‘that the largest population, the biggest cities nothing will ever change’ or, more precisely (Cairo and Alexandria) and largest working ‘You, the masses, can’t change anything’. class Egypt was, and remains, the key to Even the relatively small minority who change in the whole Middle East region, in- engage in theoretical debate are prone to cluding change in Palestine. As Tony Cliff this and in periods of reaction or counter- pointed out long ago ‘The road to Jerusalem revolution all sorts of erstwhile revolutionar- runs through Cairo’. ies search for ‘new’ ideas to justify their own Yet the fact is, and this needs to squarely collapse. ‘The bourgeoisie has changed/ the faced, the Egyptian Revolution has been de- working class has changed - they are now feated. - from Alexandria to Aswan the old too strong/ we are now too weak.’ ‘There regime is back in power. On 25 January is something wrong with the national char- 2011 hundreds of thousands came on to the acter of the Russians/ the Germans/ the streets and defeated the police. On 24 Jan- British/ the Arabs/ the Irish or whoever’. uary 2015, the eve of the anniversary, Social- ‘Revolutions always fail’.4 ist Popular Alliance Party activist Shaimaa In the face of the inevitability of such re- al-Sabbagh was taking part in a tiny demon- sponses both in Egypt and internationally it stration of about 25 people to commemorate is necessary, first, to insist on some historical the martyrs of 2011 when was she was shot perspective. and killed. The next day - the actual an- The fact that, 167 years after Marx niversary - saw about 20 people killed, most and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, of them in Matariya, one of the few places capitalism rules the world means that the there is still regular resistance. The contrast history of the revolutionary socialist move- 3John Molyneux, ‘Reflections on the Egyptian Revolution’, http://johnmolyneux.blogspot.ie/2011/ 05/reflections-on-egyptian-revolution.html 4 For a response to this particular argument see John Molyneux, ‘Do revolutions always fail?’ http: //socialistreview.org.uk/390/do-revolutions-always-fail 19 ment is first and foremost a history of de- the principle catastrophes of those years to feats - of defeats punctuated by victories as see this: the defeat of the Hungarian Rev- Tony Cliff used to say of the class struggle in olution, the failure of the German Revolu- the eighties. But there are defeats and de- tion, the defeat of the Italian Red Years and feats. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in the triumph of Mussolini, the crushing of the Europe, to which the Arab Spring was some- Chinese Revolution (1925-27), the betrayal times compared, formed the foundation for of the British General Strike and crucially, a period of major capitalist expansion which as a consequence of these, the isolation of ruled out revolution in the near future as the Russian Revolution and the victory of Marx was obliged (by 1850) to recognize. the Stalinist counterrevolution which in turn fed into victory of Hitler in 1933 and Franco Given this general prosperity, in Spain. wherein the productive forces of The cumulative effect of these defeats bourgeois society are developing was to wipe out (literally) many of the ad- as luxuriantly as it is possible for vanced layers of the international workers’ them to do within bourgeois re- movement and to drive authentic Marxism lationships, a real revolution is represented above all by Trotsky, to the ab- out of the question. Such a rev- solute margins of the working class and so- olution is possible only in peri- ciety, thus postponing for decades the possi- ods when both of these factors - bility of building genuine mass revolutionary the modern forces of production parties. The defeat in Egypt, grievous as it and the bourgeois forms of pro- is, does not have this definitive character, duction - come into opposition either nationally or internationally. with each other... A new revo- A more accurate parallel in my view is lution is only a consequence of a with the victory of the counter revolution new crisis. The one, however, is over the Russian Revolution of 1905 through as sure to come as the other.5 the Stolypin Coup of June 1907. Obviously the comparison is not, and cannot be, exact Consequently the International Commu- but it does at least give us an appropriate nist League, for which Marx had written the sense of historical scale. Manifesto, was dissolved and he withdrew The Stolypin Coup restored the Tsarist from virtually all direct political activity to autocracy to full power after the concessions concentrate on his economic researches until that had been wrung from it in 1905 and the revival of the movement and the founda- inaugurated a period of dreadful reaction. tion of the First International in 1864. But The number of workers taking strike action this is not the current situation.