After 18 days of ongoing people’s resistance in Tahir square demanding that Hosni Mubarak step down, the people of Egypt have finally won this critical round of the battle between the corrupt and tyrannical Arab rulers in Egypt and their allies from the U.S., Britain, EU and other parasitic entities who funded and backed Mubarak’s neocolonial regime. Mubarak resigned on February 11, 2011.
A few days earlier, Mubarak’s son who had been groomed to succeed him also resigned from his position of leadership in the National Democratic Party (NDP).
This is a big victory for oppressed peoples all over the world who are certainly encouraged by the ability of a mobilized population to bring down the dictatorship of Mubarak, Suleiman and other elements of the NDP in Egypt.
Reuters news agency reported that, “the United States has given Egypt an average of $2 billion annually since 1979, much of it military aid, according to the Congressional Research Service. The combined total makes Egypt the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/29/us-egypt-usa-aid-idUSTRE70S0IN20110129)
This mass mobilization that started in Tunisia over a month ago is part of the deepening crisis of neocolonialism.
In contrast to struggles in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Haiti or in imperialist centers like Montreal, London, Paris or Washington, DC, the resistance in the Middle East has been characterized by spontaneous mass mobilization, free from the control of petty bourgeois electoral candidates.
Wherever bourgeois capitalist elections occur, it occurs under the control of the bourgeoisie itself. So the lack of credible, fair and free elections has pushed the people into massive interventions, demanding change from the brutal dictators of Mubarak and Ben Aki in Tunisia! In Ivory Coast there is a crisis, but the crisis happens under the control of the two sectors of the petty bourgeoisie, who are determined to maintain their rule.
In Egypt and Tunisia the traditional petty bourgeoisie were surprised that they were not prepared for such mass national mobilizations. They played catch up throughout.
Would-be revolutionaries and other types of radicals are also playing catch-up.
US imperialism and Israel are in a state of panic. A people’s movement has brought down their main ally in the region and the prospects for revolution in Egypt have made them nervous!
The masses hate the Israeli settlers. They hate what they do to the people of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. And the Egyptian people hate the regime that brutalized them for over 30 years with U.S. military aid of $2 billion each year — second only to what Israel gets from the US. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/04/AR2011020404989.html)
The western journalists and populations pretend to have just discovered that Egypt was under tyrannical rule. They’ve had the audacity to feign ignorance about the terror in Egypt despite the facts. But the ignorance of Europeans and Euro-Americans is not innocent. Nor is the complicity of the media in covering the reality in Egypt or in African communities in these imperialist centers. Coverage that exposes the colonial conditions in the black population is never shown on TV. They support colonial immigration laws in their imperialist oppressor nations to keep us and other colonized people out. Their ignorance is a conscious political position.
The African Socialist International unites with the genuine democratic aspirations of the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and any other North African population fighting for dignity, freedom and democratic rule.
In Egypt and Tunisia people are demanding constitutional reform, release of political prisoners, basic freedom of association and assembly, freedom of thought and expression, lifting of the state of emergency and a civilian government.
We oppose any intervention by the U.S. and other imperialist powers.
The U.S., France, Germany and Britain cannot pretend to be the friends of the impoverished masses of Egypt and Tunisia. The evidence of their assault and plunder of Egypt can be seen in their national museums where glorious treasures of the African civilization are locked up.
It was France and Britain who assaulted Egypt when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. And it is well known that without U.S. financial, diplomatic and military support, the State of Israel would not exist today.
It is nauseating to hear Obama and other imperialist leaders repeatedly say they unite with the demands of the people of Egypt.
Smash all myths that do not serve the people’s revolution! This cannot happen in the rest of Africa?
The situation in Egypt is a response to colonial conditions experienced by the people.
These conditions occur in a country whose economy is controlled by U.S. corporations, that is dependent on U.S. military aid and that made a shameful compromise with the Israeli settler state at the expense of the Palestinian people.
The vast majority of people in Egypt are impoverished, living on less $2 a day.
The bourgeois media was not even courageous enough to show you the slums of Egypt.
The impact of the crisis of imperialism has meant that food prices and other basic necessities have skyrocketed.
The ongoing assault of Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and now Pakistan and Somalia has ideologically mobilized the masses in the Muslim world to respond to the aggressive intensions of U.S. imperialism.
In addition, the Mubarak regime, like Ben Ali’s regime before him, was brutal, murdering anyone who dared to express any ideas or acts for social justice.
The people today are simply taking on the old unfinished struggles of the 1950s and 1960s against colonial conditions.
The reality is that the rest of Africa’s colonial conditions are the same if not worse. The necessity to engage in struggle to overthrow these conditions is as dire in Sub-Saharan Africa as it is in North Africa.
The missing factor in Africa is the degree of political education that would allow people to recognize imperialism as the sources of all our problems. In the past 20 years or more there has not been a constant ideological mass mobilization against imperialism throughout the African world.
There is African resistance everywhere — in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Europe (particularly in France) and in the United States. But this resistance has not achieved a strategic character ideologically and organizationally to the point of being able to inspire all African and other oppressed peoples.
But the resistance is growing.
We do not belong to the camp of those who say never. We say that everything is possible.
This is despite the fact that we have witnessed a more subservient, ideological retreat caused by the dominance of selfish and petty bourgeoisie forces over what is characterized as the democratic mass movement or even democratic process.
Yes revolution can happen in Africa, but political education and struggles of the masses must intensify.
The United States is not a friend but an oppressor nation built on stolen Indigenous land and African labor
We want to remind the masses of Egypt that the U.S. ruling class is not their friend. The U.S. government does not unite with the aspirations of Egyptian workers and poor peasants. And they do not unite with any independent expression of oppressed peoples and nations.
The U.S. is itself a prison of nations that suppresses the right to self-determinations of over 100 million Africans, Mexicans and the native population of the United States.
The U.S. is a “democracy” of the oppressors, and it is the leading oppressor nation in the world!
The masses of people in Egypt cannot fight to be a U.S. or European style democracy. That is what Israel is, an oppressor nation democracy, which requires for its existence oppressed nations and peoples.
That is why a free Palestine cannot exist side by side with the Israeli occupation and settler State.
The United States is rich because its primitive accumulation of capital is based on the stolen land and wealth of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the unpaid and stolen labor of African people.
Obama is not representative of Africans in the U.S.
Barack Obama was not elected on a program that was discussed or agreed upon by the genuine representatives of African people. He was elected on a Democratic Party program, which is an imperialist program.
Obama serves imperialism well in this time of crisis, which has expanded the theft of African resources and politically engineered massive imprisonment of African and Mexican peoples within the United States.
Obama is Bush and Clinton in a black face and with a Muslim and African name. He is worse than Bush and Clinton.
Obama is not a friend of Africa or oppressed nations in the world
Obama used his first speech on African soil as U.S. president to attack Africa by saying things that Bush could not say.
He appointed Clinton, the man who overthrew Aristide from power in Haiti, as the colonial governor in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
He sent over 22,000 troops to Haiti as colonial occupiers, when masses of our people were demanding health care and aid relief to cope with the destructive impact of the earthquake that destroyed a quarter of a million Africans lives!
The U.S. and France have worked to stop Aristide from being able to deliver an independent program to address the colonial conditions of the peoples in Haiti.
The coup in Honduras against a democratically elected government happened with the collaboration of the U.S. government led by Barack Obama.
He is the man who has intensified the war against the people of Afghanistan, before expanding it to Pakistan and Somalia.
He is the man who is presiding over AFRICOM, a military high command for U.S. imperialist military domination of Africa, including Egypt and the rest of the North African region.
The aggression against the people of Colombia receives $1 billion of US military aid every year. And we don’t need to remind you of the ongoing blockade of Cuba by the US and the threats to Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution.
Eastern European style of revolution is backward revolution
Many imperialist pundits said that this was a type of Eastern European revolution, which ended the existence of the former eastern socialist bloc.
This rabid nonsense could not be further from the truth.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the Berlin wall symbolized the retreat by the rulers of the Eastern bloc from commitment to a world free from oppressor nations and oppressed nations.
It was their shameless desire to openly join the parasitic capitalism of the oppressor nations.
Now they are able to do in the open what they had been doing covertly before — share in the colonial booty offered to them by the capitalist world market. This market requires a parasitic relationship between oppressor nations and oppressed nations.
The precondition of any genuine democratic reality for the rest of us is the overturning of this parasitic relationship.
Eastern Europe officially joined this parasitic relationship. The masses of Egypt must openly break that relationship.
The military is not a neutral force and there is no such thing as peaceful revolution
The army is the strategic institution that controls power in Egypt and it is under the control of the Arab petty bourgeoisie presently in power. That is why Hosni Mubarak has handed power over to the military generals of whom he was part.
General Suleiman, who was a chief of security, is responsible for torturing opposition leaders and members. The 75-year-old field marshal Muhammad Tantawi, in charge of the country now, is a close associate of Mubarak. It is Mubarak’s government without Mubarak.
This is what Obama meant by orderly transition. Keeping power in the hands of the petty bourgeoisie who will uphold the status quo.
The current army leadership has suspended the constitution and dissolved a defunct parliament. Discussions are taking place with leaders of this uncompleted revolution.
We heard the comments on radio and TV throughout these uprisings that it was a peaceful event, and the demonstrators trusted the army. They even exaggerated the difference between the army and the police. They have already forgotten that the police of Cairo were an offensive force that always targeted the people with teargas. They have forgotten that police beat up demonstrators and kill many of them.
Mubarak’s thugs charged the masses in order to force them to flee and abandon Tahir Square. Throughout Egypt people were targeted and killed.
The truth is that European and U.S. rulers do not want the people to fight back by killing their oppressors and their agents.
It is also true that sectors of the Army have been won to the side of the people, which makes the generals more nervous.
But every force in the service of the revolution must be organized under the leadership of revolutionary forces.
We must draw a clear line of distinction to identify all forces and their interests respectively so that we can isolate all opportunist forces from genuine revolutionary forces.
That is why people like Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate against Mubarak who was subsequently jailed, and Mohamed El Baradei, the nuclear inspector who helped the US to disarm Iraq, are representative of the petty bourgeoisie who cannot lead the revolution in Egypt.
Forces like the Muslim Brotherhood resisted the Mubarak regime, but they remain one of the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, although a radical one.
The aim of any genuine people’s national democratic revolution is to seize state power on behalf of the people and with the organized participation of the masses of workers and poor peasants in alliance with patriotic forces and democratic forces in society.
Now the petty bourgeoisie in Egypt is aware that the determination of poor people and patriotic forces to demand real change will reorganize, with or without the NDP.
Most importantly, the army is still loyal to the petty bourgeoisie. Egyptian revolutionaries have to come to terms with that reality. The people under the leadership of the workers must seize state power. They can’t get around that.
The revolutionaries must criticize U.S. imperialist policies in the Middle East and in Africa as a whole. They must articulate their demand with respect to the Palestine question, the US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Iraq.
The Egyptian revolutionaries must articulate their position to all oppressed peoples of the world in particular to the primary victims of U.S. domestic imperialism, the black population of the U.S., who are also the primary allies of the people of Egypt; not Obama within the United States.
The creation of a proletarian party with a clear aim of uniting Africa, under the leadership of African workers and peasants is a necessity.
Egypt must look towards Africa for a long term and structural solution by accepting the mission of the African working class, which is the creation of the African Socialist International, the overturning of the verdict of imperialism and the unification of Africa.
Long live the struggles of the people of Egypt!
One Africa! One Nation!
