25 June 2012. A World to Win News
Service. By Samuel Albert. Egypt has had its first
so-called "free" elections, but the nation and its people are not free. In fact,
from beginning to end, the purpose of the electoral process was never to allow
the people to express their will but to repair and reinforce the apparatus of
their oppression.
For months many activists argued which was worse, a
military regime or an Islamist regime. In the end, they got
both.
In toppling Hosni Mubarak a year and a half ago, masses
of Egyptian people and especially youth hit hard at the old political order, a
political set-up ruling the country on behalf of foreign capital and the
Egyptian capitalists and other reactionaries subservient to those economic and
political interests. The electoral process has been about restoring that old
order, providing it with new reactionary features – the equally empty but
symbolically powerful validation of god and the ballot box – to restore the
state's battered legitimacy.
In his victory speech, president-elect Mohammed Morsi
made very clear what this election has not changed by paying tribute to the
institutions that have made Egypt a prison. While lauding the "martyrs of the
revolution" whose sacrifice made it possible for him to become president, he
declared his loyalty to those who killed them.
That Morsi proved most effusive in his praise for the
police might have surprised many people. They are Egypt's most universally
despised men, gangsters given a franchise to rob the people in exchange for
protecting the bigger robbery carried out by the Mubarak family and other regime
favourites.
Yet Morsi intoned, "I salute the honourable policeman, my
brothers and sons, some of whom mistakenly think I do not regard them highly.
Those who commit any crimes are subject to law, but the honourable policemen who
are the vast majority deserve to be saluted and appreciated. They will have a
big role to play in the future to protect and serve the country." (Al Jazeera
English)
Among Morsi's "brothers and sons" were the men who
dragged the young Khaled Saeed out of an Alexandria Internet café, beat him in
the street and bashed his head against an iron door and concrete walls until he
died, and even afterwards. Khaled is said to have posted pictures showing police
involved in drug dealing. Photos of his disfigured corpse multiplied on the Net.
Youth and political organizations called for a demonstration on Police Day,
contrasting the Egyptian policemen who revolted against the British occupation
in 1952 and their ignominious role under Mubarak. That 25 January 2011 protest
led to the occupation of Tahrir Square and the eventual toppling of the
president.
Did Morsi mean to praise the high police officials who,
during the protests, released criminals from prison, sending them to loot and
provoke confusion and fear, and who are still encouraging criminality so that
the people will turn to them as the “lesser evil”? Did he mean to praise the
lowly traffic police, who since the fall of Mubarak, have sown chaos in the
streets and traffic roundabouts, following instructions to prove that the only
choice is the old order or disorder?
The fact that the new president had to promise that
policemen will be subject to the rule of law is telling about how arbitrariness
and corruption have thoroughly pervaded Egyptian society and discredited
authority on every level. But with this statement about the future, wasn't he
also saying that the police need not fear punishment for their far more serious
past crimes?
The Central Security Forces, volunteers from among army
conscripts, used chains, whips, batons and guns to attack protesters in Cairo
and other cities. These are the men who ambushed marchers in Suez, producing the
first clashes in the escalating fighting that eventually forced the police to
pull across the country. Did Morsi mean to praise the riot police in charge of
beating and killing demonstrators for decades?
The same courts that declared Mubarak responsible for the
killing of demonstrators, just before the elections, also ruled top police
officials innocent of those murders. Not an officer has been punished, aside
from two policemen sentenced to seven years in prison for killing Khaled Saeed.
Morsi also had high praise for Egypt's judiciary system.
This was less surprising, since the same judiciary that has protected the police
also provided the legal basis for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF)
to shape the electoral process. It was an electoral commission made up of
Mubarak-era judges that declared Morsi president.
Most importantly, he slyly revealed "a love in my heart
that only god knows" for the Egyptian armed forces and vowed "to preserve the
military institution in Egypt." This is the military that stood by and watched
the police and Mubarak's other thugs kill at least 800 people in the uprising
and then posed as saviours of "the revolution" when at the last minute Mubarak
had to be unplugged. This is the armed forces whose soldiers and military
police, in the name of “defending the revolution", took over the task of
attacking demonstrators who dared come back to Tahrir Square and began killing
people at an escalating pace. In October 2011 they turned a protest against
assaults on Coptic Christians into a massacre. A few months later, backed up by
tanks and under the cover of dark clouds of tear gas, they used lethal rubber
bullets, birdshot and sniper rifles to blind, cripple and kill hundreds of
demonstrators in and around Tahrir Square and the Interior Ministry. That was
the punishment for demanding an end to military rule.
Morsi even paid homage to Egypt's intelligence services
whose speciality was not the defence of their country (they worked with Israel
and the U.S.) but the torture and murder of their countrymen.
What Morsi's speech represented was not a perversion of
the electoral process but its real purpose all along: the re-legitimisation of
the state apparatus and the reconciliation of the people with their worst
enemies
First of all, the whole concept of "the will of the
majority" is misleading, because the people as a whole are never united by one
will, and their "wills" are dynamic. During the toppling of Mubarak and the
confrontations with SCAF since then, it has often been repeated that "Tahrir is
not Egypt" – that the crowds who protested and fought, as large and socially
diverse as they have been, are not "the majority". Yet at critical points, not
only when Tahrir was filled with families but also during the fierce battles in
late 2011 when students, unemployed young men and street children came to fight,
SCAF was not able to mobilize large demonstrations or other shows of support for
the military against the youth. On the contrary, some of their elders stood in
line amidst the smoke, tear gas and shooting to donate blood at emergency
facilities set up for protesters by medical volunteers. While many Egyptians may
not consider themselves "revolutionary" as the Tahrir youth do, when SCAF
attacked the youth, "public opinion" – especially those people who bother to
express one – turned against the authorities. This repression was seen as
illegitimate and sharpened SCAF's political crisis.
In the electoral process, SCAF hoped to appeal to the
"silent majority", what Egyptians call "the party of the couch", people who
passively follow events on television when their neighbours are in the streets.
Those activist youth who endorsed or accepted the electoral arena as the way to
determine Egypt's future failed to learn a vital lesson of their own
accomplishments: suddenly one day, a day when conditions were right but which
was unexpected and in fact unpredictable, the militant actions of a determined
minority – who previously lacked a broad, active following – were able to awaken
large numbers of people, divide their enemies and prevent those enemies from
being able to mobilise the support of the backward.
Further, the electoral process wasn't (and never is)
neutral. SCAF, the judiciary, the government-owned media and many other
reactionary actors all worked to shape it, disqualifying candidates and
discourses until the electorate was presented with a nightmare choice: to vote
for Ahmed Shafik, the Air Force commander who was Mubarak's last prime minister,
or the Muslim Brotherhood's Morsi.
According to official figures, about half the electorate
couldn't bring themselves to vote for either. (Some reporters and other people
who visited polling places estimated the participation at far less.) For many
people this was a conscious boycott: a popular slogan was "Down with the next
president of Egypt!" Yet some political and youth organizations supported the
military candidate against the Islamist or vice-versa.
One group that ended up implicitly endorsing Morsi (by issuing a
statement opposing Shafik's candidacy and not Morsi's) argued that "the
Islamists" should be supported against "the state". (See "Revolutionary
Socialists' statement on Egypt's
presidential elections", socialistworker.co.uk; or the
widely reposted article by Hossam
el-Hamalawy, "Sometimes with the Islamists, Never with the State"; and
his explanation of this long-standing International Socialist Tendency policy in
Middle East Research and Information Project no.
242.)
This confuses the state and the government. Shafik was
undoubtedly the armed forces' favourite among the candidates for presiding over
the government, but his defeat in no way represents a blow against the state.
Elections or no elections, like all countries in today's
world Egypt is a class dictatorship, in this case the rule of large-scale
capitalists and landowners whose interests are in accord with the subordination
of Egypt's economy to foreign-based capital and its political domination by the
U.S. and other imperialist countries. The Egyptian state represents those class
forces and their interests, and its instruments of repression – the armed
forces, police and courts that are the core of the state – exist to protect and
enforce those interests.
The people's movement forced the Egyptian state to dump
Mubarak. But although the word "revolution" is so popular that Morsi and even
Shafik claimed it as their brand identity, the basic economic, social and
political organization of Egyptian life went unchallenged in the election, not
only because no candidate or party posed that challenge, but more fundamentally
because elections cannot overthrow this reactionary class dictatorship.
A week passed between the presidential elections and the
announcement of the winner. The final tally of votes for the two candidates was
more or less the same as initially indicated, and the electoral commission
handily threw out the charges of vote tampering. The long pause was necessary
because of intense negotiations among the Muslim Brotherhood, SCAF, and most
importantly, the U.S government. (See The New York Times, 25 June 2012)
If Washington and London were able to spare a moment from
plotting to remove Syria's Bashar Assad and congratulate Morsi (although Obama
is said to have rung up both Morsi and Shafik), it's because they believe that
the result of the Egyptian elections are at least acceptable.
The above-quoted Revolutionary Socialist statement
supporting the election of the Muslim Brotherhood "against the state" also
presents a false equation between the religious sentiments among the people,
which will persist for a long time to come even among many revolutionary-minded
people, and the Muslim Brotherhood's political project. The two need to be
separated as much as possible, and political Islam should not be bowed to in the
name of freedom of religion.
To quote Lenin, "All oppressing classes stand in need of
two social functions to safeguard their rule: the function of the hangman and
the function of the priest. The hangman is required to quell the protests and
indignation of the oppressed; the priest is required to console the oppressed,
to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being
mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these
prospects will be 'achieved'), while preserving class rule, and thereby to
reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine
their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination."
(The Collapse of the Second International)
Morsi is a good illustration of Lenin's observation. He
promised over and over again to bring the common people a "life with dignity".
These words could mean different things, including the very deep and positive
aspirations that made people disgusted with the moral values of the Mubarak
years. But Morsi is silent about how this is to be achieved, aside from
promising to abolish political corruption (which is both an impediment to the
smooth functioning of capitalism and an inevitable consequence of private
ownership of the means of producing wealth) – and putting himself, "god's
candidate", into office. While his speech played down the issue of religious
rule, he and his party have proclaimed, from their founding more than 80 years
ago through at least the day before he was anointed president, that "Islam is
the solution".
The Egyptian military has sometimes been in sharp
conflict with Islamists, but it has promoted Islam uninterruptedly since 1970,
following the collapse of the nationalist project led by Gamal Nasser, whose
vision of a "third way" between capitalism and socialism led to the emergence of
a new capitalist class centred in the military and the state sector of the
economy, today apparently represented by SCAF. Egypt's capitulation to Israel
brought both an increased need to use religion rather than nationalism as a
source of legitimacy and conflict with Islamic forces: Anwar Sadat, whose 1971
constitution enshrined Islam as the "principle source of all legislation", was
himself assassinated by Islamists. When Mubarak assumed the presidency in 1981
he freed the Muslim Brotherhood political prisoners and entered into a complex
but mutually beneficial relation with the Islamist movement, often allowing them
to function as his loyal opposition (and thus providing political cover for his
rule) and sometimes slapping them down, presenting himself as the only
alternative to Islamic rule.
During the last days of the Mubarak regime, when Tahrir
and the country's other public spaces were roaring with defiance, the
Brotherhood was negotiating with Mubarak's head of intelligence and
vice-president, Omar Souleiman, their contact man for many years. When the youth
returned to Tahrir last November, again the MB refused to support them, and amid
the political crisis entered into negotiations with SCAF to form a new
government. After those talks failed and a Brotherhood leader came to speak in
Tahrir, he was chased out.
In short, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of
opposition to the state but a "party of order", one of an array of reactionary
forces that both jointly and in rivalry with one another are striving to put an
end to a period of popular revolt. Its programme of throwing the veil of Islamic
government over an Egypt whose economic and political structures are unchanged
amounts to seeking to reconcile the people with their lot and the fate that
imperialism, especially the the U.S., reserves for their country. There is
nothing nationalist or democratic about them.
The Muslim Brotherhood does have real political
contradictions with the SCAF and possibly different economic interests (the MB
has strong support among a section of newly-rising private sector big
businessmen). Further, although Morsi emphasized his support for the humiliating
agreements with Israel that American officials unabashedly label a "red line"
Egypt will not be allowed to cross, it may be hard for the Brotherhood to
publicly kiss the Zionists' boots. Other Islamists not bidding for American
approval may come to the fore.
This problem, and other highly unpopular measures sure to
come, may help explain why Morsi officially resigned from the Brotherhood and
its Freedom and Justice Party after he was elected. Maybe this way the MB can
have its cake and eat it too, enjoying the benefits of heading a government and
able to distance itself from governmental policies when necessary. In the end
Morsi agreed to be president of a government which armed forces decrees had
stripped of most of its powers, at least for now. Perhaps, after a proper show
of submission, his government will be rewarded, but the situation is
complicated. For instance, the Muslim Brotherhood might prefer that the armed
forces keep the responsibility for arresting and imprisoning people, relieving
the Islamists of the embarrassment of filling what were once Mubarak's jails
with political prisoners.
Morsi promised that he would "continue the revolution"
until "all the revolution's objectives" are achieved. What can this mean? It is
true, unfortunately, that the objectives of those who brought down Mubarak have
been far from clear and often contradictory. But whatever the new government
looks like, even if it were to be very "democratic" in terms of paying lip
service to the political rights of all citizens and inclusive of Copts and
American-approved liberals, it will not free the people from what they need to
be freed from.
For instance, the peasants and farmworkers will not be
free to carry out the agrarian revolution that is crucial to freeing the country
from imperialist economic and political domination and the resulting
backwardness and stagnation throughout society. Morsi, like his rival
presidential candidate, has been silent on that question.
Women will not be free to break the bonds of tradition
and become a motor force in the country's transformation. Morsi, who often
addressed "my family" and "my brothers and sons" in his speech, is a
self-acknowledged representative of patriarchy – after all, his organization is
not called the "Muslim Brother and Sisterhood". But the many misguided people
hoping that the military will protect women from Sharia (Islamic law) law should
remember how the armed forces dispersed a women's protest in Tahrir with a
special bestiality. The image of soldiers stripping and stomping on "the girl in
the blue bra" is matched by the Brotherhood's insistence that women be made
faceless. This veiling has been well under way even without the force of law
behind it. (It has to be pointed out that the new leader of the Coptic Church
called on Christian women to follow this example of what he called Muslim
"modesty".)
Those who mistakenly see either the military or the
Muslim Brotherhood as possible allies in the struggle to solve even these most
basic democratic issues are going to be sorely disappointed, if not crushed.
These problems cannot be resolved except through the establishment of a
revolutionary political power led, through whatever necessary stages, by the
outlook and political programme of the proletariat, not to win narrow demands
for the workers but because, seen in its historical role, the proletariat can
free itself only by freeing humanity from the enslaving division of society into
classes and all the economic and social relationships, institutions, practices
and thinking that go along with that.
Morsi's speech focused on "unity of all the people of
Egypt". "We are all fingers of one hand," he declared, a new version of the now
discredited slogan "The people and the armed forces are fingers of one hand."
But the situation is defined by antagonisms. The interests of the country's
rulers, and of the U.S. and its gendarme Israel, are antagonistic to the
interests of the great majority of Egyptians.
It would be a big mistake to think that this election has
resolved the situation. Over the last year and a half huge numbers of people
have shown again and again that they would rather risk death than live in the
way they have been forced to. Further, while there may never again be a "Mubarak
moment" when most of society seems united, the people's enemies have not yet
been able to resolve their internal contradictions and their legitimacy crisis
and build a stable regime. Most of all, the people have lived an experience that
has brought out some of the weaknesses of their oppressors who once seemed
all-powerful, and given them more confidence in themselves and each other and
their collective ability to bring about real change.
But there is another extremely serious problem: the fact
that real social change has not been achieved despite all the sacrifices made
can weigh heavily on the people, especially when combined with the lack of a
political force that can put forward and mobilize people around a compelling
understanding of why Egypt and the world are the way they are, and how,
concretely, things could be different.
It would be wrong to underestimate either the difficulty
and possible consequences of these problems for the people, or the present and
potential problems for the people's enemies. The Egyptian ruling class and the
U.S. and even the Brotherhood did not want to see Mubarak go in a way that would
lead to such political instability, but that's what happened anyway. Thanks to
the people, events spun out of all the reactionaries' control. This achievement
continues to reverberate and keep the ball in play. The outcome remains to be
settled – and is likely to remain the issue of the day for some time to come.
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