12 December 2011. A World to Win News Service. After a decade of occupation and war by the US-led coalition, the people are looking back to assess the results.
But the reactionary forces on an international scale have prepared themselves for that too. By organizing various international and internal conferences and meetings, they have sought to impose their own conclusions and prepare public opinion for the continuation of their reactionary plans in Afghanistan and the region for at least another decade.
In fact US policy on Afghanistan is entering a new phase. The US is pretending that its mission in Afghanistan is almost over and that stability and prosperity there is within reach, with some minor shortcomings of course. Consequently they have started to draw down their soldiers and gradually hand over security responsibilities to the Afghan government. By the end of 2014 only a small number of foreign troops will remain to "protect the country" against its neighbours because the Afghanistan army is not strong enough to defend itself.
Just as the story told by the US and its allies when they invaded Afghanistan was a lie, so is this one.
Among the meetings recently held on Afghanistan have been the October Istanbul conference involving the Nato countries and Afghanistan's neighbours, and the traditional grand Loya Jirga with participation of 2,000 members called by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in mid-November to discuss two important issues, the long-term strategic accord with the US and negotiations with the Taliban.
The most decisive conference for the imperialists was held in Bonn, Germany on 5 December, a follow-up on the first Bonn conference 10 years ago. The first Bonn conference, held two months after the invasion started and the Taliban were ousted from power, established the framework for imperialist plans for Afghanistan over the last decade. In that conference Karzai was appointed head of the provisional government and the cabinet was given to his allies and other Islamic fundamentalists known as Jihadis who opposed the Taliban.
The second Bonn conference on Afghanistan was tasked with approving the framework for the imperialists' plans for Afghanistan for the next decade or so. Unlike the guardedly optimistic impression that the imperialists want to give, the real picture is gloomy. The majority of Afghanistan's people have been increasingly disappointed with the situation and the broken promises, and many are joining the reactionary opposition forces. Moreover the occupiers are acting with severe brutality against the population.
Air strikes and bombardment continue to victimize civilians who have nothing to do with the Taliban. A recent incident highlights the pattern of Nato and US bombardments. On 23 November an airstrike in Zhare district in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan killed seven civilians, including six children belonging to two families. "Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter who was badly wounded."
While Nato and government forces repeated their stereotyped story that they were chasing a group of insurgents who in this case were "planting a mine", the uncle of the killed children challenged this account, saying,
"There were no Taliban in the field; this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines… I have been to the scene and haven't found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven." (CBS News, 24 November 2011)
The occupiers' night raids meant to terrorize the Afghani people have become so widely and deeply hated that Karzai has had to address this issue. In his speech in the opening of the Loya Jirga he said, "Afghanistan believes that the war on terrorism is not in the people's houses, their nest is somewhere else. The corruption in offices is incredible. There is still government harassment of the people, people's houses are still not immune, both governmental institutions and foreigners can harass the people. So what should we do about these problems?" (BBC Persian website, 16 November 2011)
Women continue to be the victims of fundamentalism, both by the Nato-installed Karzai government and the opposition. There are numerous reports indicating intense and painful discrimination against women. The story of a young woman named Golnaz who was raped by a relative is particularly shocking. Golnaz, who became pregnant, was arrested and convicted of sex outside of marriage (Zina). She was given three years in prison. When she appealed, a higher court increased her sentence to 12 years imprisonment. After her story found its way to the world's media, Karzai ordered her released on the condition that she marry her rapist, though she did not want to. This is the supposed liberation of women under the occupation. There is no need to mention that there are thousands of Golnaz in Afghanistan.
No aspect of the country's reconstruction has been seriously pursued except for building up its armed forces and bureaucratic apparatus. The cultivation and production of drugs continues to rise and shape the economic structure of the country. Corruption, poverty and suffering have engulfed the people. The US and Nato forces are hated. These are some of the reasons why people who despised the Taliban are increasingly drawn to their side.
No real success in fighting the Taliban but seeking to make peace with them
While the people have suffered most from the occupation, the occupiers are now trying to make peace with the Taliban who were supposedly their target. As previously mentioned, this has been a core issue at most of the recent international and local meetings.
The government and the US are doing everything they can to draw the Taliban to the negotiating table. They have been compromising on many issues, especially women's rights. The Karzai regime's increasing application of Sharia (Koranic law) is meant to win over Taliban supporters. They have offered immunity to many Taliban leaders and suggested that the organization open an office in Doha (Qatar) or Turkey to facilitate negotiations.
Whether most or some of the Taliban forces would go to the negotiating table is another question, one that depends on their own assessment of the situation. The point is that the occupiers and the Karzai government are working hard to get the Taliban to accept some sort of power-sharing arrangement.
All this shows that the US and other imperialists did not invade Afghanistan to liberate the people or women. They did not invade Afghanistan to fight terrorists or to bring peace and reconstruct the country. Contrary to these claims, they invaded Afghanistan for their global and strategic interests. In this sense, the US-led invasion is little different than the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet social-imperialism (the imperialist USSR before its fake socialism was dropped). The difference is that the Soviets allied with the local revisionist forces who called themselves democrats or communists, while the US and other Western imperialists have allied mainly with Islamic forces and various sections of Islamic fundamentalism.
The long-term strategic treaty between Afghanistan and the US
The US and its allies still will continue to pursue their global interests in Afghanistan no matter what changes they might bring to their policies there. In fact, the new policies on the agenda, including drawing down their forces, negotiations with the Taliban and the long-term strategic accord, all are in the service of those imperialist interests.
There have been many meetings between the US and Afghanistan governments to complete the drafting of this accord. It seems the latest round of bilateral talks took place September 2011 in Washington. The draft document is said to cover military, economic, political, cultural and educational relations between the two countries.
Many observers have suggested that the most important issue under discussion over the last couple of years has been the proposed building of US military bases to facilitate the permanent or at least long-term presence of tens of thousands of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite initial denials by Afghan and US officials, Karzai confirmed this in his speech at the recent Loya Jirga, which was to discuss the accord, whose details remain secret. Even the Loya Jirga were not informed of the full contents of the US demands and conditions.
In his opening speech Karzai argued that Afghanistan would benefit from such military bases.
"The US wants military bases that would have some effects on us and on the region and on our neighbours. We can use this to our benefit. But we have our conditions: the US must stop the night raids. And stop the parallel offices in Afghanistan [American financial and political structures meant to substitute or oversee Afghan government organs]. While we and the US and the West, are friends, we are also friends with Russia, China and our neighbours. We would give them [our neighbours] our word that no matter what the price we will not allow any country to be attacked from our soil.
"These are our conditions. Afghanistan is prepared to sign the long-term treaty and this is in our interest. Their money comes to Afghanistan, they train our soldiers and our police force, and they ensure the general stability of the region." (BBC Persian website, 16 November 2011)
This is all that has been revealed about the contents of the proposed strategic treaty. Even some of the Loya Jirga members protested that they were not aware of what they were going to approve. Later, Safia Sedighi, the speaker for the Loya Jirga, told reporters,"The Americans have demanded that their conditions remain secret."
While it has not been confirmed, some sources believe that the US intends to maintain permanent military bases in at least five locations (Shinden in Herat near the Iranian border, Shoor Abak, Kandahar, Khost and Bagram).
Even as the American and Afghan governments have been trying to create public opinion to justify long-term foreign military bases in Afghanistan they have also been trying to cover up the US's real neo-colonial intentions in the country and the region.
For example, whenever the issue of ending the war has come up, Washington adds that "this time" they will not leave Afghanistan "alone", as if the mess that Afghanistan fell into during the 1990s was because the Western powers "neglected" Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets. They argue that if the US leaves completely the mess would re-emerge. They talk as if it was not imperialist interference that led to the civil war of the 1990s and as if Afghanistan were not a total mess today – a mess they created.
First of all, the imperialists have never left Afghanistan people alone to get on with their life. In fact the mess created in Afghanistan has been the result of decades of meddling in Afghan affairs, especially by the imperialists and their regional allies. The Jihadis came to power as a result of more than a decade of military, financial, political and propaganda support from the West. Later, in fact, it was Pakistan, with US approval, that brought in the Taliban. Pakistan was then the main American ally in the region. It is important to emphasize that during that period Pakistan and US had strong common interests in the region and were mainly united on achieving them.
As a recent New York Times opinion piece recalled, "during the Clinton administration, Mr Putin proposed United States-Russian cooperation against the Taliban; Washington turned down the offer for political reasons." (Dov S. Zakheim and Paul J. Saunders, 1 December 2011) What were those political reasons? When we know that the US was one of the Taliban's main financial supporters and that the countries that recognized the Taliban regime were the main US clients in the region, the political reasons start to become clearer: the US was – and still is – seeking regional hegemony as part of hanging on to its global domination.
The US's part in turning Afghanistan into a mess is such common knowledge that even those who want to justify the present and future US occupation have to take that into account. They argue that this history is why the US must continue to run Afghanistan. "The political, moral and partly legal responsibilities of the US for helping Afghanistan is one of the expectations of the bilateral strategic relations. The US has had an obvious role in creating the present problems of Afghanistan, including provoking the ex-Soviet Union to interfere militarily, supporting the extremist groups during the [Soviet] occupation, handing over the key to Kabul to Islamabad after that occupation and entrusting Pakistan with Afghanistan after 2001,” writes Davoud Moradian, currently teaching in American University in Kabul. He concludes that "US support for Afghanistan is not only what Kabul is requesting but also Afghanistan's right and the responsibility of the US and other Western countries." (BBC Persian service, 14 October 2011)
The US wants continued control of Afghanistan for the same reasons why the USSR occupied the country and wanted to stay there – and the same reasons why the British wanted Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In fact Afghanistan was coveted by a long list of empires, including Mongols, Persians and Indians.
Because of its strategic importance Afghanistan has long been a battlefield of contention between powerful countries. However, the recent occupations have taken place in a new era in which capitalism has developed into imperialism and military and economic global control has become qualitatively more important. And to force their way in and prolong their stay these imperialists have become more brutal, with an effect on the life of the people that has been disastrous in many dimensions.
This is what the strategic accord between the US and Afghanistan and the second Bonn Conference on Afghanistan was all about – the contention between powers.
In arguing for a continued US presence, Senator John Kerry, a former Democrat US presidential candidate and currently chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote an article expressing some of the concerns of the US imperialists about what would happen if they left Afghanistan:
"Russia, for example, is looking to reassert its authority in the region and could use our departure as a pretext to redeploy Russian troops on the Tajik-Afghan border. The Chinese are expanding their economic footprint but have chosen not to engage politically or militarily, in part because they’re fearful of stirring separatist sentiments in the volatile Xinjiang region bordering Afghanistan. Iran, too, has strengthened economic and trade cooperation with Kabul, building on its cultural ties to reassert its role in the region. And the Indians recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan, cementing their long-term ties." (The New York Times, 1 December 2011)
The gateway to Central Asia from the north, to the Indian peninsula from the south and east and to Iran and Middle East in the west, and also close to two powerful countries like Russia and China, Afghanistan's location makes it strategically extremely important when regional and even global contention is taken into account.
US occupation: a regional and global danger
The US occupation of Afghanistan and its plan to stay for decades to come are not in the interests of Afghanistan’s people and do not serve that country's security nor the region's stability. On the contrary this occupation is a source of insecurity for Afghanistan and the region and a provocation for contention.
It is bitterly ironic that when Karzai stated that the US must have military bases in the country to protect Afghanistan's interests, he gave his word that no neighbour will be threatened or attacked from Afghan soil. Shortly after, that is exactly what happened.
Not long after he made this pledge a Nato airstrike against two Pakistani military outposts along the north-western border with Afghanistan killed at least 25 Pakistani soldiers. This act created so much outrage that the Pakistani government had to respond by ordering the CIA to cease the drone operations it runs from the Shamsi Air Base in western Pakistan, and closing the two main NATO supply routes into Afghanistan. Pakistan also boycotted the Bonn Conference in protest. Predictably US and Nato officials are investigating to see what went "wrong".
Pakistan has been an important ally of the US for years, but its strategic importance has diminished and contradictions with US regional interests have come more to the fore. This US "mistake" could have been meant to put pressure on Pakistan to accept a new US approach to the region in which Pakistan's role would be dramatically curtailed while India's role in Afghanistan and the region would increase.
Not long after that, a CIA drone that had taken off from Afghanistan was brought down deep inside Iran near the city of Kashmar, about 140 kilometres from the border. This brought attention to the covert operations inside Iran being launched from US facilities in Afghanistan.
These incidents show that the US wants to stay in Afghanistan not to protect it from its neighbours but to threaten its neighbours.
Obviously Karzai's words are worth nothing – they are only a justification for a continued betrayal of the people of Afghanistan and the region. In the same light, the US is lying to try and conceal its goals and deceive the people.
The statement that the US is leaving Afghanistan is a lie. The statement that the US is building military bases to secure the stability of the region is also a vicious lie. In fact, the US's efforts in this region may hold even more dangerous consequences on a world scale unless they are disrupted by the struggle of the people not only in Afghanistan but also in the region and globally.
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Montag, 19. Dezember 2011
Samstag, 3. Dezember 2011
Egypt: The importance of holding out in Tahrir Square
28 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert. As Egypt's ruling military tried to shift the country's conflicts to the electoral arena, many youth and others remained in Tahrir Square in an occupation that has cost at least 42 lives and several thousand wounded so far.
The next few days will tell whether the Tahrir protesters can manage to remain in the square if a "government of national salvation" headed by leading civilian presidential candidates is installed. Their stubbornness through the last 11 days, despite the combination of armed terror and promises of change through voting unleashed against them, took the political initiative away from the armed forces and once again put these young rebels at the centre of unfolding events, much as in the days when they sparked the revolt that toppled Mubarak.
The current battles began on the morning of 19 November when military police attacked a small group of those wounded in the original revolt who had camped in a grassy area overnight. Day after day since then, the regime tried to clear the occupation with volley after volley of tear gas and shotgun-propelled projectiles. Yet the protesters not only stood their ground but even mounted wave after wave of counter-attacks on the Interior Ministry on Mohamed Mahmoud street a few blocks away from the square.
In response to friends abroad, a young pharmacist sent an e-mail from the square: "I am OK but I have two young friends, one who died already and one who is in intensive care, shot in the head, and another who lost an eye and one who lost two eyes... This massacre is revealing the ugly face of the system and has turned this into a totally people's movement, and we are trying to catch up with that. We are in Tahrir all the time, trying to be creative in our contact with the people and getting a lot of sympathy from the people still at home."
This sentiment was repeated by others: what enabled them to stay in Tahrir Square this long has not been mainly personal courage, although there was an enormous amount of that, but the feeling that what they were doing was touching a deep chord among people all over the country and was therefore worth the sacrifice. They are also aware that the world is watching them and that their actions are in resonance with the Occupy movements in the US, UK and elsewhere. People in Tahrir know about actions in support of the Egyptian revolt that have been held in a number of American and British cities. (See nomiltrials.org)
Egyptian society is much more obviously divided than at any time since Mubarak's fall. In the name of defending the anti-Mubarak "revolution", the military is attacking the youth who drove Mubarak out. The main Islamist groups have come out against the young rebels, and many ordinary people are unsure and sometimes hostile. Commentators opposed to the revolt emphasize the conflict between "the street" (majority opinion) and "the square" (Tahrir). Yet so many people across society have shown such strong sympathy and even active support for the rebels that for the last 11 days the military has been unable to put an end to the political stalemate and the standoff around the square.
On Friday 25 November, the occupiers' numbers swelled into the tens of thousands as they were joined by various organized contingents, including people from various kinds of universities and neighbourhoods, and women chanting slogans against the Islamist parties. One feeder march was led by a young man who had lost one eye in the January and February revolt and the other eye just now. The rally brought out a socially mixed crowd of men and women, in contrast to the generally poorer young men and boys fighting the police near the Interior Ministry. (For a sharply drawn portrait of the various segments of protesters, see "The battle of Cairo's Muhammad Mahmoud Street" by Lucie Ryzova on the Al Jazeera Web site.)
That same evening a few thousand counter-demonstrators gathered at another centre-city square to chant, "Down with Tahrir, yes to the military council."
In a very unusual gesture, the chief imam of Al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam's highest religious authority, issued a statement of support for the Tahrir protesters.
The fear of public opinion has even forced the military – or at least two generals speaking in the name of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – to express "regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of the martyrs from among Egypt's loyal sons during recent events in Tahrir Square."
But at the same time a military court has ordered another 15 days of detention for blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who had already spent a month in prison. He now faces a trial before a special state security court. Another blogger, Maikel Nabil, sentenced to three years in prison for writing "The army and the people were never one hand", has been on hunger strike for almost a hundred days and his retrial has been postponed. It seems that the military's plan for dealing with public opinion includes crushing opposing opinion-makers.
SCAF tried to undermine support for the Tahrir Square rebels by removing the entire cabinet they themselves had appointed to provide themselves with a civilian face. Their new chosen prime minister was Kamal El-Ganzouri, a US-trained economist who served in the same post under Mubarak at the end of the 1990s. When news of Ganzouri's appointment reached the 25 November rally, the crowd roared its rejection.
The mood was celebratory that night, because the regime seemed to be retreating both politically and in the streets around the square. People set off the coloured fireworks seen at football games. The next morning, however, when young men and women staged a sit-in in front of the cabinet building to prevent El-Ganzouri from entering, a military vehicle ran over and killed one of them, 21-year-old Ahmed Sayed. Thousands more people came to Tahrir Square the next day, 27 November, despite the first hard rain of winter. As the polls opened the next day, their numbers dwindled, with sentiments divided between boycotting the elections (mainly in hopes of holding future elections under a civilian government) and reluctantly voting now (mainly to hold back an Islamist victory).
The medical situation reveals much about the political line-up. Many doctors and other medical personnel have come to the aid of the protesters and young fighters, setting up about a dozen field hospitals in the square itself. During the revolt last January and February such hospitals were set up because of fears that the public hospital administration would report or turn over the wounded to the police. This spirit of a necessary alternative to official institutions is still at work.
The police have made these medical tents a special target for tear gas and arson. A young woman doctor died of suffocation when huge clouds of tear gas engulfed the tent where she was working. A devout Muslim, she was said to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that is particularly strong in the doctors' association and that called for its members to stay away from Tahrir. Reportedly there has been no shortage of medical personnel or even supplies in Tahrir, thanks to continuing donations.
Medical attention has become more crucial than ever because of the use of new police tactics – shooting to blind people with birdshot pellets and rubber and plastic bullets. This is apparent in videos of the casualties showing wounds in the upper chest and face. One regular hospital alone reported admitting 60 people with eye injuries in the week leading up to 27 November. Their wounds included burst corneas, burst eye sockets and foreign bodies in the eye. A volunteer doctor working in the field hospital nearest to Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry reported that he treated about 25 people on the morning and afternoon of 25 November. Most had been shot in the upper area of the body, especially the face, with four people hit in the eyes with birdshot. (Report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights)
Eyewitnesses say that police taunted protesters facing off against them, "If you want to lose your eye, come over here." A notorious video on Youtube shows a police officer firing on demonstrators in Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A soldier congratulates him, saying, "Nice shot, you hit that guy right in the eye." A blogger asked what kind of army, and what kind of society, would train its soldiers to think like that.
The authorities have not hesitated to kill – another video shows men in civilian clothing wielding long clubs apparently to finish off people left unconscious by police truncheons. But shooting people in the eyes seems to have become a deliberate policy meant to cause as much pain and terror as possible while avoiding greater numbers of politically problematic deaths. In addition, according to the same report, almost 400 people have been arrested and then beaten and otherwise abused in custody, including children.
Similarly, many of the fatalities have been attributed to tear gas. Questions have been raised about what exactly this tear gas contains, although examination of the spent cartridges found so far has not revealed anything that would make it more deadly than usual. Some medical experts speculate that the deaths are caused not by a more lethal variety of gas but its concentrated and sustained use over a long period. It may be that people are suffering from cumulative pulmonary, cardiac and other damage. So much gas has combined with the dust that usually coats this desert city that in much of the downtown the slightest gust of wind sets off coughing.
This gas is primarily supplied by the United States, as anyone can see by examining the markings on spent cartridges. The US provides the Egyptian military with 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct aid, amounting to two-thirds of total US funding for Egypt (money for civilian projects is no less harmful – US "aid" obliges Egyptians to depend on American wheat imports for their daily bread). US State Department records show that the US supplied 1.7 million dollars worth of "toxicological agents" – "including tear gas and riot control agents" in 2010 alone. (El Ahram Online, 25 November.)
Youth organizations have made public documents leaked to them by customs employees indicating that the US is now in the process of shipping the Egyptian Interior Ministry an additional 21 tons of tear gas. The second of three container ships was being unloaded in the port city of Suez when these documents were released on 28 November.
While the police are a civilian body, they are run by the Interior Ministry, which is under military control. The main police units attacking the protesters are from the Central Security Forces, responsible for most of the deaths in January and February. The members of this corps are recruited from among army conscripts who volunteer for the job. The armed forces claim that they have intervened to protect demonstrators from the police, but there have been many reports of army officers and military police accompanying other police in attacking Tahrir square and in defending the Interior Ministry, often surrounded by tanks. Now the military has put up a two-metre high wall of concrete slabs across Mohamed Mahmoud street.
The US has called for a "full transfer of power to a civilian government", a move that SCAF head Field Marshall Tantawi initially rejected. On 27 November he announced that no matter what the result of the elections, "the place of the army will remain exactly as it is. It will not change in any new constitution."
While Tahrir square is united around the chant, "The people want the fall of the field marshal", there is a prevailing lack of clarity about what kind of regime could be an alternative to military rule. SCAF has become as discredited as most of Egypt's political institutions, and there is not much hope for real change from the current elections. (We Are All Khaled Said, one of the main Facebook groups behind the original revolt, asked people to vote while wearing black badges in memory of the martyrs, a call that seems to reflect a mood of bleak acquiescence to the elections due to the lack of an alternative.) Yet few people envision a revolutionary overthrow of the entire state structure, including the armed forces. Instead, most would like to hope that somehow parliamentary elections or a constituent assembly – there is debate about which – could establish a rule of law that would somehow be above society. But the Egyptian ruling classes and the US imperialists they are beholden to would never respect any legal structure that didn't reflect their economic and political interests!
The viciousness of what the movement faces can be seen in the military tactics being used against them. These tactics are not only fully enabled by the US but also seem to be in line with Washington's political goals, which are to facilitate the emergence of a regime that would both continue to be subservient to US interests and enjoy enough legitimacy to get away with crushing the young rebels and their supporters. While there may be some conflict between SCAF and Washington, it is over how best to achieve this goal.
At the same time as SCAF was expressing its "regret" for deaths on its Facebook page, the American ambassador to Egypt used her Twitter account to announce that the US was donating 100,000 dollars in "humanitarian assistance for violence victims." In light of everything else the US has done in Egypt, including building up, sustaining and arming the Egyptian military, this is like gouging out someone's eyes and then offering them eye drops.
The next few days will tell whether the Tahrir protesters can manage to remain in the square if a "government of national salvation" headed by leading civilian presidential candidates is installed. Their stubbornness through the last 11 days, despite the combination of armed terror and promises of change through voting unleashed against them, took the political initiative away from the armed forces and once again put these young rebels at the centre of unfolding events, much as in the days when they sparked the revolt that toppled Mubarak.
The current battles began on the morning of 19 November when military police attacked a small group of those wounded in the original revolt who had camped in a grassy area overnight. Day after day since then, the regime tried to clear the occupation with volley after volley of tear gas and shotgun-propelled projectiles. Yet the protesters not only stood their ground but even mounted wave after wave of counter-attacks on the Interior Ministry on Mohamed Mahmoud street a few blocks away from the square.
In response to friends abroad, a young pharmacist sent an e-mail from the square: "I am OK but I have two young friends, one who died already and one who is in intensive care, shot in the head, and another who lost an eye and one who lost two eyes... This massacre is revealing the ugly face of the system and has turned this into a totally people's movement, and we are trying to catch up with that. We are in Tahrir all the time, trying to be creative in our contact with the people and getting a lot of sympathy from the people still at home."
This sentiment was repeated by others: what enabled them to stay in Tahrir Square this long has not been mainly personal courage, although there was an enormous amount of that, but the feeling that what they were doing was touching a deep chord among people all over the country and was therefore worth the sacrifice. They are also aware that the world is watching them and that their actions are in resonance with the Occupy movements in the US, UK and elsewhere. People in Tahrir know about actions in support of the Egyptian revolt that have been held in a number of American and British cities. (See nomiltrials.org)
Egyptian society is much more obviously divided than at any time since Mubarak's fall. In the name of defending the anti-Mubarak "revolution", the military is attacking the youth who drove Mubarak out. The main Islamist groups have come out against the young rebels, and many ordinary people are unsure and sometimes hostile. Commentators opposed to the revolt emphasize the conflict between "the street" (majority opinion) and "the square" (Tahrir). Yet so many people across society have shown such strong sympathy and even active support for the rebels that for the last 11 days the military has been unable to put an end to the political stalemate and the standoff around the square.
On Friday 25 November, the occupiers' numbers swelled into the tens of thousands as they were joined by various organized contingents, including people from various kinds of universities and neighbourhoods, and women chanting slogans against the Islamist parties. One feeder march was led by a young man who had lost one eye in the January and February revolt and the other eye just now. The rally brought out a socially mixed crowd of men and women, in contrast to the generally poorer young men and boys fighting the police near the Interior Ministry. (For a sharply drawn portrait of the various segments of protesters, see "The battle of Cairo's Muhammad Mahmoud Street" by Lucie Ryzova on the Al Jazeera Web site.)
That same evening a few thousand counter-demonstrators gathered at another centre-city square to chant, "Down with Tahrir, yes to the military council."
In a very unusual gesture, the chief imam of Al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam's highest religious authority, issued a statement of support for the Tahrir protesters.
The fear of public opinion has even forced the military – or at least two generals speaking in the name of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – to express "regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of the martyrs from among Egypt's loyal sons during recent events in Tahrir Square."
But at the same time a military court has ordered another 15 days of detention for blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who had already spent a month in prison. He now faces a trial before a special state security court. Another blogger, Maikel Nabil, sentenced to three years in prison for writing "The army and the people were never one hand", has been on hunger strike for almost a hundred days and his retrial has been postponed. It seems that the military's plan for dealing with public opinion includes crushing opposing opinion-makers.
SCAF tried to undermine support for the Tahrir Square rebels by removing the entire cabinet they themselves had appointed to provide themselves with a civilian face. Their new chosen prime minister was Kamal El-Ganzouri, a US-trained economist who served in the same post under Mubarak at the end of the 1990s. When news of Ganzouri's appointment reached the 25 November rally, the crowd roared its rejection.
The mood was celebratory that night, because the regime seemed to be retreating both politically and in the streets around the square. People set off the coloured fireworks seen at football games. The next morning, however, when young men and women staged a sit-in in front of the cabinet building to prevent El-Ganzouri from entering, a military vehicle ran over and killed one of them, 21-year-old Ahmed Sayed. Thousands more people came to Tahrir Square the next day, 27 November, despite the first hard rain of winter. As the polls opened the next day, their numbers dwindled, with sentiments divided between boycotting the elections (mainly in hopes of holding future elections under a civilian government) and reluctantly voting now (mainly to hold back an Islamist victory).
The medical situation reveals much about the political line-up. Many doctors and other medical personnel have come to the aid of the protesters and young fighters, setting up about a dozen field hospitals in the square itself. During the revolt last January and February such hospitals were set up because of fears that the public hospital administration would report or turn over the wounded to the police. This spirit of a necessary alternative to official institutions is still at work.
The police have made these medical tents a special target for tear gas and arson. A young woman doctor died of suffocation when huge clouds of tear gas engulfed the tent where she was working. A devout Muslim, she was said to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that is particularly strong in the doctors' association and that called for its members to stay away from Tahrir. Reportedly there has been no shortage of medical personnel or even supplies in Tahrir, thanks to continuing donations.
Medical attention has become more crucial than ever because of the use of new police tactics – shooting to blind people with birdshot pellets and rubber and plastic bullets. This is apparent in videos of the casualties showing wounds in the upper chest and face. One regular hospital alone reported admitting 60 people with eye injuries in the week leading up to 27 November. Their wounds included burst corneas, burst eye sockets and foreign bodies in the eye. A volunteer doctor working in the field hospital nearest to Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry reported that he treated about 25 people on the morning and afternoon of 25 November. Most had been shot in the upper area of the body, especially the face, with four people hit in the eyes with birdshot. (Report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights)
Eyewitnesses say that police taunted protesters facing off against them, "If you want to lose your eye, come over here." A notorious video on Youtube shows a police officer firing on demonstrators in Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A soldier congratulates him, saying, "Nice shot, you hit that guy right in the eye." A blogger asked what kind of army, and what kind of society, would train its soldiers to think like that.
The authorities have not hesitated to kill – another video shows men in civilian clothing wielding long clubs apparently to finish off people left unconscious by police truncheons. But shooting people in the eyes seems to have become a deliberate policy meant to cause as much pain and terror as possible while avoiding greater numbers of politically problematic deaths. In addition, according to the same report, almost 400 people have been arrested and then beaten and otherwise abused in custody, including children.
Similarly, many of the fatalities have been attributed to tear gas. Questions have been raised about what exactly this tear gas contains, although examination of the spent cartridges found so far has not revealed anything that would make it more deadly than usual. Some medical experts speculate that the deaths are caused not by a more lethal variety of gas but its concentrated and sustained use over a long period. It may be that people are suffering from cumulative pulmonary, cardiac and other damage. So much gas has combined with the dust that usually coats this desert city that in much of the downtown the slightest gust of wind sets off coughing.
This gas is primarily supplied by the United States, as anyone can see by examining the markings on spent cartridges. The US provides the Egyptian military with 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct aid, amounting to two-thirds of total US funding for Egypt (money for civilian projects is no less harmful – US "aid" obliges Egyptians to depend on American wheat imports for their daily bread). US State Department records show that the US supplied 1.7 million dollars worth of "toxicological agents" – "including tear gas and riot control agents" in 2010 alone. (El Ahram Online, 25 November.)
Youth organizations have made public documents leaked to them by customs employees indicating that the US is now in the process of shipping the Egyptian Interior Ministry an additional 21 tons of tear gas. The second of three container ships was being unloaded in the port city of Suez when these documents were released on 28 November.
While the police are a civilian body, they are run by the Interior Ministry, which is under military control. The main police units attacking the protesters are from the Central Security Forces, responsible for most of the deaths in January and February. The members of this corps are recruited from among army conscripts who volunteer for the job. The armed forces claim that they have intervened to protect demonstrators from the police, but there have been many reports of army officers and military police accompanying other police in attacking Tahrir square and in defending the Interior Ministry, often surrounded by tanks. Now the military has put up a two-metre high wall of concrete slabs across Mohamed Mahmoud street.
The US has called for a "full transfer of power to a civilian government", a move that SCAF head Field Marshall Tantawi initially rejected. On 27 November he announced that no matter what the result of the elections, "the place of the army will remain exactly as it is. It will not change in any new constitution."
While Tahrir square is united around the chant, "The people want the fall of the field marshal", there is a prevailing lack of clarity about what kind of regime could be an alternative to military rule. SCAF has become as discredited as most of Egypt's political institutions, and there is not much hope for real change from the current elections. (We Are All Khaled Said, one of the main Facebook groups behind the original revolt, asked people to vote while wearing black badges in memory of the martyrs, a call that seems to reflect a mood of bleak acquiescence to the elections due to the lack of an alternative.) Yet few people envision a revolutionary overthrow of the entire state structure, including the armed forces. Instead, most would like to hope that somehow parliamentary elections or a constituent assembly – there is debate about which – could establish a rule of law that would somehow be above society. But the Egyptian ruling classes and the US imperialists they are beholden to would never respect any legal structure that didn't reflect their economic and political interests!
The viciousness of what the movement faces can be seen in the military tactics being used against them. These tactics are not only fully enabled by the US but also seem to be in line with Washington's political goals, which are to facilitate the emergence of a regime that would both continue to be subservient to US interests and enjoy enough legitimacy to get away with crushing the young rebels and their supporters. While there may be some conflict between SCAF and Washington, it is over how best to achieve this goal.
At the same time as SCAF was expressing its "regret" for deaths on its Facebook page, the American ambassador to Egypt used her Twitter account to announce that the US was donating 100,000 dollars in "humanitarian assistance for violence victims." In light of everything else the US has done in Egypt, including building up, sustaining and arming the Egyptian military, this is like gouging out someone's eyes and then offering them eye drops.
Egypt: still out of control
22 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert. Once again events in Egypt have taken everyone by surprise, even the actors. Through a conjunction of favourable circumstances and especially through their courage and daring, the youth who were at the core of the movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak have regained the initiative and struck back at efforts to continue the old regime in a new form.
Many people are talking about "Tahrir reloaded". They called last Saturday, when the youth first successfully resisted police attempts to clear them out of Cairo's main square, "day 19", a return to the 18 day revolt that began last January 25. But that Tahrir moment, the days when there was a consensus throughout Egyptian society – that Mubarak was finished – will not come again. The armed forces, which dumped Mubarak with US assent, have been waging a war on the youth and made themselves that movement's main target despite initial illusions that the military might be a positive force or at least neutral. When protesters now revive the old chant, "The people want the fall of the regime", and explicitly add the name of Field Marshall Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Armed Forces Council (SCAF) that took over from Mubarak, it is in much more difficult circumstances, facing even more vicious battles at the beginning of the year, and with a much more divided population. And it is even more daring.
In retrospect, it may be that the last few months, when the movement fell back amid serious difficulties, should be considered as one of intense calm in the midst of a continuing revolutionary crisis rather than an ebbing of the revolutionary situation. While the revolt had lost the initiative, it is clear that a great many people remained deeply dissatisfied and were in fact becoming increasingly angry and desperate. When they saw a chance to act decisively, they took it.
That chance occurred in connection with a mass rally called by the Muslim Brotherhood meant to pressure the military regime to its own advantage. The Islamists are reactionaries seeking to use religion and religious rule to make acceptable the relations of exploitation and oppression that have made life unbearable for so many Egyptians. But their contradictions with the military regime created room for something entirely different, an ultimately successful attempt to "replay Tahrir" in the sense of a new occupation intended to bring down the new/old regime.
The 18 November rally started out with a different scene than witnessed in Cairo's Tahrir Square back in January and February, even if it was the biggest protest since then. That earlier Tahrir was marked by an almost utopian spirit of mutual aid, collective self-reliance and equality between ethnic groups, religions and even, to some extent, men and women. Photos show men, women and children present, and at the hours of Muslim prayers, some people kneeling in devotion and others standing up, all mixed together, with many people not praying. The Brotherhood, somewhat tolerated as well as sometimes repressed under Mubarak, boycotted the revolt in the crucial first few days. When the Brotherhood did come, their presence didn't change the movement's character.
In contrast, when the call to prayer came on Friday afternoon 18 November, hardly a head was left raised. There were some distinctions between the crowds brought out by the Muslim Brotherhood (especially strong among the middle classes, including doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists) and the various Salafist groups (known for their support from the young urban poor), although these differences in class base are very approximate and often contradictory. There were a variety of views on whether the new government should be civil in form but Islamic-based, or one on the Saudi Arabian model (seen as a rich and modern country where Sunni fundamentalism rules supreme, as opposed to poor and backward Afghanistan or Shia Iran isolated by the West). But there seems to have been a shared sense that Islam should be considered the only source of morality and political legitimacy.
Among the youth groups and leftist parties that attended, most tried to literally keep a distance from the Islamist groups (each organized around its own podium and preachers) and maintain a distinct political identity focused on opposition to military trials and political repression, which the Islamists seldom talk about. There was debate about whether or not to try and occupy Tahrir Square. In the early evening, the Muslim Brotherhood and the main Salafist groups declared the event over and left. The 6 April Youth Organization, the best-known secular youth group, announced that instead of attempting to stay in the square they were calling for another demonstration the following Friday (the only day most people have off from work).
A previous attempt to "replay Tahrir" in July failed to gather enough momentum to prevent a police attack that cleared the square and then survive the month-long break for Ramadan in August. The SCAF had been forced to permit marches and rallies in Tahrir and elsewhere, but occupation, which has come to represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the prevailing regime, had not been permitted.
However, some youth, a few hundred according to reports, decided to stay overnight in Tahrir anyway. The next morning they were attacked by the Central Security Forces, Mubarak's well-trained and organized black-clad riot police. Twice that day, in the morning and especially the early evening, the police almost succeeded in driving them out, but thousands of youth began to pour in from around the city. At first they came individually and in small groups. Later, columns marched in from assembly points at other downtown squares and even more distant neighbourhoods, both middle class and poor. The fighting was intense; at least two people were killed. The police used tear gas, clubs, electric prods, shotguns firing rubber bullets and birdshot, and standard bullets. Soldiers on the rooftops of the surrounding tall buildings threw down tear gas canisters and other deadly objects. The underground station – one of the city's two main junctions – was closed to cut off new arrivals. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning ex-International Atomic Energy Agency head who is the country's most prominent candidate for the as yet unscheduled presidential elections, came to the square. Some Islamists, particularly youth, came back.
Other demonstrations broke out in at least seven other cities. In Suez, where people had burned down the police station and other official buildings in the first days of the January revolt, the new police headquarters was assaulted. Along with Alexandria, there were also fierce protests in several smaller cities along the upper Nile.
Tahrir remained occupied Saturday night. The police attacked even more ferociously the next day, killing at least 11 more people. Hospitals reported about 1,800 injured Saturday and Sunday. Two well-known groups of football fans ("ultras") came to reinforce the battle against the police, who have always treated them brutally. Military policemen and officers also took part in attacking people, according to some reports. But on Sunday and Monday, at times the protesters were able to take the offensive. They repeatedly marched on the Ministry of the Interior, one of the most important targets left unscathed after last January and February. Obviously they felt they had unfinished business.
Over the past months, the armed forces increasing use of naked violence, sometimes directly by soldiers as well as police, has certainly scared many people, but it has also made many conclude that the military's rule is the problem, not the solution – that an attempt to "replay Tahrir", this time against the army, is the only way out of a deteriorating situation.
Yet it was the Muslim Brotherhood and not the youth organizations and certainly none of the traditional "left" parties that issued the call for a "Million Man March" in Tahrir Square 18 November. (As it turned out, there were closer to 50,000.) It was billed as "The Day of One Demand" – that the military give up power. This might seem surprising, since the military and Islamists have been acting as "one hand" in trying to restore stability and steer people off the streets and into the polling booths for the scheduled 28 November parliamentary elections that the Islamists expect will hand them a central role in a new civilian government.
The Muslim Brotherhood's apparent conflict with the army was precipitated when a civilian minister, answerable, like the whole government, to the generals, proposed to a meeting of the major political parties that the armed forces be allowed to dictate certain constitutional principles now, choose most of the members of the panel to write a new constitution after parliament is elected, and permanently remain above civilian interference or even budgetary supervision. The Brotherhood's electoral arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, declared this a threat to the emergence of "democracy" in Egypt. Certainly a great many people saw these measures as a crude attempt to perpetuate military rule under a parliamentary fig leaf.
At the same time, however, as the Brotherhood's secular critics point out, the proposal contained articles and procedures that might make it harder to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, restrict the Islamist parties' options and of course keep them under military supervision. While the US and its Egyptian flunkies are unanimous in their belief that parliamentary elections are the only way to restore the legitimacy of state institutions, and while most observers think that an Islamist-dominated parliament is the most probable result, there may very well be contention between various forces among the Islamists and the generals.
There is another factor likely at work, although no proof has been uncovered: the US. During the period when the Brotherhood was negotiating with the military as to whether or not to call off the threatened 18 November demonstration and was also officially in contact with US State Department representatives, American government officials began to express unhappiness with the Egyptian military's efforts to formally limit the powers of a future civilian government. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "If, over time, the most powerful political forces in Egypt remain a handful of unelected officials, they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egypt will have missed a historic opportunity." (New York Times, 16 November) In other words, while the US might agree with the generals' project in the abstract, its officials fear that continuing brazen military rule could undermine US interests, which require a government whose stability depends not just on violence but also on a sufficient degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This doesn't mean that the US plans to try to do without the nearly million-man Egyptian armed forces. They are the recipient of 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct American funding, and the US has carefully cultivated its officer corps for decades. But the Egyptian military has its own political and economic interests, including a gigantic network of enterprises under its command. Roughly 40 percent of the country's economy is estimated to be controlled by a network of military and other state-owned enterprises and private companies run by retired officers.
The imperialist finance system, speaking through the IMF, has often complained that foreign investment would be better served by more "private"-sector opportunities. The US once encouraged Hosni Mubarak's son and appointed successor Gamal because he sought to expand, at the military's expense, the "private" capital sector now championed by civilian presidential candidates such as ElBaradei. (Actually, in an economy organized according to the laws of capitalism both state-owned and "private" capital are effectively private in terms of putting narrow, particular interests above the general interests of society.) The US and the Egyptian military can't do without one another, but that doesn't mean that their interests are identical.
As for the US and the Islamists, the American government's attitude seems to be "maybe". No one can say exactly where an Islamist government might lead, and US officials are certainly aware of potential problems with an Islamic government bordering Israel. But the US, which kept Mubarak in power for three decades and clung to him almost to the end, does not have a lot of options. If Egypt slipped out of American domination, that would be a disaster for US interests in the region and the world.
The basic question being fought over in the squares and streets is who will govern Egypt: Islamists, generals or those who declare themselves loyal to "human rights; and in what form, through a military junta, a parliament and civilian president, or an emir (religious political leader). These are very important questions with deep, long-term implications. But who governs and the form of governance doesn't settle the question of the content of rule – the class or classes that hold political power, and consequently the way society is organized economically and politically, for what purpose, and what ideology is promoted.
It is vital to understand that the common demand for an end to military rule covers opposing possible outcomes representing mutually antagonistic interests. The question is whether open military rule comes to an end in a way that encourages or discourages people's struggles to go further.
Even if the entire military-appointed government of the Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, a former Mubarak figure, were replaced in an effort to appease the revolt, it's likely that the military would still call the shots. Under any circumstances, no matter which civilian might become prime minister and eventually president, the armed forces would have the ultimate say, as well as control of powerful economic, social and political levers. After all, on what armed power would any other government rest?
This situation would not be changed by the resignation of the minister who suggested that the new constitution formally sanction continued military control, as the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties demanded, or even the resignation of all the ministers, an idea considered so extreme that these parties did not dare demand it Monday morning, but became a real possibility by Monday night. The SCAF may seek to "replay Tahrir" in its own way by jettisoning whoever necessary to keep from being overthrown.
ElBaradei is now proposing the replacement of the SCAF-appointed government with a government of national unity composed of all the major political parties. including the Islamists and people like himself. (According to Al Ahram, the 6 April Youth organization has endorsed this proposal.) It is also noteworthy that the SCAF's recent decision to accept IMF funds (and therefore decisions) sparked little controversy among these parties. However real their differences, they are all ultimately amenable to the global, imperialist-dominated economic system and power relations.
As long as the army is not dismantled by revolutionary force, it will continue to be the backbone and pillar of any regime. The Islamists may have their own interests and agenda, but they definitely plan on ruling with the army, not against it. (In another act of blatant hypocrisy, when their manoeuvre to use the streets to their advantage backfired, they called for an end to all street demonstrations. A prominent Brotherhood leader who came to Tahrir with a handful of supporters on 21 November was booed out of the square.)
To many people, the best-case outcome would be a government chosen by majority rule through elections. This is especially understandable in a country that has never known anything but monarchy and a military rule where the occasional opposition candidates not in the regime's pay often ended up in jail or exile. But even with real elections, parliamentary democracy is perfectly compatible with and often the best form for the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. The formal equality of citizens before the law masks and gives full play to the enormous inequalities that characterize Egypt at least as much as any other country.
Further, Egyptian experience of the last nine months is rich in examples of how a revolt unsanctioned by elections can draw ordinary people into political life and allow them to change basic things through their actions, and how the experience (and promise) of elections can strip them of their conscious, active role. It has also highlighted the limitations of a spontaneous revolt that doesn't seek state power.
The Muslim Brotherhood now argues that the latest clashes were encouraged by provocateurs to force the cancellation of the imminent elections. But maybe one factor in the current upsurge is that many people have already decided that they can't expect anything good from this electoral process, even if they haven't lost hope in parliamentary democracy in the abstract.
A few of the revolt's intellectual participants do question parliamentary democracy as a viable or even desirable alternative to the military. Some "moderate" Islamist arguments in favour of the so-called supremacy of elections are instructive in this regard. They reason that since the majority of Egyptians are practising Muslims, then it is only right for the country to become an Islamic state. This might be considered just more hypocritical opportunism – after all, these forces intend to do everything in their power to set the terms of debate in the most manipulative and coercive manner and have never relied solely on persuasion – but there is a real, inescapable point here: the majority can be fooled, and certainly what the majority might think at any given moment doesn't necessarily correspond to the fundamental interests of the vast majority of people. Those who fought to overthrow Mubarak and have continued the revolt have not always had the visible broad support they wanted.
The fact is that in Egypt, not only would parliamentary democracy be a form of the dictatorship of the exploiting classes in which the interests and deepest desires of the people do not bear any weight in basic decisions, but it would be doubly empty because life in Egypt is ultimately determined by the interests and decisions of the imperialists, the powers whose twin instruments of subjugation are their military and the global market.
To take just one example: although the Nile valley and delta where most Egyptians live is among the world's most fertile land, imported wheat and other foodstuffs are cheaper than domestic production and the world market has crushed Egypt's agriculture. Consequently the country has become the world's biggest wheat importer (American "aid" ensures that it is bought from the US). To pay for this central component of people's diet, the country must depend on revenues from the Suez canal (without which the military and bureaucracy would never have become so swollen), the export of gas (Egypt sends gas to Israel while Egyptians cook with fires or use inconvenient and dangerous propane tanks), tourism (which requires a docile population) and especially the export of people (the money sent home by Egyptians forced to work abroad). Dependence on these sectors is an obstacle to an all-around development of the economy, including employment. There are so many people hungry for work in the Nile Delta that China and Iran, in addition to the Western powers, have set up factories there to exploit cheap Egyptian labour.
Changing the country's subordinated development and its disastrous effects on every aspect of the lives of the people, including their day-to-day existence and their culture and thinking – not to mention getting rid of all the other exploitative and oppressive relations in Egyptian life – cannot conceivably happen without a thoroughgoing revolution, the forcible overthrow of the power of the exploiting classes and the establishment of a whole new kind of regime led by a party that has the goal and a plan for freeing Egypt as part of ending exploitation and oppression on a world scale.
Making a revolution in any country, including Egypt, is unthinkable unless a section of the people led by such a party can successfully navigate through a complex mix of favourable and unfavourable factors. But the current complexity of the Egyptian situation contains positive factors that are rare in the history of any country. The people's enemies have not been able to resolve a political crisis that has festered since January and now become acute. So far they have not been able to restore the legitimacy of their institutions of domination or establish new ones. If they have vacillated in choosing a course of action, it is because any choice they make entails the risk of inflaming this crisis further. For instance, beating and shooting demonstrators has been anything but a solution for them, but stopping that might allow the people's anger to boil over. Serious compromises to the people's struggle might give the rebels a taste of victory that leaves them hungry for more, now or at some later point, especially if these concessions fail to fulfil their expectations.
The persistence of youth and others – despite a difficult period in which there has been more passivity than street action, especially among the less well-off sections of the people – has proved to be a mood creating factor throughout society. It is true that this "Internet elite", as an Egyptian politician sneeringly labelled them, has not always been able to rouse the broader masses. Yet they have been a major element in preventing the military and Islamist forces from consolidating their hold and keeping alive the possibility that broader masses could once again intervene in determining the country's future, as they did during those 18 days in January and February.
As of now, a wide variety of youth, not only "the Internet elite" but also working class students and young men and boys of the lower classes in general, have become uncontrollable. They are actively supported by many thousands of other men and some women. In fact, they have won enough sympathy and support that millions may consider them more in touch with their interests and even more legitimate than the ruling regime. Their courage in the face of repression is such that many have adopted the habit of writing the phone number of their next of kin on their arm in case they are found dead or unconscious – fear doesn't stop them. The solidarity is such that amid the tear gas people have formed long lines to donate blood at two mobile stations set up in Tahrir Square.
The factors that brought about that first Tahrir moment – the inability of the ruling classes to rule in the old way and the willingness of a large section of the people to risk death rather than continue living in the old way – remain unresolved and continue to interact.
Many people are talking about "Tahrir reloaded". They called last Saturday, when the youth first successfully resisted police attempts to clear them out of Cairo's main square, "day 19", a return to the 18 day revolt that began last January 25. But that Tahrir moment, the days when there was a consensus throughout Egyptian society – that Mubarak was finished – will not come again. The armed forces, which dumped Mubarak with US assent, have been waging a war on the youth and made themselves that movement's main target despite initial illusions that the military might be a positive force or at least neutral. When protesters now revive the old chant, "The people want the fall of the regime", and explicitly add the name of Field Marshall Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Armed Forces Council (SCAF) that took over from Mubarak, it is in much more difficult circumstances, facing even more vicious battles at the beginning of the year, and with a much more divided population. And it is even more daring.
In retrospect, it may be that the last few months, when the movement fell back amid serious difficulties, should be considered as one of intense calm in the midst of a continuing revolutionary crisis rather than an ebbing of the revolutionary situation. While the revolt had lost the initiative, it is clear that a great many people remained deeply dissatisfied and were in fact becoming increasingly angry and desperate. When they saw a chance to act decisively, they took it.
That chance occurred in connection with a mass rally called by the Muslim Brotherhood meant to pressure the military regime to its own advantage. The Islamists are reactionaries seeking to use religion and religious rule to make acceptable the relations of exploitation and oppression that have made life unbearable for so many Egyptians. But their contradictions with the military regime created room for something entirely different, an ultimately successful attempt to "replay Tahrir" in the sense of a new occupation intended to bring down the new/old regime.
The 18 November rally started out with a different scene than witnessed in Cairo's Tahrir Square back in January and February, even if it was the biggest protest since then. That earlier Tahrir was marked by an almost utopian spirit of mutual aid, collective self-reliance and equality between ethnic groups, religions and even, to some extent, men and women. Photos show men, women and children present, and at the hours of Muslim prayers, some people kneeling in devotion and others standing up, all mixed together, with many people not praying. The Brotherhood, somewhat tolerated as well as sometimes repressed under Mubarak, boycotted the revolt in the crucial first few days. When the Brotherhood did come, their presence didn't change the movement's character.
In contrast, when the call to prayer came on Friday afternoon 18 November, hardly a head was left raised. There were some distinctions between the crowds brought out by the Muslim Brotherhood (especially strong among the middle classes, including doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists) and the various Salafist groups (known for their support from the young urban poor), although these differences in class base are very approximate and often contradictory. There were a variety of views on whether the new government should be civil in form but Islamic-based, or one on the Saudi Arabian model (seen as a rich and modern country where Sunni fundamentalism rules supreme, as opposed to poor and backward Afghanistan or Shia Iran isolated by the West). But there seems to have been a shared sense that Islam should be considered the only source of morality and political legitimacy.
Among the youth groups and leftist parties that attended, most tried to literally keep a distance from the Islamist groups (each organized around its own podium and preachers) and maintain a distinct political identity focused on opposition to military trials and political repression, which the Islamists seldom talk about. There was debate about whether or not to try and occupy Tahrir Square. In the early evening, the Muslim Brotherhood and the main Salafist groups declared the event over and left. The 6 April Youth Organization, the best-known secular youth group, announced that instead of attempting to stay in the square they were calling for another demonstration the following Friday (the only day most people have off from work).
A previous attempt to "replay Tahrir" in July failed to gather enough momentum to prevent a police attack that cleared the square and then survive the month-long break for Ramadan in August. The SCAF had been forced to permit marches and rallies in Tahrir and elsewhere, but occupation, which has come to represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the prevailing regime, had not been permitted.
However, some youth, a few hundred according to reports, decided to stay overnight in Tahrir anyway. The next morning they were attacked by the Central Security Forces, Mubarak's well-trained and organized black-clad riot police. Twice that day, in the morning and especially the early evening, the police almost succeeded in driving them out, but thousands of youth began to pour in from around the city. At first they came individually and in small groups. Later, columns marched in from assembly points at other downtown squares and even more distant neighbourhoods, both middle class and poor. The fighting was intense; at least two people were killed. The police used tear gas, clubs, electric prods, shotguns firing rubber bullets and birdshot, and standard bullets. Soldiers on the rooftops of the surrounding tall buildings threw down tear gas canisters and other deadly objects. The underground station – one of the city's two main junctions – was closed to cut off new arrivals. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning ex-International Atomic Energy Agency head who is the country's most prominent candidate for the as yet unscheduled presidential elections, came to the square. Some Islamists, particularly youth, came back.
Other demonstrations broke out in at least seven other cities. In Suez, where people had burned down the police station and other official buildings in the first days of the January revolt, the new police headquarters was assaulted. Along with Alexandria, there were also fierce protests in several smaller cities along the upper Nile.
Tahrir remained occupied Saturday night. The police attacked even more ferociously the next day, killing at least 11 more people. Hospitals reported about 1,800 injured Saturday and Sunday. Two well-known groups of football fans ("ultras") came to reinforce the battle against the police, who have always treated them brutally. Military policemen and officers also took part in attacking people, according to some reports. But on Sunday and Monday, at times the protesters were able to take the offensive. They repeatedly marched on the Ministry of the Interior, one of the most important targets left unscathed after last January and February. Obviously they felt they had unfinished business.
Over the past months, the armed forces increasing use of naked violence, sometimes directly by soldiers as well as police, has certainly scared many people, but it has also made many conclude that the military's rule is the problem, not the solution – that an attempt to "replay Tahrir", this time against the army, is the only way out of a deteriorating situation.
Yet it was the Muslim Brotherhood and not the youth organizations and certainly none of the traditional "left" parties that issued the call for a "Million Man March" in Tahrir Square 18 November. (As it turned out, there were closer to 50,000.) It was billed as "The Day of One Demand" – that the military give up power. This might seem surprising, since the military and Islamists have been acting as "one hand" in trying to restore stability and steer people off the streets and into the polling booths for the scheduled 28 November parliamentary elections that the Islamists expect will hand them a central role in a new civilian government.
The Muslim Brotherhood's apparent conflict with the army was precipitated when a civilian minister, answerable, like the whole government, to the generals, proposed to a meeting of the major political parties that the armed forces be allowed to dictate certain constitutional principles now, choose most of the members of the panel to write a new constitution after parliament is elected, and permanently remain above civilian interference or even budgetary supervision. The Brotherhood's electoral arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, declared this a threat to the emergence of "democracy" in Egypt. Certainly a great many people saw these measures as a crude attempt to perpetuate military rule under a parliamentary fig leaf.
At the same time, however, as the Brotherhood's secular critics point out, the proposal contained articles and procedures that might make it harder to declare Egypt an Islamic republic, restrict the Islamist parties' options and of course keep them under military supervision. While the US and its Egyptian flunkies are unanimous in their belief that parliamentary elections are the only way to restore the legitimacy of state institutions, and while most observers think that an Islamist-dominated parliament is the most probable result, there may very well be contention between various forces among the Islamists and the generals.
There is another factor likely at work, although no proof has been uncovered: the US. During the period when the Brotherhood was negotiating with the military as to whether or not to call off the threatened 18 November demonstration and was also officially in contact with US State Department representatives, American government officials began to express unhappiness with the Egyptian military's efforts to formally limit the powers of a future civilian government. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "If, over time, the most powerful political forces in Egypt remain a handful of unelected officials, they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egypt will have missed a historic opportunity." (New York Times, 16 November) In other words, while the US might agree with the generals' project in the abstract, its officials fear that continuing brazen military rule could undermine US interests, which require a government whose stability depends not just on violence but also on a sufficient degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This doesn't mean that the US plans to try to do without the nearly million-man Egyptian armed forces. They are the recipient of 1.3 billion dollars a year in direct American funding, and the US has carefully cultivated its officer corps for decades. But the Egyptian military has its own political and economic interests, including a gigantic network of enterprises under its command. Roughly 40 percent of the country's economy is estimated to be controlled by a network of military and other state-owned enterprises and private companies run by retired officers.
The imperialist finance system, speaking through the IMF, has often complained that foreign investment would be better served by more "private"-sector opportunities. The US once encouraged Hosni Mubarak's son and appointed successor Gamal because he sought to expand, at the military's expense, the "private" capital sector now championed by civilian presidential candidates such as ElBaradei. (Actually, in an economy organized according to the laws of capitalism both state-owned and "private" capital are effectively private in terms of putting narrow, particular interests above the general interests of society.) The US and the Egyptian military can't do without one another, but that doesn't mean that their interests are identical.
As for the US and the Islamists, the American government's attitude seems to be "maybe". No one can say exactly where an Islamist government might lead, and US officials are certainly aware of potential problems with an Islamic government bordering Israel. But the US, which kept Mubarak in power for three decades and clung to him almost to the end, does not have a lot of options. If Egypt slipped out of American domination, that would be a disaster for US interests in the region and the world.
The basic question being fought over in the squares and streets is who will govern Egypt: Islamists, generals or those who declare themselves loyal to "human rights; and in what form, through a military junta, a parliament and civilian president, or an emir (religious political leader). These are very important questions with deep, long-term implications. But who governs and the form of governance doesn't settle the question of the content of rule – the class or classes that hold political power, and consequently the way society is organized economically and politically, for what purpose, and what ideology is promoted.
It is vital to understand that the common demand for an end to military rule covers opposing possible outcomes representing mutually antagonistic interests. The question is whether open military rule comes to an end in a way that encourages or discourages people's struggles to go further.
Even if the entire military-appointed government of the Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, a former Mubarak figure, were replaced in an effort to appease the revolt, it's likely that the military would still call the shots. Under any circumstances, no matter which civilian might become prime minister and eventually president, the armed forces would have the ultimate say, as well as control of powerful economic, social and political levers. After all, on what armed power would any other government rest?
This situation would not be changed by the resignation of the minister who suggested that the new constitution formally sanction continued military control, as the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties demanded, or even the resignation of all the ministers, an idea considered so extreme that these parties did not dare demand it Monday morning, but became a real possibility by Monday night. The SCAF may seek to "replay Tahrir" in its own way by jettisoning whoever necessary to keep from being overthrown.
ElBaradei is now proposing the replacement of the SCAF-appointed government with a government of national unity composed of all the major political parties. including the Islamists and people like himself. (According to Al Ahram, the 6 April Youth organization has endorsed this proposal.) It is also noteworthy that the SCAF's recent decision to accept IMF funds (and therefore decisions) sparked little controversy among these parties. However real their differences, they are all ultimately amenable to the global, imperialist-dominated economic system and power relations.
As long as the army is not dismantled by revolutionary force, it will continue to be the backbone and pillar of any regime. The Islamists may have their own interests and agenda, but they definitely plan on ruling with the army, not against it. (In another act of blatant hypocrisy, when their manoeuvre to use the streets to their advantage backfired, they called for an end to all street demonstrations. A prominent Brotherhood leader who came to Tahrir with a handful of supporters on 21 November was booed out of the square.)
To many people, the best-case outcome would be a government chosen by majority rule through elections. This is especially understandable in a country that has never known anything but monarchy and a military rule where the occasional opposition candidates not in the regime's pay often ended up in jail or exile. But even with real elections, parliamentary democracy is perfectly compatible with and often the best form for the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. The formal equality of citizens before the law masks and gives full play to the enormous inequalities that characterize Egypt at least as much as any other country.
Further, Egyptian experience of the last nine months is rich in examples of how a revolt unsanctioned by elections can draw ordinary people into political life and allow them to change basic things through their actions, and how the experience (and promise) of elections can strip them of their conscious, active role. It has also highlighted the limitations of a spontaneous revolt that doesn't seek state power.
The Muslim Brotherhood now argues that the latest clashes were encouraged by provocateurs to force the cancellation of the imminent elections. But maybe one factor in the current upsurge is that many people have already decided that they can't expect anything good from this electoral process, even if they haven't lost hope in parliamentary democracy in the abstract.
A few of the revolt's intellectual participants do question parliamentary democracy as a viable or even desirable alternative to the military. Some "moderate" Islamist arguments in favour of the so-called supremacy of elections are instructive in this regard. They reason that since the majority of Egyptians are practising Muslims, then it is only right for the country to become an Islamic state. This might be considered just more hypocritical opportunism – after all, these forces intend to do everything in their power to set the terms of debate in the most manipulative and coercive manner and have never relied solely on persuasion – but there is a real, inescapable point here: the majority can be fooled, and certainly what the majority might think at any given moment doesn't necessarily correspond to the fundamental interests of the vast majority of people. Those who fought to overthrow Mubarak and have continued the revolt have not always had the visible broad support they wanted.
The fact is that in Egypt, not only would parliamentary democracy be a form of the dictatorship of the exploiting classes in which the interests and deepest desires of the people do not bear any weight in basic decisions, but it would be doubly empty because life in Egypt is ultimately determined by the interests and decisions of the imperialists, the powers whose twin instruments of subjugation are their military and the global market.
To take just one example: although the Nile valley and delta where most Egyptians live is among the world's most fertile land, imported wheat and other foodstuffs are cheaper than domestic production and the world market has crushed Egypt's agriculture. Consequently the country has become the world's biggest wheat importer (American "aid" ensures that it is bought from the US). To pay for this central component of people's diet, the country must depend on revenues from the Suez canal (without which the military and bureaucracy would never have become so swollen), the export of gas (Egypt sends gas to Israel while Egyptians cook with fires or use inconvenient and dangerous propane tanks), tourism (which requires a docile population) and especially the export of people (the money sent home by Egyptians forced to work abroad). Dependence on these sectors is an obstacle to an all-around development of the economy, including employment. There are so many people hungry for work in the Nile Delta that China and Iran, in addition to the Western powers, have set up factories there to exploit cheap Egyptian labour.
Changing the country's subordinated development and its disastrous effects on every aspect of the lives of the people, including their day-to-day existence and their culture and thinking – not to mention getting rid of all the other exploitative and oppressive relations in Egyptian life – cannot conceivably happen without a thoroughgoing revolution, the forcible overthrow of the power of the exploiting classes and the establishment of a whole new kind of regime led by a party that has the goal and a plan for freeing Egypt as part of ending exploitation and oppression on a world scale.
Making a revolution in any country, including Egypt, is unthinkable unless a section of the people led by such a party can successfully navigate through a complex mix of favourable and unfavourable factors. But the current complexity of the Egyptian situation contains positive factors that are rare in the history of any country. The people's enemies have not been able to resolve a political crisis that has festered since January and now become acute. So far they have not been able to restore the legitimacy of their institutions of domination or establish new ones. If they have vacillated in choosing a course of action, it is because any choice they make entails the risk of inflaming this crisis further. For instance, beating and shooting demonstrators has been anything but a solution for them, but stopping that might allow the people's anger to boil over. Serious compromises to the people's struggle might give the rebels a taste of victory that leaves them hungry for more, now or at some later point, especially if these concessions fail to fulfil their expectations.
The persistence of youth and others – despite a difficult period in which there has been more passivity than street action, especially among the less well-off sections of the people – has proved to be a mood creating factor throughout society. It is true that this "Internet elite", as an Egyptian politician sneeringly labelled them, has not always been able to rouse the broader masses. Yet they have been a major element in preventing the military and Islamist forces from consolidating their hold and keeping alive the possibility that broader masses could once again intervene in determining the country's future, as they did during those 18 days in January and February.
As of now, a wide variety of youth, not only "the Internet elite" but also working class students and young men and boys of the lower classes in general, have become uncontrollable. They are actively supported by many thousands of other men and some women. In fact, they have won enough sympathy and support that millions may consider them more in touch with their interests and even more legitimate than the ruling regime. Their courage in the face of repression is such that many have adopted the habit of writing the phone number of their next of kin on their arm in case they are found dead or unconscious – fear doesn't stop them. The solidarity is such that amid the tear gas people have formed long lines to donate blood at two mobile stations set up in Tahrir Square.
The factors that brought about that first Tahrir moment – the inability of the ruling classes to rule in the old way and the willingness of a large section of the people to risk death rather than continue living in the old way – remain unresolved and continue to interact.
Report from Egypt: A complex and difficult situation – for both the people and their enemies
14 November 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Samuel Albert, Cairo. The euphoria has evaporated. While today's raucous political climate is very different than the years before Hosni Mubarak's ouster, when an enforced silence and stillness prevailed, it has also changed markedly since the period immediately preceding and following his 11 February forced resignation. Now, among the millions who participated in or supported that revolt and more broadly, there is a feeling that the situation is becoming increasingly complex, unsettled and dangerous. Marches, strikes, sit-ins and other protests happen every day, but many ordinary people are becoming more passive. There is a chill in the air that comes from more than the approaching winter.
This discouragement is largely the product of the unfolding of events since then, both what has happened and what has not. While many activists express the hope that the political awakening of the Egyptian people may lead to basic social change some time in the future, right now their foremost concern is that the situation may become more difficult and even disastrous, both in terms of political repression and a closing of minds among a large part of the people.
No one chants "The people and the army are one hand" any more, as they did when the army's refusal to fire on protesters helped make Mubarak's dismissal possible. The illusion that the army would be at least neutral toward basic change began to fade after only a few months, even if people still try to cling to it. Driven by distinct class interests and ideologies, the highly heterogeneous social forces whose convergence brought down Mubarak are now pulling the country in different directions. Everyone knows that the army is going to play a key role, even if the generals, their American paymasters and the unpredictable unfolding of events have not decided exactly what that role will be.
The armed forces in Egypt have a monopoly on organized violence, as they do in every state, and economic holdings unparalleled in most other countries, along with the support of the US and other imperialist powers. Here they also benefit from whatever legitimacy the state organs still hold in the eyes of the people. Not a few people would like to see a difference between the Mubarak-era generals in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the army as an institution they consider patriotic. This is because of its leadership of the 1952 revolution that finally expelled the British occupiers and its role in defending the country against subsequent invasions by Britain, France and Israel.
Many hoped that Mubarak's downfall would be followed by the adoption of a new constitution that would set the framework for bringing about some sort of social change. But the idea that the "rule of law" could reflect anything but which classes and organizations dominate society received a hard blow in March, when the army, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, old regime forces and state-owned and other reactionary media, successfully pushed through a referendum approving the continuation of the old constitution with a few changes for the worse. Unexpectedly, the voter turnout was extremely high, and more than 70 percent of the ballots approved the proposal. This emboldened the armed forces to publicly discuss scenarios such as the promulgation of articles for a new constitution by its own decree, or its own selection of the bulk of the members of the committee to write a new constitution that would give the military the last say on all major questions and continue to shield it from civilian oversight.
The process of parliamentary elections is scheduled to begin in late November and last through January. At first the military promised it would govern for only six months. Now it says it will turn over power to a civilian president in 2013. Most people once saw the election of a parliament and its selection of a committee to write a new constitution as a possible peaceful pathway to change. Now a few have concluded that the real purpose of this process is to re-legitimize the state and disperse the flames that still flair up in the street, both aspects meant to make revolutionary change more difficult, without changing anything basic in society. But even those who still hold out hope for parliamentary democracy in a general way have decided that at this point, the only open question is whether the new parliament will be a circus of disparate forces unwilling and unable to change anything, or one dominated by Islamists seeking to move society backward.
Already, even those forces that identify with the revolt who are most focused on electoral activity are pessimistic about the outcome. The only ones who seem to be looking forward to the polling are the Islamists, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the revolt in the beginning, and the Salafists, fundamentalists who hold that Egyptians should live more like Muslims in Mohammed's day, a society of women in burkas and men in beards and robes, though everyone would still have a mobile (cell phone).
An increasingly aggressive army
For many people, hopes for something positive from the army's "hand" vanished by April, when, instead of leaving it to the police, the armed forces themselves assaulted demonstrators challenging their rule, killing two protesters. But far worse occurred on 9 October, when Christians and secularists protesting the armed forces' failure to react to a wave of arson attacks on Coptic churches were themselves attacked, leaving 28 dead and hundreds of wounded and injured.
The demonstrators had marched across central Cairo to Maspero, the headquarters of the state-owned television services. Videos posted online show army armoured vehicles barrelling through the crowd, running over or crushing to death a dozen people. But the fighting was complicated, involving demonstrators, soldiers and a horde of unidentified civilians who charged the crowd and may have fought against soldiers too.
The difficulty in determining exactly what happened reflects the variety of forces at work. It also feeds the widespread feeling that mysterious dark forces are manipulating the situation and seizing the political initiative, a sentiment that leaves many former participants in the revolt paralysed and fearful.
Who were the men in civilian clothing who rampaged against the demonstrators under cover of night? Some believe that they were people from nearby slums organized by Muslim fundamentalists. Ridding Egypt of its Christian minority is a pillar of their programme, along with the institutionalization of the subjugation of women to men and the harsh punishments prescribed by sharia (Islamic law), such as cutting off the right hand of thieves.
Others believe that these men were members of the former state security service and the militia run by Mubarak's National Democratic Party, aiming to derail the people's movement by fomenting divisions between Muslims and Christians. It is sometimes pointed out that the leadership of the Coptic Church supported the old regime and continues to play a conservative political and social role. Some people argue that Israeli agents were also at work amid all this. While Israeli agents cannot possibly be a main factor in such events, as a few people would like to think, they are certainly present and active. (One was recently caught and expelled.)
A similar fog of confusion hovers around the September protests at the Israeli embassy after the SCAF failed to respond to a cross-border Israeli attack. Israeli soldiers, allegedly pursuing Palestinian fighters, killed six Egyptian policemen. Most people say that the protest was legitimate but the actual penetration into the embassy was a provocation meant to discredit the movement. Others believe that action, which forced the Israeli ambassador to flee the country, saved Egypt's honour. The feeling that there is no reliable information – even some people who were at these events say they aren't sure exactly who did what – is related, although not identical to, the question as to whether or not the movement should target the SCAF, instead of giving the military the benefit of a doubt.
But the armed forces government has made its attitude clear in regard to the Maspero incident in a way that sheds light much more broadly. During that protest, state television broadcasters called on "honest Egyptians" to come to Maspero to fight in defence of soldiers they said were being massacred by Christians. Actually, most of the dead were Copts; no soldiers were killed. In the following weeks the armed forces investigated the charges that it had murdered protesters and found itself innocent. There was not the slightest effort to identify the civilian assailants. While the armed forces' relations with the Coptic Church remain strained, the only named targets of the investigation so far have been secular youth who had spearheaded the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and had come to demonstrate against the repression of the Copts.
Plainly, whoever organized the assaults, the army is at the very least protecting them. Further, especially given these facts, there is no reason to simply accept the army's claim that its soldiers had not been issued live rounds and could not have done the shooting.
Two well-known young secular activists were brought in for formal interrogation. Both refused to cooperate. One was released. The other, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a well-known blogger and leading activist previously jailed in 2009, declared that he would refuse to answer questions because the army could not impartially investigate itself, and because the military had no right to try civilians. He was accused of stealing army weapons and destroying state property. Most people who don't support the army consider the idea that he attacked and trashed an armoured vehicle nothing but an action-film fantasy. Even more ominously, he was charged with the content of his blog itself, criticism of the armed forces which, the SCAF said, had fomented the violence.
The young man was remanded to prison for two weeks, pending a decision about what to do with him. Late on the night of 31 October, several thousand people – mostly bloggers and their readers and others mobilized at the last minute on the Net, and thus by definition mainly youth and others from the upper middle classes – marched across Cairo to a prison to support Fattah and another blogger, Maikel Nabil, who has been on hunger strike to protest his two-year sentence for having written, "The army and the people were never one hand." The military sent Nabil to a mental hospital, but the doctors, decrying this repressive manoeuvre, refused to admit him. Fattah, from the cell he shared with many common prisoners, wrote a searing and widely reprinted blog about once again finding himself in Mubarak's dungeons even after the fall of Mubarak. On 13 November the military renewed his imprisonment for at least another two weeks. There was a second, smaller march led by No to Military Trials, a human rights group that is one of the organisations most active in the streets now. (en.nomiltrials.com)
In another late October demonstration, a similar crowd, along with a small Islamist party, had marched from Tahrir Square to Maspero and back to protest the prison death of a young man serving a short sentence on minor criminal charges. The authorities claimed he poisoned himself by swallowing drugs to keep them from being discovered. The protesters, remembering similar justifications for deaths in custody under Mubarak, were inclined to believe the victim's family and a doctor at the hospital where his corpse was taken, who said that the police had forced soapy water down his throat and up his anus until it killed him. While unlike the bloggers, Essam Attah was not a political prisoner but seems to have been a victim of police repression of lower-class youth in general, these events underlined the fact that the police and armed forces are continuing and even stepping up the kind of atrocities that led people to revolt against and drive out Mubarak – and that the police and armed forces are one hand.
Military tribunals have tried bout 12,000 people for political and criminal offences since the armed forces took over. After its televised opening session, Mubarak's trial for murder and other crimes has been indefinitely postponed. The civilian courts have been discredited as utterly corrupt and part of the Mubarak '"system"and are often not able to function. During a rowdy October confrontation between lawyers and judges about proposed court procedures, the magistrates pulled their pistols and began shooting into the air to clear the room. The Mubarak-appointed judges are reviled as pirates licensed to rob the poor, middle class and even the unconnected rich.
This illustrates the broader circumstances in a society where for a half-century the regime openly or effectively appointed officials in all institutions. The authorities from top to bottom are despised as repressive, arbitrary and usually corrupt. For instance, even at the University of Cairo, surprisingly not a political hotbed, there have been important struggles to bring in independent department and faculty heads. The same almost total control that made the Mubarak regime seen invincible has produced a vacuum of legitimacy and moral authority that the generals have had great difficulty filling once people lost their fear and inertia.
A relative ebb
Yet the recent protests have been relatively small and narrowly based compared to January and February. Back then factory workers and other poor people were the first Egyptians to confront the regime's security forces, in the city of Suez. Hundreds of thousands of people of all social classes – Muslims, Copts and non-believers alike – picked up stones and sticks to fight the police and Mubarak thugs and occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and another public space in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city.
Now Cairo and Alexandria witness walkouts, occupations, street blockades and other protests by scores or hundreds of people every day, but they haven't sparked the larger-scale outpouring hoped for. The biggest actions lately have been in small cities.
In Damietta, a Nile river port city north of Cairo, tens of thousands of residents blocked traffic during the first two weeks of November, demanding the relocation of a Canadian-Egyptian fertilizer plant that is poisoning the water and killing people. The army tried and failed to end the port blockade. Police opened fire 13 November, killing two demonstrators. In a concession that is not infrequent in this kind of situation, especially when faced with what are formulated as non-political issues, the government then agreed to shut the plant down, but people would not believe the authorities' promises and some stayed in the streets.
In Aswan, far to the south of Cairo on the Nile, hundreds of Nubians (a marginalized minority) marched that same day to protest the police shooting of a boatman, the third such killing in recent months. Here, too, the unrest is continuing.
Why the political movement has dwindled and even retreated overall, at least for now, despite countercurrents, is a question as complex and difficult to answer as it is important. Two reasons are obvious. One is that nine months ago there was a convergence of young bloggers and similar activists (the Facebook page of one of the main organizations had hundreds of thousands of "friends"), the urban lower middle class, workers and other urban poor, veteran leftists, a whole section of capitalists not admitted to Mubarak's inner circle, and at a certain point the US and its Egyptian generals, all convinced that Mubarak must go and that his son Gamal must not be allowed to perpetuate the regime. There is no similar consensus today about the rule of the army and especially about what kind of regime should be established instead.
Another, related reason, is that developments since Mubarak's downfall have served to drive many ordinary people, especially the most downtrodden, into passivity. Whereas for a short time they believed, correctly, that their actions could change history, now they find themselves spectators to almost all the traditional left and liberal parties' obsession with the electoral process. Deliberately or not, these forces have turned their back on the conscious actions of the broadest masses.
The self-defence committees formed in poorer neighbourhoods during the revolt to protect people and their homes from criminals freed and encouraged by the police seem to have become inactive. At the same time, the police have responded to the almost universal (and now freely expressed) hatred of them by refusing to deal with crime and even to organize traffic. Policemen can be seen idly chatting at the almost permanently gridlocked intersections and roundabouts that make driving a car in this city of 20 million both a privilege and a bit like owning a portable tomb. In the face of a daily life that feels increasingly chaotic and often scary, there is a widespread longing for some sort of order, security and stability. If daily life cannot fundamentally change, at least it could become less exhausting.
In this situation, the Islamists are considered likely to win far more votes than any other party, including leftists who try to attract the lower masses with platforms calling for a minimum wage and so on. With their combination of religious proselytizing and supplying basic social services the government fails to provide, such as health clinics and subsidized food on religious holidays, the Islamists are usually the only organized forces visible in poor neighbourhoods. They are asserting dominance among the educated classes as well.
It must be left to other occasions to more deeply examine the variety of Islamist forces and the question of Islam, the ineffectual traditional left and the fundamental questions about society that, to the dismay of the left and liberals, the Islamists have insisted on loudly raising, such as whether the patriarchal rule of men over women that characterizes every dimension of Egyptian daily life should be given the dignity of law. For now, it is enough to say that the non-revolutionary parties that call themselves socialist or communist, and the openly pro-capitalist forces like Mohammed ElBaradei (the former International Atomic Energy Agency head seen by nearly every non-Islamic party and most secularists as the only presidential candidate who could challenge the Muslim Brotherhood and former Mubarak collaborators), all basically agree on the impossibility, at least for now, of a radical change in Egyptian society. They also agree, explicitly in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, that there is no alternative to the kind of IMF-approved and globalisation-dependent economic policies Mubarak pledged to carry out. Tellingly, although the Brotherhood is very active in Damietta, it has ignored the mass movement against the fertilizer plant.
It is ironic that many, although far from all, of the young activists who provided the spark for the 25 January revolt and are still persisting in the streets call themselves "liberals". What's meant is not exactly the European definition, believers in unfettered markets, nor an analogy to the American Democratic Party, but that the achievement of "human rights" – the political liberties so cruelly denied by the Mubarak regime – would constitute a revolution sufficient to transform Egypt. This illusion is made all the stronger by the military regime's efforts to block the establishment of the kind of parliamentary political system and formal rights that characterize most of the imperialist countries. However, even if this goal could be achieved – which is still an unanswered question – it could not offer the possibility of radical economic, political, social and ideological transformation without which daily life and Egypt's fate would remain pretty much the same, whether wrapped in "democratic" or Islamic trappings or some combination.
Contradictory factors
This is a difficult situation for the Egyptian people, but also a very difficult one for their enemies, the Western powers that have subordinated the country's economy and politics to their interests and the native exploiters and would-be exploiters governing in junior partnership with the imperialists.
First of all, there has been the kind of political awakening among the people that comes only at special moments in history. Certainly nothing like the majority of Egypt's 80 million people, but certainly millions, have, literally, taken history into their own hands. This includes many of the dispossessed who are ordinarily forbidden, by force of custom, culture and sometimes arms, to have anything to say about who rules, how and for what. During the Mubarak years, no one dared discuss politics in public. Even friends held their conversations as far from other ears as possible. These days the clash of opinions takes place in many neighbourhoods and is often deafening.
At the same time, the often repeated phrase that "The Egyptian people have lost their fear", and therefore can be counted on to continue standing up no matter what, must be analysed scientifically to understand the contradictoriness of this phenomenon. If for 18 days so many people from diverse social strata were willing to risk death rather than go on living as before, that is related to the fact that they believed, and correctly so, that their actions could make a crucial difference. If today so many of these same people have adopted a "wait and see attitude", that is because this now seems like the most reasonable alternative to them – within the framework of the situation as it is presented to them. While there are disparate factors at work in making a revolutionary moment, surely the masses of people cannot be inspired to risk everything unless at least a core of people among them have been brought to a basic understanding of why their lives and the world are the way they are and how the people themselves can transform them.
Hardly anyone expected Mubarak to be brought down the way he was. The first people who came to Tahrir Square on 25 January expected to go home a few hours later after just another, if much bigger, demonstration. Now that the people have shown what they are capable of, it would be criminal if those who consider themselves revolutionaries remain content with reducing the masses' activity to choosing the "least bad" in a list of uninspiring candidates for office, or anything else that does not build on and seek to take the revolt further, and to a decisive conclusion.
As for the least bad alternative, the imperialists and their Egyptian flunkies do not have what they consider good choices themselves.
A military government, or a civilian government whose decisions are openly subject to military approval, may not be acceptable even to many people who are not remotely revolutionary, including big capitalists and other inherently non-anti-imperialist forces, but the US and its local generals may decide that the domination of the Egyptian people requires that. The Muslim Brotherhood has repeatedly expressed its willingness to maintain Egypt's economic, political and military subordination to the US, but Washington may not have decided yet whether such a relationship is feasible and desirable.
The question of Israel make this all the more complex. A fierce hatred of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and aggression, threats and interference in Egypt is a central factor in the country's political life and people's thinking, including among the lower classes. Often (although not always), it is coupled with hatred for the US for sustaining Israel, the two wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., not to mention unstinting American support for Mubarak. While scratching off Mubarak's name from squares, train stations and maps, the Egyptian military is now using the TV stations and other media at its disposal to promote Mubarak's predecessor in more than a half century of military rule, Anwar Sadat, as the only Egyptian leader able to inflict a severe military blow on Israel (in the 1973 war). At the same time the military must be painfully aware that Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamists within the army itself after he capitulated to Israel.
While the SCAF may consider the Muslim Brotherhood a crucial ally, and while Islam is deeply and historically rooted in the Egyptian military (unlike Turkey, whose military was long associated with the secular Kemalist tradition), the Islamist forces may not be able to produce the kind of reliable and stable Israel-tolerant regime the US needs in Egypt. Israel itself may or may not be willing or able to carry out minor compromises (such as halting the expansion of settlements and the establishment of a flimsy Palestinian "mini-state") to make such a grand compromise possible.
This international situation sets the framework and interacts with the domestic situation, including the changing moods among the people themselves. The dynamic nature of this interaction can be seen in the way that the revolt in Egypt has already posed problems for the present world order in the region and beyond, and the way international developments have reverberated in Egypt. For instance, the toppling of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, in a positive way, and, negatively, the almost universal assumption (even in the Egyptian Communist Party and among other self-identified Marxists) that the experience of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of a revolutionary pole in the world with the capitalist coup following the death of Mao in China have "proven" that socialism has failed. Everyone refers to the 25 January "revolution", but people's concept of revolution is extremely limited in scope.
In short, there are real obstacles to the establishment of a durable reactionary regime in Egypt. The future can't be predicted, but there are substantial factors that might prolong the present political instability. That is all the more reason why those who really want to free the Egyptian people from all their chains should not throw away the possibility that the movement that brought down one of the world's most powerful and hated tyrants could go on to achieve the revolutionary political power that Egypt and the world needs to see emerge from this difficult, complicated but still unsettled and potentially favourable situation.
This discouragement is largely the product of the unfolding of events since then, both what has happened and what has not. While many activists express the hope that the political awakening of the Egyptian people may lead to basic social change some time in the future, right now their foremost concern is that the situation may become more difficult and even disastrous, both in terms of political repression and a closing of minds among a large part of the people.
No one chants "The people and the army are one hand" any more, as they did when the army's refusal to fire on protesters helped make Mubarak's dismissal possible. The illusion that the army would be at least neutral toward basic change began to fade after only a few months, even if people still try to cling to it. Driven by distinct class interests and ideologies, the highly heterogeneous social forces whose convergence brought down Mubarak are now pulling the country in different directions. Everyone knows that the army is going to play a key role, even if the generals, their American paymasters and the unpredictable unfolding of events have not decided exactly what that role will be.
The armed forces in Egypt have a monopoly on organized violence, as they do in every state, and economic holdings unparalleled in most other countries, along with the support of the US and other imperialist powers. Here they also benefit from whatever legitimacy the state organs still hold in the eyes of the people. Not a few people would like to see a difference between the Mubarak-era generals in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the army as an institution they consider patriotic. This is because of its leadership of the 1952 revolution that finally expelled the British occupiers and its role in defending the country against subsequent invasions by Britain, France and Israel.
Many hoped that Mubarak's downfall would be followed by the adoption of a new constitution that would set the framework for bringing about some sort of social change. But the idea that the "rule of law" could reflect anything but which classes and organizations dominate society received a hard blow in March, when the army, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, old regime forces and state-owned and other reactionary media, successfully pushed through a referendum approving the continuation of the old constitution with a few changes for the worse. Unexpectedly, the voter turnout was extremely high, and more than 70 percent of the ballots approved the proposal. This emboldened the armed forces to publicly discuss scenarios such as the promulgation of articles for a new constitution by its own decree, or its own selection of the bulk of the members of the committee to write a new constitution that would give the military the last say on all major questions and continue to shield it from civilian oversight.
The process of parliamentary elections is scheduled to begin in late November and last through January. At first the military promised it would govern for only six months. Now it says it will turn over power to a civilian president in 2013. Most people once saw the election of a parliament and its selection of a committee to write a new constitution as a possible peaceful pathway to change. Now a few have concluded that the real purpose of this process is to re-legitimize the state and disperse the flames that still flair up in the street, both aspects meant to make revolutionary change more difficult, without changing anything basic in society. But even those who still hold out hope for parliamentary democracy in a general way have decided that at this point, the only open question is whether the new parliament will be a circus of disparate forces unwilling and unable to change anything, or one dominated by Islamists seeking to move society backward.
Already, even those forces that identify with the revolt who are most focused on electoral activity are pessimistic about the outcome. The only ones who seem to be looking forward to the polling are the Islamists, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the revolt in the beginning, and the Salafists, fundamentalists who hold that Egyptians should live more like Muslims in Mohammed's day, a society of women in burkas and men in beards and robes, though everyone would still have a mobile (cell phone).
An increasingly aggressive army
For many people, hopes for something positive from the army's "hand" vanished by April, when, instead of leaving it to the police, the armed forces themselves assaulted demonstrators challenging their rule, killing two protesters. But far worse occurred on 9 October, when Christians and secularists protesting the armed forces' failure to react to a wave of arson attacks on Coptic churches were themselves attacked, leaving 28 dead and hundreds of wounded and injured.
The demonstrators had marched across central Cairo to Maspero, the headquarters of the state-owned television services. Videos posted online show army armoured vehicles barrelling through the crowd, running over or crushing to death a dozen people. But the fighting was complicated, involving demonstrators, soldiers and a horde of unidentified civilians who charged the crowd and may have fought against soldiers too.
The difficulty in determining exactly what happened reflects the variety of forces at work. It also feeds the widespread feeling that mysterious dark forces are manipulating the situation and seizing the political initiative, a sentiment that leaves many former participants in the revolt paralysed and fearful.
Who were the men in civilian clothing who rampaged against the demonstrators under cover of night? Some believe that they were people from nearby slums organized by Muslim fundamentalists. Ridding Egypt of its Christian minority is a pillar of their programme, along with the institutionalization of the subjugation of women to men and the harsh punishments prescribed by sharia (Islamic law), such as cutting off the right hand of thieves.
Others believe that these men were members of the former state security service and the militia run by Mubarak's National Democratic Party, aiming to derail the people's movement by fomenting divisions between Muslims and Christians. It is sometimes pointed out that the leadership of the Coptic Church supported the old regime and continues to play a conservative political and social role. Some people argue that Israeli agents were also at work amid all this. While Israeli agents cannot possibly be a main factor in such events, as a few people would like to think, they are certainly present and active. (One was recently caught and expelled.)
A similar fog of confusion hovers around the September protests at the Israeli embassy after the SCAF failed to respond to a cross-border Israeli attack. Israeli soldiers, allegedly pursuing Palestinian fighters, killed six Egyptian policemen. Most people say that the protest was legitimate but the actual penetration into the embassy was a provocation meant to discredit the movement. Others believe that action, which forced the Israeli ambassador to flee the country, saved Egypt's honour. The feeling that there is no reliable information – even some people who were at these events say they aren't sure exactly who did what – is related, although not identical to, the question as to whether or not the movement should target the SCAF, instead of giving the military the benefit of a doubt.
But the armed forces government has made its attitude clear in regard to the Maspero incident in a way that sheds light much more broadly. During that protest, state television broadcasters called on "honest Egyptians" to come to Maspero to fight in defence of soldiers they said were being massacred by Christians. Actually, most of the dead were Copts; no soldiers were killed. In the following weeks the armed forces investigated the charges that it had murdered protesters and found itself innocent. There was not the slightest effort to identify the civilian assailants. While the armed forces' relations with the Coptic Church remain strained, the only named targets of the investigation so far have been secular youth who had spearheaded the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and had come to demonstrate against the repression of the Copts.
Plainly, whoever organized the assaults, the army is at the very least protecting them. Further, especially given these facts, there is no reason to simply accept the army's claim that its soldiers had not been issued live rounds and could not have done the shooting.
Two well-known young secular activists were brought in for formal interrogation. Both refused to cooperate. One was released. The other, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a well-known blogger and leading activist previously jailed in 2009, declared that he would refuse to answer questions because the army could not impartially investigate itself, and because the military had no right to try civilians. He was accused of stealing army weapons and destroying state property. Most people who don't support the army consider the idea that he attacked and trashed an armoured vehicle nothing but an action-film fantasy. Even more ominously, he was charged with the content of his blog itself, criticism of the armed forces which, the SCAF said, had fomented the violence.
The young man was remanded to prison for two weeks, pending a decision about what to do with him. Late on the night of 31 October, several thousand people – mostly bloggers and their readers and others mobilized at the last minute on the Net, and thus by definition mainly youth and others from the upper middle classes – marched across Cairo to a prison to support Fattah and another blogger, Maikel Nabil, who has been on hunger strike to protest his two-year sentence for having written, "The army and the people were never one hand." The military sent Nabil to a mental hospital, but the doctors, decrying this repressive manoeuvre, refused to admit him. Fattah, from the cell he shared with many common prisoners, wrote a searing and widely reprinted blog about once again finding himself in Mubarak's dungeons even after the fall of Mubarak. On 13 November the military renewed his imprisonment for at least another two weeks. There was a second, smaller march led by No to Military Trials, a human rights group that is one of the organisations most active in the streets now. (en.nomiltrials.com)
In another late October demonstration, a similar crowd, along with a small Islamist party, had marched from Tahrir Square to Maspero and back to protest the prison death of a young man serving a short sentence on minor criminal charges. The authorities claimed he poisoned himself by swallowing drugs to keep them from being discovered. The protesters, remembering similar justifications for deaths in custody under Mubarak, were inclined to believe the victim's family and a doctor at the hospital where his corpse was taken, who said that the police had forced soapy water down his throat and up his anus until it killed him. While unlike the bloggers, Essam Attah was not a political prisoner but seems to have been a victim of police repression of lower-class youth in general, these events underlined the fact that the police and armed forces are continuing and even stepping up the kind of atrocities that led people to revolt against and drive out Mubarak – and that the police and armed forces are one hand.
Military tribunals have tried bout 12,000 people for political and criminal offences since the armed forces took over. After its televised opening session, Mubarak's trial for murder and other crimes has been indefinitely postponed. The civilian courts have been discredited as utterly corrupt and part of the Mubarak '"system"and are often not able to function. During a rowdy October confrontation between lawyers and judges about proposed court procedures, the magistrates pulled their pistols and began shooting into the air to clear the room. The Mubarak-appointed judges are reviled as pirates licensed to rob the poor, middle class and even the unconnected rich.
This illustrates the broader circumstances in a society where for a half-century the regime openly or effectively appointed officials in all institutions. The authorities from top to bottom are despised as repressive, arbitrary and usually corrupt. For instance, even at the University of Cairo, surprisingly not a political hotbed, there have been important struggles to bring in independent department and faculty heads. The same almost total control that made the Mubarak regime seen invincible has produced a vacuum of legitimacy and moral authority that the generals have had great difficulty filling once people lost their fear and inertia.
A relative ebb
Yet the recent protests have been relatively small and narrowly based compared to January and February. Back then factory workers and other poor people were the first Egyptians to confront the regime's security forces, in the city of Suez. Hundreds of thousands of people of all social classes – Muslims, Copts and non-believers alike – picked up stones and sticks to fight the police and Mubarak thugs and occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and another public space in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city.
Now Cairo and Alexandria witness walkouts, occupations, street blockades and other protests by scores or hundreds of people every day, but they haven't sparked the larger-scale outpouring hoped for. The biggest actions lately have been in small cities.
In Damietta, a Nile river port city north of Cairo, tens of thousands of residents blocked traffic during the first two weeks of November, demanding the relocation of a Canadian-Egyptian fertilizer plant that is poisoning the water and killing people. The army tried and failed to end the port blockade. Police opened fire 13 November, killing two demonstrators. In a concession that is not infrequent in this kind of situation, especially when faced with what are formulated as non-political issues, the government then agreed to shut the plant down, but people would not believe the authorities' promises and some stayed in the streets.
In Aswan, far to the south of Cairo on the Nile, hundreds of Nubians (a marginalized minority) marched that same day to protest the police shooting of a boatman, the third such killing in recent months. Here, too, the unrest is continuing.
Why the political movement has dwindled and even retreated overall, at least for now, despite countercurrents, is a question as complex and difficult to answer as it is important. Two reasons are obvious. One is that nine months ago there was a convergence of young bloggers and similar activists (the Facebook page of one of the main organizations had hundreds of thousands of "friends"), the urban lower middle class, workers and other urban poor, veteran leftists, a whole section of capitalists not admitted to Mubarak's inner circle, and at a certain point the US and its Egyptian generals, all convinced that Mubarak must go and that his son Gamal must not be allowed to perpetuate the regime. There is no similar consensus today about the rule of the army and especially about what kind of regime should be established instead.
Another, related reason, is that developments since Mubarak's downfall have served to drive many ordinary people, especially the most downtrodden, into passivity. Whereas for a short time they believed, correctly, that their actions could change history, now they find themselves spectators to almost all the traditional left and liberal parties' obsession with the electoral process. Deliberately or not, these forces have turned their back on the conscious actions of the broadest masses.
The self-defence committees formed in poorer neighbourhoods during the revolt to protect people and their homes from criminals freed and encouraged by the police seem to have become inactive. At the same time, the police have responded to the almost universal (and now freely expressed) hatred of them by refusing to deal with crime and even to organize traffic. Policemen can be seen idly chatting at the almost permanently gridlocked intersections and roundabouts that make driving a car in this city of 20 million both a privilege and a bit like owning a portable tomb. In the face of a daily life that feels increasingly chaotic and often scary, there is a widespread longing for some sort of order, security and stability. If daily life cannot fundamentally change, at least it could become less exhausting.
In this situation, the Islamists are considered likely to win far more votes than any other party, including leftists who try to attract the lower masses with platforms calling for a minimum wage and so on. With their combination of religious proselytizing and supplying basic social services the government fails to provide, such as health clinics and subsidized food on religious holidays, the Islamists are usually the only organized forces visible in poor neighbourhoods. They are asserting dominance among the educated classes as well.
It must be left to other occasions to more deeply examine the variety of Islamist forces and the question of Islam, the ineffectual traditional left and the fundamental questions about society that, to the dismay of the left and liberals, the Islamists have insisted on loudly raising, such as whether the patriarchal rule of men over women that characterizes every dimension of Egyptian daily life should be given the dignity of law. For now, it is enough to say that the non-revolutionary parties that call themselves socialist or communist, and the openly pro-capitalist forces like Mohammed ElBaradei (the former International Atomic Energy Agency head seen by nearly every non-Islamic party and most secularists as the only presidential candidate who could challenge the Muslim Brotherhood and former Mubarak collaborators), all basically agree on the impossibility, at least for now, of a radical change in Egyptian society. They also agree, explicitly in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, that there is no alternative to the kind of IMF-approved and globalisation-dependent economic policies Mubarak pledged to carry out. Tellingly, although the Brotherhood is very active in Damietta, it has ignored the mass movement against the fertilizer plant.
It is ironic that many, although far from all, of the young activists who provided the spark for the 25 January revolt and are still persisting in the streets call themselves "liberals". What's meant is not exactly the European definition, believers in unfettered markets, nor an analogy to the American Democratic Party, but that the achievement of "human rights" – the political liberties so cruelly denied by the Mubarak regime – would constitute a revolution sufficient to transform Egypt. This illusion is made all the stronger by the military regime's efforts to block the establishment of the kind of parliamentary political system and formal rights that characterize most of the imperialist countries. However, even if this goal could be achieved – which is still an unanswered question – it could not offer the possibility of radical economic, political, social and ideological transformation without which daily life and Egypt's fate would remain pretty much the same, whether wrapped in "democratic" or Islamic trappings or some combination.
Contradictory factors
This is a difficult situation for the Egyptian people, but also a very difficult one for their enemies, the Western powers that have subordinated the country's economy and politics to their interests and the native exploiters and would-be exploiters governing in junior partnership with the imperialists.
First of all, there has been the kind of political awakening among the people that comes only at special moments in history. Certainly nothing like the majority of Egypt's 80 million people, but certainly millions, have, literally, taken history into their own hands. This includes many of the dispossessed who are ordinarily forbidden, by force of custom, culture and sometimes arms, to have anything to say about who rules, how and for what. During the Mubarak years, no one dared discuss politics in public. Even friends held their conversations as far from other ears as possible. These days the clash of opinions takes place in many neighbourhoods and is often deafening.
At the same time, the often repeated phrase that "The Egyptian people have lost their fear", and therefore can be counted on to continue standing up no matter what, must be analysed scientifically to understand the contradictoriness of this phenomenon. If for 18 days so many people from diverse social strata were willing to risk death rather than go on living as before, that is related to the fact that they believed, and correctly so, that their actions could make a crucial difference. If today so many of these same people have adopted a "wait and see attitude", that is because this now seems like the most reasonable alternative to them – within the framework of the situation as it is presented to them. While there are disparate factors at work in making a revolutionary moment, surely the masses of people cannot be inspired to risk everything unless at least a core of people among them have been brought to a basic understanding of why their lives and the world are the way they are and how the people themselves can transform them.
Hardly anyone expected Mubarak to be brought down the way he was. The first people who came to Tahrir Square on 25 January expected to go home a few hours later after just another, if much bigger, demonstration. Now that the people have shown what they are capable of, it would be criminal if those who consider themselves revolutionaries remain content with reducing the masses' activity to choosing the "least bad" in a list of uninspiring candidates for office, or anything else that does not build on and seek to take the revolt further, and to a decisive conclusion.
As for the least bad alternative, the imperialists and their Egyptian flunkies do not have what they consider good choices themselves.
A military government, or a civilian government whose decisions are openly subject to military approval, may not be acceptable even to many people who are not remotely revolutionary, including big capitalists and other inherently non-anti-imperialist forces, but the US and its local generals may decide that the domination of the Egyptian people requires that. The Muslim Brotherhood has repeatedly expressed its willingness to maintain Egypt's economic, political and military subordination to the US, but Washington may not have decided yet whether such a relationship is feasible and desirable.
The question of Israel make this all the more complex. A fierce hatred of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and aggression, threats and interference in Egypt is a central factor in the country's political life and people's thinking, including among the lower classes. Often (although not always), it is coupled with hatred for the US for sustaining Israel, the two wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., not to mention unstinting American support for Mubarak. While scratching off Mubarak's name from squares, train stations and maps, the Egyptian military is now using the TV stations and other media at its disposal to promote Mubarak's predecessor in more than a half century of military rule, Anwar Sadat, as the only Egyptian leader able to inflict a severe military blow on Israel (in the 1973 war). At the same time the military must be painfully aware that Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamists within the army itself after he capitulated to Israel.
While the SCAF may consider the Muslim Brotherhood a crucial ally, and while Islam is deeply and historically rooted in the Egyptian military (unlike Turkey, whose military was long associated with the secular Kemalist tradition), the Islamist forces may not be able to produce the kind of reliable and stable Israel-tolerant regime the US needs in Egypt. Israel itself may or may not be willing or able to carry out minor compromises (such as halting the expansion of settlements and the establishment of a flimsy Palestinian "mini-state") to make such a grand compromise possible.
This international situation sets the framework and interacts with the domestic situation, including the changing moods among the people themselves. The dynamic nature of this interaction can be seen in the way that the revolt in Egypt has already posed problems for the present world order in the region and beyond, and the way international developments have reverberated in Egypt. For instance, the toppling of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, in a positive way, and, negatively, the almost universal assumption (even in the Egyptian Communist Party and among other self-identified Marxists) that the experience of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of a revolutionary pole in the world with the capitalist coup following the death of Mao in China have "proven" that socialism has failed. Everyone refers to the 25 January "revolution", but people's concept of revolution is extremely limited in scope.
In short, there are real obstacles to the establishment of a durable reactionary regime in Egypt. The future can't be predicted, but there are substantial factors that might prolong the present political instability. That is all the more reason why those who really want to free the Egyptian people from all their chains should not throw away the possibility that the movement that brought down one of the world's most powerful and hated tyrants could go on to achieve the revolutionary political power that Egypt and the world needs to see emerge from this difficult, complicated but still unsettled and potentially favourable situation.
A planetary disaster foretold – Global warming, its causes, effects and perspectives
7 November 2011 A World to Win News Service. Following is a translation of an article that appeared on the Web site Aurora Roja, of the Revolutionary Organization of Mexico. (http://aurora-roja.blogspot.com ). The footnotes and illustrations are available in the online version.
The main causes of global warming are the use of oil, gas and coal, as well as deforestation.
The planet is getting warmer because of the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. The most important of these is carbon dioxide (CO2), produced by burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. The second most important cause is deforestation.
Carbon dioxide is a naturally-produced gas. For example, human beings and animals in general inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The problem is that the more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the more the atmosphere traps the sun's heat which otherwise would be radiated out into space. This makes the planet heat up in the same way that a greenhouse captures the sun's heat and heats up inside, although this effect is the product of a different process.
Furthermore, trees and plants in general absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, so that the loss of forests and the destruction of other vegetation also contributes to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming.
The amount of carbon dioxide emitted every year went up by about eighty percent between 1970 and 2004, and the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during this period increased by seventy percent. In addition to carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases include methane (produced by the use of coal and natural gas, the burning of biomass (organic matter), rubbish incineration and other factors), nitrous oxide (also produced by burning fossil fuels and hi-tech farming) and gases containing halogens (the result of various industrial processes and intensive agriculture).
The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing every year, from 316 ppm (parts per million) in 1959 to 399 ppm in 2010. In 1988 it surpassed 350 ppm, the level that many scientists consider the limit if drastic climate changes are to be avoided. Worse, the average annual increase more than doubled in this period.
These increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are due to the way capitalism has industrialized the world, in a manner that is highly dependent on the use of fossil fuels because that is the most profitable energy source. Three-quarters of all the energy produced in the world comes from oil, natural gas and coal. The main sources of greenhouse gases are the production of energy (25.9 percent); industry (19.4 percent); burning down forests to clear land (17.4 percent); agriculture, basically intensive, hi-tech agriculture (13.5 percent); transport (13.1 percent); commercial and residential buildings, especially because of fossil fuel heating (7.9 percent) and rubbish (2.8 percent).
The economies of the imperialist countries (the so-called "developed countries") are responsible for the majority of global warming, and much of the greenhouse gases produced in the rest of the world are the result of the capitalist production systems encouraged by capital investment from these "rich" countries. In the last 50 years about three-quarters (75 percent) of the accumulated greenhouse gases have been produced in the industrialized countries that represent only 20 percent of the world's population, while the remaining quarter has been produced in the oppressed countries that are home to 80 percent of the world's population. The United States has barely four percent of the world's population and yet it emits 25 percent of the carbon dioxide and 36 percent of all greenhouse gases.
The planet is already getting warmer
These factors have already brought about global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ), which unites the efforts of a large number of scientists appointed by governments under the auspices of the United Nations concluded, in its 2007 report, that "the warming of the climate system is unequivocal [beyond reasonable doubt], as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level."
Further, global warming has accelerated during the last decades. "For the global average, warming in the last century has occurred in two phases, from the 1910s to the 1940s (.035° C), and more strongly from the 1970s to the present (0.55° C). An increasing rate of warming has been taking place over the last 25 years, and 11 of the 12 warmest years on record occurred in the past 12 years."
Climate change is already producing devastation
Global warming is already causing major destruction. The IPCC report concludes,"Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes, especially by rising temperatures." During the last few decades, the number of heat waves has increased, more regions are experiencing droughts, and, paradoxically, because of the same climatological disequilibrium, there has also been an increase in the number of storms and hurricanes resulting in flooding. According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in the US, over the past 30 years climate change has caused four times as many natural disasters than in the first 75 years of the twentieth century.
It is estimated that global warming is already killing 15,000 people every year due to the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, storms, floods, heat waves and parasitical diseases. Natural disasters are already killing 60,000 people, and many millions more die every year, according to the World Health Organization, due to causes that global warming and other forms of the destruction of the environment have intensified and will intensify further. This includes the death of approximately 1.2 million people because of the contamination of the air, 2.2 million because of diarrhoea due to the lack of clean water, and 3.5 million due to malnutrition.
Sea levels are already rising, and the rate of that rise has gone up sharply in recent decades because of the melting of glaciers, ice caps and polar ice, leading to more severe flooding in coastal areas and islands. Many polar species face extinction. The melting of glaciers is also eliminating important sources of fresh water in various densely populated regions.
The worst is yet to come
But the worst is yet to come. The IPCC states, "If greenhouse gases continue to grow at their actual rhythm or a greater one, warming will be intensified and many changes will take place in the global climate system during the 21st century." Its estimates of temperature increases in this century vary according to various presuppositions, but they range from a minimum of 1.1º C and a maximum of 6.4º C temperatures above the already high levels of 1980-1999. In particular, given the continuing intensive use of fossil fuels and rapid economic development, even if more efficient technologies are put to use, the IPCC projects a temperature rise of between 2.4 and 6.4º C by the end of the century, with the most probable increase being 4º C.
Due to pressures from the governments involved, the IPCC's estimates are conservative. In 2001 they predicted a temperature increase of between 0.15° and 0.30° over the next five years, but the reality exceeded their predictions – the actual increase was 0.33°. An article in the prestigious scholarly review Science indicates that the last time atmospheric carbon levels were anything like those observed today, 15-20 million years ago, global temperatures rose to between 3 and 6° C hotter than today and sea levels rose to between 25 and 40 metres higher than now. This suggests that even if the present level of carbon in the atmosphere were stabilized – which is already impossible – temperatures would rise to the upper levels of what the IPCC estimates could occur if greenhouse gases were to rise.
The coming planetary disaster
The climate change triggered by world capitalist industrialization is already causing disasters and will bring more, although it is difficult to predict them with scientific certainty. One reason is the uncertainties involved in predicting the magnitude of temperature change, both because of the complexity of climatic processes and because various human factors are also involved: the rate of economic growth, population growth and above all what measures are taken (or not) to abandon the use of fossil fuels and stop deforestation. Another reason is that although global warming is a major danger in itself, it is not the only ecological problem. Global capitalist production is setting off other environmental crises and it is difficult to predict the interaction between various harmful changes. It is even possible that a chain reaction could occur such that ecological destruction could become more intense and widespread than the projected damage caused by global warming itself. For a multifaceted analysis of the ecological crises the world is undergoing, we recommend the special issue of Revolution on this subject (issue no. 199, revcom.us). What is clear in any case is that today's capitalist production set-up is destroying the global ecological balance and threatening the future of many species, including the human race.
Although there were far higher temperatures millions of years ago, before the existence of human beings, one important difference with today's world is that the warming is taking place at a fast rate, due to capitalist industrialization, so that species will not have a chance to evolve to adapt to these rapid changes in the environment, potentially destroying entire ecosystems. Even the IPCC's conservative estimates indicate that a temperature jump of 2º C (over the prevailing temperatures in 1980-1999) would put 30 percent of the planet's species at risk of extinction, and a leap of 4º could bring about the extinction of 40 percent of the world's species. A change of that magnitude would have incalculable effects on the environment and the earth's ability to sustain its present human population.
James Hansen, chief climatologists for NASA (the American space flight agency) has provided an eloquent and terrifying projection of the potential changes from global warming: if decisive measures to "defuse the global warming time bomb" are not taken soon, "it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control... more warming is already 'in-the-pipeline', delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean. And climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a 'perfect storm', a global cataclysm, are assembled.
"Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic
sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.
"In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be re-established in any time frame that humanity can conceive.
"Species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years.
"The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation. These conclusions are based on paleoclimate data showing how the Earth responded to past levels of greenhouse gases and on observations showing how the world is responding to today’s carbon dioxide amount. The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.
"Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion
of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed. Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.
"Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid."
What can be done to prevent this disaster?
There has been much controversy about the magnitude of the changes necessary to prevent this disaster. Partly this is because of a scientific problem: what we're seeing today, a rapid warming process and the extensive contamination of the globe by the modern capitalist process of production, has never existed before in all of the Earth's history. A much bigger source of confusion is the disinformation being spread by the defenders of the economic and political interests of today's system, both powerful economic forces that minimize the problem of global warming because they need to maximize their short-term profits through the use of fossil fuels, and the political representatives of this system that give nice speeches about the need to stop global warming while trying to create the illusion that something is being done about it, when in reality the problem is getting worse and worse, faster and faster.
There is a basic consensus among scientists that global warming is real, that it represents grave dangers and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. The IPCC concludes, "The stabilization of CO2 emissions at their present levels will lead to a constant increment in CO2 levels in the atmosphere during the 21st century and beyond." It should be emphasized that these emissions are not stabilizing but rather increasing from year to year at an accelerating rate. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions have to be reduced.? The question is: How?
One of the most "optimistic" estimates, one that is in line with the economic and political interests of the system comes from a recent study by the United Nations Environment Programme arguing that an annual level of greenhouse gas emissions at the equivalent of 39 to 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (a figure obtained by converting other greenhouse gases to their CO2 equivalents) in 2020 would very likely suffice to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. This would mean a reduction of only 4-9 gigatonnes from the 2009 level of 48 gigatonnes, or in other words, a 8-19 percent drop from present levels. But they have to admit that as things are going now, emissions will probably reach 56 gigatonnes in 2020. The study was unabashedly published for the harmful and absurd political purpose of demonstrating that the Copenhagen climate summit negotiations could have achieved a serious advance. The study seems to represent a dangerous underestimation of the problem – but even the conference failed to agree even on that far too limited goal.
It is commonly accepted in scientific circles that what is really needed is a reduction of world-wide greenhouse gas emissions by about half. Other studies, including one by NASA scientist Hansen indicate that avoiding major climatic changes would require lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million, a level already surpassed in 1988, as said above, and one that would require even greater emission reductions.
There is accumulating evidence that drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions are required. A basic problem is that once carbon is liberated, it remains in the atmosphere for a long time, so that we have not yet seen the full effects of the emissions of the past and present. The study in the magazine Science cited above used bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice to analyse the composition of the atmosphere with a margin of error of only 14 ppm, with the surprising conclusion, cited above, that the carbon dioxide levels 15-20 million years ago, similar to those of today, produced temperatures of 3-6° C higher than today, changes that would be catastrophic for the world's ecosystems and human society. The study also demonstrated a very close relationship between carbon levels and temperature changes (and sea levels).
A study published in Nature in 2006 analysing a period 55 million years ago when there was rapid climate change associated with large-scale greenhouse gas emissions discovered that the Arctic experienced incredible temperatures – more than 23° C, far warmer than anything that has been projected by the climate models now in common use. The three dozen authors who participated in the study concluded that these models may fail to take into account major factors and may seriously underestimate the possible effects. Another scientific study analysing climate changes in the Middle Ages concluded that the retroactive effect of warming, which actually triggers the liberation of more carbon dioxide, could lead to temperature rises of 15 to 78 percent or more, far above the IPCC's estimates.
One of the most stunning of the recent studies, carried out by the climatologists Ken Caldeira and Damon Matthews, using the sophisticated model of the planetary environmental system developed by the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institute, found that to stop global warming carbon emissions basically have to be reduced to zero. Most previous studies had focused on how much emissions should be reduced to stabilize the level of carbon in the atmosphere, without taking into account that the cumulative effects of carbon emissions mean that a stable level of carbon does not mean a stable climate. By studying the impact of different emissions levels over the next 500 years, they found that each emission produces a warming effect, so that only by reducing emissions to zero can the warming already under way be halted. According to their model, even if emissions were reduced to zero, plants and seas would gradually absorb the carbon but temperatures would remain high for 500 years after emissions stopped. More emissions, even at a lower level than today, would worsen the situation for centuries.
Only a radical change in the system of production can save the planet
Beyond the legitimate scientific debates, only representatives of a system basically driven by the necessity for immediate profits, with a deep disregard for the future of the planet and its living things, including human beings, could continue to keep their foot on the accelerator as the planet heads to the brink of a cliff with the vain hope that just maybe the abyss into which we will fall isn't so deep after all. That exactly describes the system we live under, the world capitalist-imperialist system. Its representatives keep babbling about ecology, sustainable development, etc., even as each imperialist power and every bloc of capital hurtles blindly onward in a never-ending race to beat out the competition or die trying, in a dynamic that is at the very heart of the functioning of the capitalist system. The perfect illustration of the essential nature of this system is that as global warming shrinks the North Pole icecap, the imperialist powers and giant oil corporations have started to fight for control of the Arctic oilfields. All they can see in this ecological disaster is a way to make more profit.
Greenhouse gas emissions keep going up year after year, year after year temperatures increase, year after year the sea levels rise. The irrefutable numbers about the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere demonstrate a stark truth: nothing has really been done to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases and therefore global warming. Not the Kyoto Protocol, nor any UN conference, nor the "carbon credit markets" nor any of their supposed measures.
They haven't done anything and they won't, because stopping global warming would require a total restructuring of today's system of production to drastically cut back on and eventually eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and begin to reforest the planet instead of mercilessly deforesting it. The capitalist system cannot do that because its fundamental law is the competition between different capitals for the highest profits. We cannot continue to live under the system that created this problem and makes it worse with every passing day.
If we really want to save the planet, if we really want to save millions of species from extinction, if we really want to save humanity from a horrible future, what we need to do is make revolution – communist revolution.
The main causes of global warming are the use of oil, gas and coal, as well as deforestation.
The planet is getting warmer because of the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. The most important of these is carbon dioxide (CO2), produced by burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. The second most important cause is deforestation.
Carbon dioxide is a naturally-produced gas. For example, human beings and animals in general inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The problem is that the more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the more the atmosphere traps the sun's heat which otherwise would be radiated out into space. This makes the planet heat up in the same way that a greenhouse captures the sun's heat and heats up inside, although this effect is the product of a different process.
Furthermore, trees and plants in general absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, so that the loss of forests and the destruction of other vegetation also contributes to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming.
The amount of carbon dioxide emitted every year went up by about eighty percent between 1970 and 2004, and the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during this period increased by seventy percent. In addition to carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases include methane (produced by the use of coal and natural gas, the burning of biomass (organic matter), rubbish incineration and other factors), nitrous oxide (also produced by burning fossil fuels and hi-tech farming) and gases containing halogens (the result of various industrial processes and intensive agriculture).
The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing every year, from 316 ppm (parts per million) in 1959 to 399 ppm in 2010. In 1988 it surpassed 350 ppm, the level that many scientists consider the limit if drastic climate changes are to be avoided. Worse, the average annual increase more than doubled in this period.
These increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are due to the way capitalism has industrialized the world, in a manner that is highly dependent on the use of fossil fuels because that is the most profitable energy source. Three-quarters of all the energy produced in the world comes from oil, natural gas and coal. The main sources of greenhouse gases are the production of energy (25.9 percent); industry (19.4 percent); burning down forests to clear land (17.4 percent); agriculture, basically intensive, hi-tech agriculture (13.5 percent); transport (13.1 percent); commercial and residential buildings, especially because of fossil fuel heating (7.9 percent) and rubbish (2.8 percent).
The economies of the imperialist countries (the so-called "developed countries") are responsible for the majority of global warming, and much of the greenhouse gases produced in the rest of the world are the result of the capitalist production systems encouraged by capital investment from these "rich" countries. In the last 50 years about three-quarters (75 percent) of the accumulated greenhouse gases have been produced in the industrialized countries that represent only 20 percent of the world's population, while the remaining quarter has been produced in the oppressed countries that are home to 80 percent of the world's population. The United States has barely four percent of the world's population and yet it emits 25 percent of the carbon dioxide and 36 percent of all greenhouse gases.
The planet is already getting warmer
These factors have already brought about global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ), which unites the efforts of a large number of scientists appointed by governments under the auspices of the United Nations concluded, in its 2007 report, that "the warming of the climate system is unequivocal [beyond reasonable doubt], as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level."
Further, global warming has accelerated during the last decades. "For the global average, warming in the last century has occurred in two phases, from the 1910s to the 1940s (.035° C), and more strongly from the 1970s to the present (0.55° C). An increasing rate of warming has been taking place over the last 25 years, and 11 of the 12 warmest years on record occurred in the past 12 years."
Climate change is already producing devastation
Global warming is already causing major destruction. The IPCC report concludes,"Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes, especially by rising temperatures." During the last few decades, the number of heat waves has increased, more regions are experiencing droughts, and, paradoxically, because of the same climatological disequilibrium, there has also been an increase in the number of storms and hurricanes resulting in flooding. According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in the US, over the past 30 years climate change has caused four times as many natural disasters than in the first 75 years of the twentieth century.
It is estimated that global warming is already killing 15,000 people every year due to the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, storms, floods, heat waves and parasitical diseases. Natural disasters are already killing 60,000 people, and many millions more die every year, according to the World Health Organization, due to causes that global warming and other forms of the destruction of the environment have intensified and will intensify further. This includes the death of approximately 1.2 million people because of the contamination of the air, 2.2 million because of diarrhoea due to the lack of clean water, and 3.5 million due to malnutrition.
Sea levels are already rising, and the rate of that rise has gone up sharply in recent decades because of the melting of glaciers, ice caps and polar ice, leading to more severe flooding in coastal areas and islands. Many polar species face extinction. The melting of glaciers is also eliminating important sources of fresh water in various densely populated regions.
The worst is yet to come
But the worst is yet to come. The IPCC states, "If greenhouse gases continue to grow at their actual rhythm or a greater one, warming will be intensified and many changes will take place in the global climate system during the 21st century." Its estimates of temperature increases in this century vary according to various presuppositions, but they range from a minimum of 1.1º C and a maximum of 6.4º C temperatures above the already high levels of 1980-1999. In particular, given the continuing intensive use of fossil fuels and rapid economic development, even if more efficient technologies are put to use, the IPCC projects a temperature rise of between 2.4 and 6.4º C by the end of the century, with the most probable increase being 4º C.
Due to pressures from the governments involved, the IPCC's estimates are conservative. In 2001 they predicted a temperature increase of between 0.15° and 0.30° over the next five years, but the reality exceeded their predictions – the actual increase was 0.33°. An article in the prestigious scholarly review Science indicates that the last time atmospheric carbon levels were anything like those observed today, 15-20 million years ago, global temperatures rose to between 3 and 6° C hotter than today and sea levels rose to between 25 and 40 metres higher than now. This suggests that even if the present level of carbon in the atmosphere were stabilized – which is already impossible – temperatures would rise to the upper levels of what the IPCC estimates could occur if greenhouse gases were to rise.
The coming planetary disaster
The climate change triggered by world capitalist industrialization is already causing disasters and will bring more, although it is difficult to predict them with scientific certainty. One reason is the uncertainties involved in predicting the magnitude of temperature change, both because of the complexity of climatic processes and because various human factors are also involved: the rate of economic growth, population growth and above all what measures are taken (or not) to abandon the use of fossil fuels and stop deforestation. Another reason is that although global warming is a major danger in itself, it is not the only ecological problem. Global capitalist production is setting off other environmental crises and it is difficult to predict the interaction between various harmful changes. It is even possible that a chain reaction could occur such that ecological destruction could become more intense and widespread than the projected damage caused by global warming itself. For a multifaceted analysis of the ecological crises the world is undergoing, we recommend the special issue of Revolution on this subject (issue no. 199, revcom.us). What is clear in any case is that today's capitalist production set-up is destroying the global ecological balance and threatening the future of many species, including the human race.
Although there were far higher temperatures millions of years ago, before the existence of human beings, one important difference with today's world is that the warming is taking place at a fast rate, due to capitalist industrialization, so that species will not have a chance to evolve to adapt to these rapid changes in the environment, potentially destroying entire ecosystems. Even the IPCC's conservative estimates indicate that a temperature jump of 2º C (over the prevailing temperatures in 1980-1999) would put 30 percent of the planet's species at risk of extinction, and a leap of 4º could bring about the extinction of 40 percent of the world's species. A change of that magnitude would have incalculable effects on the environment and the earth's ability to sustain its present human population.
James Hansen, chief climatologists for NASA (the American space flight agency) has provided an eloquent and terrifying projection of the potential changes from global warming: if decisive measures to "defuse the global warming time bomb" are not taken soon, "it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control... more warming is already 'in-the-pipeline', delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean. And climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a 'perfect storm', a global cataclysm, are assembled.
"Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic
sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.
"In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be re-established in any time frame that humanity can conceive.
"Species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years.
"The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation. These conclusions are based on paleoclimate data showing how the Earth responded to past levels of greenhouse gases and on observations showing how the world is responding to today’s carbon dioxide amount. The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.
"Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion
of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed. Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.
"Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid."
What can be done to prevent this disaster?
There has been much controversy about the magnitude of the changes necessary to prevent this disaster. Partly this is because of a scientific problem: what we're seeing today, a rapid warming process and the extensive contamination of the globe by the modern capitalist process of production, has never existed before in all of the Earth's history. A much bigger source of confusion is the disinformation being spread by the defenders of the economic and political interests of today's system, both powerful economic forces that minimize the problem of global warming because they need to maximize their short-term profits through the use of fossil fuels, and the political representatives of this system that give nice speeches about the need to stop global warming while trying to create the illusion that something is being done about it, when in reality the problem is getting worse and worse, faster and faster.
There is a basic consensus among scientists that global warming is real, that it represents grave dangers and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. The IPCC concludes, "The stabilization of CO2 emissions at their present levels will lead to a constant increment in CO2 levels in the atmosphere during the 21st century and beyond." It should be emphasized that these emissions are not stabilizing but rather increasing from year to year at an accelerating rate. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions have to be reduced.? The question is: How?
One of the most "optimistic" estimates, one that is in line with the economic and political interests of the system comes from a recent study by the United Nations Environment Programme arguing that an annual level of greenhouse gas emissions at the equivalent of 39 to 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (a figure obtained by converting other greenhouse gases to their CO2 equivalents) in 2020 would very likely suffice to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. This would mean a reduction of only 4-9 gigatonnes from the 2009 level of 48 gigatonnes, or in other words, a 8-19 percent drop from present levels. But they have to admit that as things are going now, emissions will probably reach 56 gigatonnes in 2020. The study was unabashedly published for the harmful and absurd political purpose of demonstrating that the Copenhagen climate summit negotiations could have achieved a serious advance. The study seems to represent a dangerous underestimation of the problem – but even the conference failed to agree even on that far too limited goal.
It is commonly accepted in scientific circles that what is really needed is a reduction of world-wide greenhouse gas emissions by about half. Other studies, including one by NASA scientist Hansen indicate that avoiding major climatic changes would require lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million, a level already surpassed in 1988, as said above, and one that would require even greater emission reductions.
There is accumulating evidence that drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions are required. A basic problem is that once carbon is liberated, it remains in the atmosphere for a long time, so that we have not yet seen the full effects of the emissions of the past and present. The study in the magazine Science cited above used bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice to analyse the composition of the atmosphere with a margin of error of only 14 ppm, with the surprising conclusion, cited above, that the carbon dioxide levels 15-20 million years ago, similar to those of today, produced temperatures of 3-6° C higher than today, changes that would be catastrophic for the world's ecosystems and human society. The study also demonstrated a very close relationship between carbon levels and temperature changes (and sea levels).
A study published in Nature in 2006 analysing a period 55 million years ago when there was rapid climate change associated with large-scale greenhouse gas emissions discovered that the Arctic experienced incredible temperatures – more than 23° C, far warmer than anything that has been projected by the climate models now in common use. The three dozen authors who participated in the study concluded that these models may fail to take into account major factors and may seriously underestimate the possible effects. Another scientific study analysing climate changes in the Middle Ages concluded that the retroactive effect of warming, which actually triggers the liberation of more carbon dioxide, could lead to temperature rises of 15 to 78 percent or more, far above the IPCC's estimates.
One of the most stunning of the recent studies, carried out by the climatologists Ken Caldeira and Damon Matthews, using the sophisticated model of the planetary environmental system developed by the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institute, found that to stop global warming carbon emissions basically have to be reduced to zero. Most previous studies had focused on how much emissions should be reduced to stabilize the level of carbon in the atmosphere, without taking into account that the cumulative effects of carbon emissions mean that a stable level of carbon does not mean a stable climate. By studying the impact of different emissions levels over the next 500 years, they found that each emission produces a warming effect, so that only by reducing emissions to zero can the warming already under way be halted. According to their model, even if emissions were reduced to zero, plants and seas would gradually absorb the carbon but temperatures would remain high for 500 years after emissions stopped. More emissions, even at a lower level than today, would worsen the situation for centuries.
Only a radical change in the system of production can save the planet
Beyond the legitimate scientific debates, only representatives of a system basically driven by the necessity for immediate profits, with a deep disregard for the future of the planet and its living things, including human beings, could continue to keep their foot on the accelerator as the planet heads to the brink of a cliff with the vain hope that just maybe the abyss into which we will fall isn't so deep after all. That exactly describes the system we live under, the world capitalist-imperialist system. Its representatives keep babbling about ecology, sustainable development, etc., even as each imperialist power and every bloc of capital hurtles blindly onward in a never-ending race to beat out the competition or die trying, in a dynamic that is at the very heart of the functioning of the capitalist system. The perfect illustration of the essential nature of this system is that as global warming shrinks the North Pole icecap, the imperialist powers and giant oil corporations have started to fight for control of the Arctic oilfields. All they can see in this ecological disaster is a way to make more profit.
Greenhouse gas emissions keep going up year after year, year after year temperatures increase, year after year the sea levels rise. The irrefutable numbers about the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere demonstrate a stark truth: nothing has really been done to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases and therefore global warming. Not the Kyoto Protocol, nor any UN conference, nor the "carbon credit markets" nor any of their supposed measures.
They haven't done anything and they won't, because stopping global warming would require a total restructuring of today's system of production to drastically cut back on and eventually eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and begin to reforest the planet instead of mercilessly deforesting it. The capitalist system cannot do that because its fundamental law is the competition between different capitals for the highest profits. We cannot continue to live under the system that created this problem and makes it worse with every passing day.
If we really want to save the planet, if we really want to save millions of species from extinction, if we really want to save humanity from a horrible future, what we need to do is make revolution – communist revolution.
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