The Mosi Coup And The Left

Gerry Downing, September 15th
When I was a child in rural West Cork my father told me a story. A man had a horse and no fodder for him as Winter came on so he devised a plan to save him. He would teach his horse to live on the wind. All Winter long he trained his horse in this technique until Spring arrived. The horse was now fully trained but suddenly and inexplicably he died.

This tale popped into my head when I read the story as related in several of the left and self-proclaimed revolutionary left of the “revolution” in Egypt that was going so excellently well that it overthrew the dictator Morsi but then suddenly went so disastrously and inexplicably wrong, like the poor horse in West Cork. Al Sisi “stole” the “revolution”, the generals “hijacked” it etc. The Workers Revolutionary Party’s Marxist Review had a front page featuring those fireworks celebrations what we all remember was put on by the Army supporters, paid for, of course, by the Coptic Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris who organised the coup and mass mobilisations in collaboration with the CIA and the army:

“The mass movement created a huge crisis for the bourgeoisie and FORCED THE ARMY TO STEP IN and, after failing to reach any compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood, launch a coup to topple the Mursi presidency and replace it with as fake ‘intern’ government as a fig leaf for army rule”

Dave Wiltshire stupidly wrote on page 23, as if the horse had almost transformed the clever farmer into a millionaire except for his inexplicable death.

Some commentators have analysed the coup as a defeat for the working class and the hopes of a revolution. Rubbish, Wiltshire assures in an “after the Nazis us” mode:

“…the two wings of the bourgeoisie, representing the army and the Muslim Brotherhood are reduced to tearing each other apart while their imperialist masters look on in disarray”.

Alan Wood and the IMT are in exactly the same mode. In what must rate as one of the most idiotic pieces of “Marxism” ever, The Second Egyptian Revolution – IMT Statement, they boldly proclaim:

“Morsi has fallen. The magnificent movement of the masses has once more shown to the entire world the authentic face of the Egyptian people. It shows that the Revolution, which many even on the Left believed to have stalled, still possesses immense social reserves. Despite all the lying propaganda that tries to present the Revolution as a “coup”, this was a genuine popular insurrection, which spread like wildfire through every city and town in Egypt. This was the Second Egyptian Revolution.”

Workers Power’s Marcus Halaby manages to equate the coup which overthrew Morsi and restored the army with that which the coup of 2011 which overthrew Mubarak, thereby making a facile equation of a powerful revolutionary upsurge which forced the hand of the army and obliged them to concede a measure of democratic rights with a counter-revolutionary mobilisation of middleclass army supporters who demanded that the army topple Morsi and the army obliged because it had already ideologically won the mass movement to its side. This was a counter-revolution which set out to restore army rule and succeeded in its aims. And it then immediately went on to attack its opponents, Morsi supporters in the beginning but now the working class and the whole of progressive Egypt, in alliance with the army.

The Revolution that was a counterrevolution was the biggest mistake many on the left ever made. Just because of those 17 million on the streets, who could they all be wrong? How could the 99.999% of the world’s population who believed the world was flat in the Dark Ages all be wrong? They were wrong and they were counter-revolutionary. It is best we leave the final word to the Revolutionary Socialist of Egypt, the SWP’s Egypt section from a report in WSWS:

Ahmed Shawki, editor of the International Socialist Review, declared:

“The Tamarod movement broke the dam by providing a vehicle by which the mass of the Egyptian population were able to make Morsi pay a political price for his actions.”

He posed the question:

“Military coups usually herald the defeat of the revolutionary process—they are often the most extreme representation of the counterrevolution. Does the military’s intervention to remove Morsi, appoint a new president and promise new elections represent the victory of counterrevolution?”

He replied: “Absolutely not”. Shawki described the army’s intervention as merely an effort to “contain the movement… So while the military is in the streets and has overstepped the constitutional limits to its power, I believe that it will seek some means to quickly return power to a civilian authority. I don’t think it wants to hold state power.”

It is clear all these forces backed a horse who was about to die of starvation. But there is another horse who is alive and well, though it has suffered a serious defeat in this race won by the Army and the USA. And that is the Egyptian working class. But it surely must develop a better revolutionary leadership than these above who cannot distinguish revolution from counter-revolution. http://www.marxist.com/second-egyptian-revolution.htm