What the rulers portrayed as a non-violent “revolution” in Egypt was far from the truth.

“It’s happening people….It’s happening….The working class has entered the arena with full force today.”

That’s how one blogger described the strike of Cairo’s transit workers as they shut six garages: Nasr Station, Fateh Station, Ter’a Station, Amiriya Station, Mezzalat Station, Sawwah Station, just days before Mubarak’s fall. That was the end of public bus service in Cairo under the hated torturer’s regime.

The strike-wave that eventually sent Mubarak packing did not fall from the sky. Since 2004, more than 2,000,000 Egyptian workers have gone on strike and protested for higher pay, especially to fight privatization.

In Mubarak’s final days, tens of thousands of workers from Cairo to Alexandria to the Suez Canal were on strike. More than 6,000 workers for the Suez Canal Authority staged a sit-down strike at the international waterway. Al Jazeera reported more than 20,000 factory workers on strike.

In Mahallah, 24,000 textile workers walked out demanding raises and in solidarity with the protesters in Tahrir Square. Striking telecommunication workers attended mass protests in Cairo’s Ramses Square. Workers struck some military equipment factories, owned by the army. Subway, postal and Egypt Airline workers walked out. Laid-off workers at the Alexandria Library demanded their jobs back. Hospital workers at the Al Azhar University hospitals walked out. Temporary and contract workers demanded permanent jobs.

These were all wildcat, “illegal” strikes, as much against the leaders of the official government-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation as against the bosses and Mubarak himself.

The NY Times (2/9) reported, “In Helwan, 6,000 workers at the Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company went on strike….More than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in Quesna began a strike while about 5,000 unemployed youths stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor. Postal workers protested in shifts. In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated outside their headquarters.”

Riot police killed five people and wounded more than 100 during protests in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo. Protesters responded by burning police stations and other government buildings. In Asyut, protesters blocked a railway line. Protesters in Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, set fire to a government building when local officials ignored demands for better housing.

There are many lessons to be learned from the fall of Mubarak. One is the power of the workers to cast the deciding vote as to the direction and success or failure of any uprising or rebellion. We work among many of these same groups of workers. We are building a mass base for communist revolution.

Egypt shows that things can change very fast. It should encourage us to work harder in these very difficult times so when our opportunity comes, we will be able to fight for the leadership of the movement and lead the working class to power with communist revolution. That will not happen this time around in Egypt as Mubarak is replaced by the same butchers and torturers who have surrounded him for 30 years.JWhat the rulers portrayed as a non-violent “revolution” in Egypt was far from the truth.

“It’s happening people….It’s happening….The working class has entered the arena with full force today.”

That’s how one blogger described the strike of Cairo’s transit workers as they shut six garages: Nasr Station, Fateh Station, Ter’a Station, Amiriya Station, Mezzalat Station, Sawwah Station, just days before Mubarak’s fall. That was the end of public bus service in Cairo under the hated torturer’s regime.

The strike-wave that eventually sent Mubarak packing did not fall from the sky. Since 2004, more than 2,000,000 Egyptian workers have gone on strike and protested for higher pay, especially to fight privatization.

In Mubarak’s final days, tens of thousands of workers from Cairo to Alexandria to the Suez Canal were on strike. More than 6,000 workers for the Suez Canal Authority staged a sit-down strike at the international waterway. Al Jazeera reported more than 20,000 factory workers on strike.

In Mahallah, 24,000 textile workers walked out demanding raises and in solidarity with the protesters in Tahrir Square. Striking telecommunication workers attended mass protests in Cairo’s Ramses Square. Workers struck some military equipment factories, owned by the army. Subway, postal and Egypt Airline workers walked out. Laid-off workers at the Alexandria Library demanded their jobs back. Hospital workers at the Al Azhar University hospitals walked out. Temporary and contract workers demanded permanent jobs.

These were all wildcat, “illegal” strikes, as much against the leaders of the official government-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation as against the bosses and Mubarak himself.

The NY Times (2/9) reported, “In Helwan, 6,000 workers at the Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company went on strike….More than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in Quesna began a strike while about 5,000 unemployed youths stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor. Postal workers protested in shifts. In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated outside their headquarters.”

Riot police killed five people and wounded more than 100 during protests in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo. Protesters responded by burning police stations and other government buildings. In Asyut, protesters blocked a railway line. Protesters in Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, set fire to a government building when local officials ignored demands for better housing.

There are many lessons to be learned from the fall of Mubarak. One is the power of the workers to cast the deciding vote as to the direction and success or failure of any uprising or rebellion. We work among many of these same groups of workers. We are building a mass base for communist revolution.

Egypt shows that things can change very fast. It should encourage us to work harder in these very difficult times so when our opportunity comes, we will be able to fight for the leadership of the movement and lead the working class to power with communist revolution. That will not happen this time around in Egypt as Mubarak is replaced by the same butchers and torturers who have surrounded him for 30 years. 

U.S. rulers are pushing two big lies about dictator Mubarak’s ouster and the mass protests that forced it. First, Obama and the bosses’ media try to mislead workers into thinking that large numbers of unarmed protesters demanding elections can produce a “revolution” against fascist oppression. But an election installing another group of pro-capitalist politicians is not a revolution, which only results from a fundamental change in class rule. It occurs when the oppressed working class overthrows the oppressor capitalist class and its state.

Secondly, elite analysts offer capitalist audiences groundless reassurances of Egyptian “stability.” The pundits say — while ignoring workers’ fight-backs — that continuing military control there means business as usual in the greater Middle East, the oil-rich cornerstone of U.S. imperialism. Both falsehoods hold grave consequences for workers.

Mass Murderer Obama, Rulers’ Media Praise Peaceful Protest, Steer Workers Down Political Dead-End

Just after Mubarak fled, hypocrite-in-chief Obama, dripping with the blood of workers from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan, compared protesters in Egypt to Ghandi’s and Martin Luther King’s movements. “In Egypt,” said Obama, “it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” News broadcasts depicted crowds in Tahir Square exulting in “newfound freedom” and then dutifully tidying up afterwards.

There was almost a total blackout on strikes and mass violence against the police and government (see top article). Many of these strikes are continuing.

But Obama & Co. deliberately distort history. Whenever workers have significantly “bent the arc” of capitalist misery, it’s been through mass strikes and violent rebellions, not pacifism. King’s “turn-the-other-cheek” stance didn’t rid the U.S. of racism. Black rebellions in scores of cities across the U.S. that fought the military, not non-violence, won jobs for black workers in the basic industries. The “illegal” strike and rebellion of black Memphis sanitation workers, not King’s pacifism (he fled the city when workers marched) was the crucial factor in whatever was won. The communist-led sit-down strikes and mass movement of the unemployed in the U.S. that also fought the military in the Great Depression are what won the 8-hour day and unemployment insurance.

In India today, the working-class grandchildren of Gandhi’s pacifist followers are among the most exploited, poverty-stricken workers on the planet. Progress for the working class comes only with militant strikes and violent rebellions.

Lasting Change Requires Armed Revolution

But as long as capitalism is in control, even these advances are ground down by the inherent workings of the profit system. Only armed revolution of millions of workers led by a communist party can bring lasting change. It is just such a party that is missing in Egypt and Tunisia today.

The greatest working-class triumphs of the 20th Century were the revolutions in Russia and China. In the name of communism, armies of workers overthrew their capitalist exploiters. In both countries, our class made huge strides in every conceivable living standard and became the main force in smashing the Nazis and Japanese fascists.

Unfortunately, however, the Russian and Chinese parties practiced socialism which retained toxic capitalist elements, like nationalism — “sharing” power (in China) with local bosses — and a wage system (in both countries) which produced differentials among workers and an elite class of managers and cultural professionals. All this led eventually to complete restoration of the profit system in both countries.

However, Cairo’s demonstrators, lacking  working-class consciousness, did not aim to overthrow the system that leaves half the working class jobless amid skyrocketing food prices and resulting profits. Stratfor, an outfit that “provides strategic intelligence on global business, economic, security and geopolitical affairs,” noted (2/11/2011) that, “The end of President Hosni Mubarak’s reign over Egypt is more of a military succession than a popular revolution.” The military has just announced a ban on all union meetings and strikes.

As of this writing, power rests with General Omar Suleiman. “Head of the country’s feared security agency, Suleiman, was nicknamed the CIA’s man in Cairo,” reports the Brisbane, Australia Times (2/13/2011), “because of his close relationship with the U.S. on its so-called extraordinary rendition program — kidnapping suspected terrorists and taking them to a third country for interrogation and torture.”

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. rulers’ top Rockefeller-funded foreign policy factory, comforted its business-class readers with an article titled, “Mubarakism Without Mubarak.” It said events in Egypt were “the culmination of the slow-motion coup and the return of the somewhat austere military authoritarianism of decades past.” (CFR website, 2/11/2011).

On one hand, the CFR warned of potential future uprisings in Egypt. But its main thrust was that Egyptian fascists, who have served U.S. imperialism so well since the 1979 Egypt-Israel treaty, remain in power and should continue to get their yearly $1.5-$2 billion in U.S. aid.

No Egypt Victory for U.S. Imperialism; Pressure for Wider Wars Intensifies

But, while U.S. rulers’ media congratulate Obama for skillful bullet-dodging in the Mubarak affair, there are still plenty of loaded guns aimed at U.S. imperialism. A big one may very well be in Egypt itself, which (presumably) must now hold elections. The nation’s best organized political group is the pro-Iran, anti-U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. (Such elections produced anti-U.S. exploiter-leaders in Gaza and Lebanon.)

Washington’s best hope in Egypt is probable candidate Mohamed ElBaradei, who, though born in Egypt, hasn’t lived there for years, and thus has scant popular backing. His service to the U.S. empire as the UN’s nuclear watchdog lies in exposing Iran’s weapon program while stalling an Israeli attack on it, for which the U.S. is presently ill-prepared.

For this, ElBaradei won a Nobel “Peace” Prize from a Norwegian government committee, dominated by a major oil company (Statoil) active worldwide and a highly-modern military allied staunchly to the U.S.

However, as Anthony Cordesman, a major strategist for the U.S. war machine at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes:

“Whatever new government comes to power has less than a 50 percent chance of surviving for two years.... This...poses a long-term challenge for the U.S. that goes far beyond who in the military has power in the first phase of change following Mubarak’s departure. Egypt controls a critical global trade route in the Suez Canal. The security of the Canal and its pipeline has a major impact on energy prices and the world economy. Egypt is key to the Arab-Israeli peace and stability in the region, U.S. military overflights and staging, and the struggle against extremism. In short, Egypt is a vital U.S. national security interest — in fact, a far more vital interest than Afghanistan or Pakistan.”

Capitalism Cannot Solve Workers’ Problems

Coming from Cordesman — who, as General McChrystal’s advisor, got Obama to vastly increase Afghanistan-Pakistan death squads and drone terror attacks — this last sentence declares Egypt a U.S. war zone. But an even larger danger of war, which the rulers hesitate to mention, lies just across the Red Sea. “A revolt in Saudi Arabia...is looking increasingly possible given the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt.” (Boston Globe, 2/13/2011)

Capitalism cannot solve the problems of the workers in Egypt, of mass unemployment (intrinsic to the profit system) and raging price increases. Only a movement like our Party’s can lead to a real revolution that smashes the capitalist state and system and puts the working class in power. The kind of anti-racist, pro-working-class struggles reported in CHALLENGE of U.S. students, parents and teachers, of transit and hospital workers, of rebels in Haiti, of garment workers in Pakistan and Bangladesh, of teachers in Mexico — in which the PLP is being built — is the path to follow.

Exxon Man Gives Mubarak His Marching Orders

Frank Wisner, Jr., Obama’s emissary-extraordinary to Cairo in the Mubarak mess, sports sterling imperialist credentials. Retired as a lifelong diplomat, Wisner now works for the Washington law firm Patton Boggs, which counts Exxon Mobil as its biggest client. Patton Boggs, by dragging out the Exxon Valdez case for decades, has made a mockery of legal judgments against the company.

Wisner’s father, a founding spook of the CIA, helped engineer the 1952 CIA coup that installed the murderous pro-U.S. shah as Iran’s dictator.

The recent official White House version says Wisner urged Mubarak to stay on. But facts are more stubborn than press releases. Actually, reports the Washington Post (2/1/11), Wisner visited Mubarak in late January, “When it was time to give Egypt’s embattled leader a gentle nudge....Within 24 hours of Wisner’s private chat with the Egyptian president, Mubarak had announced on state television that he would step down at the end of his current term.” Mubarak held out for a week or so, threw a last-ditch tantrum, but then did the Exxon-CIA man’s bidding and resigned.



Dozens of workers on all shifts of a major truck assembly plant in the South fought changes to the paid-time-off (PTO) policy the bosses suddenly imposed. The changes set up hundreds for possible firing for calling in sick too often. The most threatened workers were Latino single parents with children who need to use more sick time. This means the change is both racist and sexist and sets up all workers for attack.

Under the old policy, all write-ups for absences were cleared every 90 days, but if you had four write-ups you could be fired. Under the new policy only one write-up is cleared every 90 days.

The bosses need these changes because each country’s auto companies — Toyota, Ford, GM, in Korea, Europe, Russia and China — are desperate to squeeze high enough profits from their workers in order to survive against their competitors in their inter-imperialist rivalry. The stakes are high and will ultimately lead to larger wars.

When the new PTO policy was announced, word spread that the bosses were requiring all workers to sign a form acknowledging the changes. Workers were given no notice. The bosses demanded that workers sign the new policy without reading it.

Many workers realized the problem. PLP members and friends analyzed the small print, calling on all workers to refuse to sign. Dozens of workers, separately and in groups, confronted supervisors who demanded signatures. Several workers faced down supervisors who threatened firing for not signing. These supervisors feared getting in trouble if they couldn’t make the workers sign.

Talk began among groups of workers about having meetings, shutting down the line, walking out or petitioning against the new policy. However they’re working 10-hour shifts, six days a week and workers couldn’t meet to co-ordinate any planning. The bosses were showing their increasing weakness in the world-wide battle for auto profits by imposing overtime alongside this new policy, enabling them to fire more workers whenever necessary. But the working class is not organized to understand, and take advantage of, the bosses’ desperation.

After worker confrontations with “Human Resources” management, the bosses quietly backed off a notch by clearing all existing absences before the new policy took effect — or so they claimed. “If it’s true,” said one worker, “where’s the proof? We should see it and sign something.” Nonetheless, it’s a small victory, because currently no one is on the brink of being fired for their next absence. But the bosses are also making it much harder to get time off approved.

PL’ers and others couldn’t pull off any action beyond individual confrontations and shouting matches with supervisors. These confrontations were good, but bigger action will be necessary. Workers must see these reform struggles as training exercises on the road to revolution, workers’ power and control of the entire world by the working class.

Even strikes and major battles against the capitalist rulers, whether in the U.S., Japan, Egypt or other countries, can at best win temporary gains in this period of rapidly-increasing inter-imperialist rivalry and world economic crisis.

The desperation of bosses locked in this rivalry means they and their capitalist system are weaker, not stronger, because when each company squeezes its workers harder, workers can learn that the bosses’ system of profit, greed and war doesn’t work and need not be ever-lasting. The workers can learn that the capitalist class and its governments can be taken by a working class organized to go all the way, and turn the struggle into a working-class revolution to establish communism — a world without money, racism or exploitative wage systems — all provided if PLP points the way.

The key is consistently building political struggle and personal relationships, day in and day out. There’s no way workers can protect their jobs in this plant, no less prepare for revolution, without PLP and its friends organizing secret workers’ meetings to analyze the constant attacks, identify the most important issues and recognize the limits of reform actions. Attacks and firings should be expected. Workers’ meetings should plan actions necessary to save those jobs as larger struggles unfold.

All this is risky, but the alternative is riskier, to surrender to every bosses’ attack instead of recognizing and exploiting the capitalists’ increasing weaknesses. Giving in is no answer at all, because factory work in the South is already at slave-labor levels.

Meet! Unite! Organize to fight for communist revolution! 

BROOKLYN, NY February 14 — Long Island College Hospital (LICH) is at risk of closing. LICH employs about 2,500 workers and serves the Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing project in Brooklyn, with over 10,000 black and Latino workers and youth. LICH is a 300-bed hospital that delivers more than 2,500 babies and sees more than 55,000 patients in its emergency room every year.

The State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center had been poised to take over LICH, which would have been bad enough, threatening the entire emergency services department. But last Wednesday, Democratic Governor Cuomo put that on hold when he announced a $2.84 billion cut in Medicaid, freezing the $62 million for the Downstate take-over and threatening to close LICH. As we go to press, a deal may be in the works to release some or all of the take-over money. Either way, there will be less health care for the workers and youth who need it.

Whether LICH closes or not, capitalism can never meet the needs of the working class because it puts profits over healthcare. Goldman Sachs gave out executive bonuses totaling $15.3 billion in 2010 and Mayor Bloomberg’s personal fortune hit $18 billion, while 30 million are unemployed and over $1 trillion goes to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that closing LICH is even being considered illustrates capitalism’s inherent racism.

Ten other hospitals are also on the chopping block in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In Brooklyn alone 16,000 hospital jobs are at risk at five hospitals that treated over 250,000 patients in 2010 and serve nearly a million. Eight hospitals have closed since 2007, including St. Vincent’s in lower Manhattan and North General in Harlem last year.

PLP supports the growing unity of workers and patients to fight these attacks at both LICH and SUNY Downstate. Last week, some LICH EMS workers went to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) over the lack of visible addresses in the Red Hook Houses.  Ambulances respond to 911 calls there, but due to the lack of visibile building numbers, Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) are often forced to jump out of the ambulance and run to the building to find the address. No doubt, some patients have died before the ambulance could locate them.

The EMTs brought written statements from coworkers and photos of the buildings and asked to speak to an NYCHA official. They were not allowed to speak to anyone about this easily correctable health hazard, so the EMTs and Red Hook residents will paint the addresses themselves!

We don’t have the hundreds of thousands demonstrating like in Cairo’s Tahrir Square…yet. But Egypt shows that things can change quickly. Fighting against racist health cuts and building unity between workers and patients; expanding the circulation of CHALLENGE; deepening our personal/political relationships is the only way to guarantee that when things do change, we will be able to determine the direction and outcome of that struggle with a mass revolutionary communist PLP.