Egyptian Intifada

Hosni gets a face lift

The April 6th strike of the Ghazl el-Mahalla textile workers has erupted into nation-wide clashes with the state. The demands of the strike included the raising of the minimum wage for textile workers that hasn't been raised since 1984, that is leading to calls for the raising of the national minimum wage, payment of unpaid bonuses, and prosecution of corrupt management. Leaders of the Islamic Labor Party and Kefaya group, opportunistically and irresponsibly as Hossam el-Hamalawy argues, called for a general strike. On the morning of the strike, troops and police amassed near the factory, the largest of its kind in Egypt's textile industry. Police reportedly occupied the factory on Sunday, but by the afternoon clashes broke out, with live ammunition being fired on strikers and protesters. Strike leadership have been arrested and tortured in American-funded jails. For an indispensable source of information on the movement check 3arabawy frequently.

The Mubarak regime has been facing a rising strike movement in recent years. Similar developments have been happening in Iran. However, in Egypt, middle class grievances have been merging with the growing workers movement and combining with the protests against the regime in its alliance with US imperialism. Currently, the growing frustration with inflation, such as the rising cost of bread, as a result of world-wide rise in commodity prices, the mass arrest of hundreds of Muslim Brothers candidates and other opposition parties leading up to the recent elections, the deepening of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, the deepening of privatization of industries, casualization with the growth in temporary labor contracts, massive corruption and the strengthening of Israeli apartheid and the continuing occupation of Iraq is taking on the character of a wide-ranging political movement to bring down the Mubarak dictatorship. However, state terror has been effective before in preventing such democratic movements from cohering and Egyptian activists are routinely arrested and tortured.

And this is exactly what has been happening. Much of the leadership of the strike, along with a leader of Kefaya, and several well-known bloggers have been arrested and many of them have been tortured. The regime's attempt to occupy the factories and smash the student solidarity demonstrations in Cairo led to tens of thousands fighting back in the streets these last few days. Knowing that elections are a sham, and paralleling a call by the Muslim Brothers for a voter boycott, turnout for the most recent local elections has been estimated at 3%. While the U.S. and British rulers prop-up the dictatorship with billions of dollars in what they say is their fight for democracy, its legitimacy is near zero with its foundations being pulled at brick by brick with the hands of the working and middle classes alike.

To read the NYTimes or Washington Post you would think only when Egyptian bloggers "insult Islam" are they jailed by the regime.

Meanwhile, Egyptian state terror is completely censored from the pages of these papers, let alone such bastions of liberal opinion as openDemocracy, while endless articles stream forth on dictator Robert Mugabe's recent attempts to overturn election results and stay in power by smashing the MDC opposition and the Chinese state's attacks on the new spring for the Tibetan movement. It's important to understand what's going on in Egypt to see why its not on the front page of the rulers' press along with Zimbabwe and Tibet.

Since the early 1990s, the Egyptian government has embarked on a process of neoliberal restructuring involving the selling off of state-owned industries, the introduction of temporary labor contracts or casualization, reduction of subsidies for staples, and cut back on social services. It is a process familiar to the U.S. and around the world that has defined the political climate and social policy for the last 30 years. While street protest against the government, centered around student activity, has been developing since 2002 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, the center of strike activity began in the textile industry in earnest in 2006 and spread quickly from there.

During the 1919 revolution in Egypt the liberal elite Wafd Party rode the rebellion of working people to power, negotiating a deal with British colonial occupation and smashing the early democratic organizations of the workers that were decisive in winning the qualified independence of 1923. The anti-democratic Wafd was politically dependent on British imperialism, the importation of British capital, and the British-installed monarchist stooge. The situation is no different from the liberal elites promoted by today's "progressive" imperialists. Textiles have been a major industry in Egypt going back to the 1930s and 1940s and it was textile workers who played a major role in finally running the Wafd elites out of power.

The rise to power of the radical nationalist Nasser saw the break with British and American imperialism. Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council, or Free Officers, consolidated their power not by smashing the Egyptian working classes' organizations, but by incorporating them into intense state-capitalist development and support from Soviet capital. Like the New Deal in the U.S. or the British Labor Party in Britain, this resulted in the creation of new "progressive" labor law, subsidies and other benifits and compensation. These state-capitalist concessions were made possible through the destruction of any independent political power of Egyptian workers and the incorporation of a union bureaucracy that would help guarantee labor quiet. Once again, working people found a new regime of exploitation.

By the late 1970s the Nasserist state was seeing the first signs of being dismantled. By the 1990s neoliberal political and economic policies had taken fully hold in Egypt, a world-wide phenomenon. The union bureaucracies of the old Nasserist state have helped this neoliberal bonanza for the rich by ensuring that the roots of the Mubarak regime continue to wrap around and strangle any independent democratic movement in Egyptian industry. Egypt is just one more example of how the only relation in today's ruling class ideology to "democracy" (pimped in the NYtimes and flying on the wings of imperialism and "economic reforms") is making sure it doesn't exist.

The strikes of the last two years have been the center of gravity of the movement that has spread out across other industries, including the growing privatized industries, combining with the student movement, and embracing the middle class professional associations, with college professors and doctors going out on strike, and much of the civil service, whose salaries are not keeping up with inflation.

As Mustafa Bassiouny and Omar Said show, a key development has been a return to the central conflict of working people's movements in the effort to build independent national unions rooted in strong workplace democratic committees and to oust the General Federation of Trade Unions attached to the Mubarak regime. The attack on the April 6th strike spilled over into the streets in a direct confrontation. This is an important time in Egypt and the Middle East in general, where democratic struggles are challenging the barbarism of U.S. imperialism, Israeli apartheid and the legacy of "revolutionary" state-capitalism alike.

For more check out this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and Rabab el-Mahdi.

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Liberalism and the New White Man's Burden

Paul Berman has become better known in recent years for writing a number of books since 9-11, reconstructing the ideological defense of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and support for Israeli apartheid. He is a favorite intellectual of the liberal elites in his attempts to give imperialism "democratic" justifications.

For his efforts, they have rewarded him well, reserving spots in the NYTimes and a chance to cash in with a post at NYU. However, Berman first proved his bona fides in writing the usual "leftist"-turned-sober story in his 1990s A Tale of Two Utopias. Like his fellow sadists Todd Gitlin and Christopher Hitchens, he dons the mantle of authenticity by impersonating a former New Leftist himself, and making his "critique" more marketable. In distinguishing between the legacy of "bad" New Leftist, say the old anti-imperialist militant--perhaps a Black Panther still scaring the kids--and the "good" New Leftist, like someone who went on to sober up and realize that providing charity to the poor and the oppressed is more respectable, the dollars start rolling in.

Today he's manning up as editor of the progressive imperialist journal Dissent, founded by Irving Howe, a cousin of what came to be known as neoconservatism, and playing ideological general in search of an army of young idealist imperial social workers. Writing in the New York Times this past week, he's laid out some of his ideas about the need for solidarity with Arab and Muslim "liberals". So for those who are not familiar, what does he have to say and why is it important?

In his 2004 book, Terror and Liberalism, Berman essentially argues for a new Popular Front. This term refers to the policy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s calling on the Communist Parties to subordinate themselves to liberal leadership in the name of defeating fascism. Today, Berman has been one of the more visible elite intellectuals attempting to develop the ideological basis for such a policy for today's Western Left. Only this time the Berman is not alone, of course. In the U.S. and Europe such arguments have been piled up through a proliferation of books and journals big enough to fill a garbage dump off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Here are a few paragraphs from Berman:

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

"Dismaying" and "surprising": words that are the consequence of shibboleths playing like thought.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Kanan Makiya, Irshad Manji, Fouad Ajami, among others: these types that Berman speaks for here have solidarity enough. The government, university and corporate cash lining the pockets of these people is proof enough of that. Berman tells us that these people represent "human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society" and shouldn't the Left support them? But Berman shouldn't worry too much. The deafening silence of the liberal left on the sheer scale of mass imperial terror being carried out on Iraq, Palestinians, Lebanon, with its civil war strategies and revving up the death squads, should comfort him.

And that's the problem with Berman's bad faith posturing. The real Arab and Muslim liberals are locked up in Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Gulf State jails. They are under attack, some being purged, from American and European universities. Berman himself wrote a long essay in The New Republic against a major Muslim liberal in Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He has expanded it into a book that is coming out shortly. And he hasn't been working alone. The U.S. government denied Ramadan a visa to enter the country as a visiting professor at Notre Dame.

This is either incomprehension or propaganda. Which ever it is, it's rooted deeply in the history of colonialism and white supremacy--the stink of bad faith is all over Berman's arguments-- and an ideological crisis of the American and European middle classes.

Rudyard Kipling Returns

People forget that the White Man's Burden, famously coined by British poet Rudyard Kipling to honor the U.S. attempts to subjugate the Philippines, was in fact conceived of as a progressive project. This ideology has become self-consciously renewed and embraced in recent years for reasons that need to be discussed.

This movement of intellectuals has a long history in the U.S. and a somewhat more recent legacy in Europe, such as the so-called "New Philosophers" in France. In the 1990s, these establishment intellectuals began to argue for a "humanitarian imperialism". During the Cold War, these things were justified by referring to the "threat" of Communism in all things. All political movements that jeopardized the interests of the dictatorships and the ruling elites supported by these "democrats" could be smashed by U.S. imperialism through either indirect support or direct military intervention. This policy was important to shore up the political and economic order at home. Dictatorships and ruling oligarchs may depend on U.S. imperialism because they have no social support, but U.S. rulers depend on them to ensure cheap consumer goods by keeping any democratic movements disabled and therefore keeping cheap super-exploited labor available. Further, the raising of "national security", the slogan of the imperial presidency, ensures that domestic racist forces can be mobilized around an "external enemy." It used to be "Communism". Today its "terrorism".

"Humanitarian imperialism" had tried to provide a new set of explanations for the persistence of U.S. imperialism after the Soviet Union collapsed. Since the occupation of Iraq, progressive racists have attempted to graft the Humanitarian program of the 1990s onto the full neo-conservative program of "pre-emptive war". These two strains are functionally indistinguishable from each other and it is one of the reasons a Paul Berman type is usually thrown in with the neo-conservatives. However, there are important differences to consider.

We have to briefly take a step back in time to uncover the deeper intellectual roots of the relationship and differences of this ideology in American history. In the late 1940s, as the Second World War ended, the Trotskyist parties who were the most coherent forces on the anti-Stalinist left at the time, debated the nature of the Soviet Union. There were three positions. One said that the ruling class of the Soviet Union must be overthrown, but it is worth critically defending against Western imperialism because it is more progressive. Another said that both the Soviet Union and the Western states represented together two forms of state-capitalism and the path forward was not to allign with either, but support the democratic movements in all these countries that are both struggling against this new stage of capitalism. A third position was that there was no possibility of these movements against state-capitalism, but it was more possible in the West than in the Soviet bloc countries. Therefore, it was important to critically support Western imperialism abroad and subordinate to the "progressive" sections of the ruling classes and official society.

In the 1960s, this third position split into a left-wing and right-wing social democratic position in relation to the rebirth of the black movement, rank-and-file workers movements and the occupation of Vietnam. Later, with the growth of the PLO and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the politics of Israeli apartheid would enter into this dynamic. The left-wing social democrats, around Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, and the right-wing social democrats around Max Shachtman, had different ideas about how they would essentially extend the New Deal and create a more benevolent U.S. imperialism. While the right-wing social democrats cozied up around the AFL-CIO labor bosses and fully supported the continued attack on Vietnam, the left-wing social democrats came to believe that the Vietnam occupation was doing more harm than good in protecting anti-Communist forces that were also opposed to the dictatorship in South Vietnam supported by the U.S. Further, these left-wing social democrats tended to be more critical of the big labor bosses, like Meaney and Kirkland, and supported more forcefully the Civil Rights leadership in its attempt to extend the New Deal to African-Americans. Both wings were for a Popular Front-type politics in which working peoples' organizations subordinated themselves to the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party elites.

However, both strains were deeply hostile to Black Power, the rank-and-file workplace movements, and full opposition to U.S. imperialism. The rejection of white liberal patronage and the critique of their racism, in their attempt to justify the failures of the Civil Rights movement to end white supremacy, drove them crazy. Right-wing social democrats tended to view the inability of the Cold War liberal coalitions of Civil Rights, Labor Bureaucracy, and Keynesian Capitalists as unable to control the growing black movement, rank-and-file movement, the campus situation, and the economic crisis emerging in the later 1960s. This is the origins then of neo-conservativism, and neo-liberal thought more generally. It emerged as a call for the reestablishment of the racial and class order. It was perfectly attuned to the middle and ruling classes that needed to feel good again about saying they were going to be in charge, that became a signature of the rise of the New Right.

It is for this reason that the right-wing social democrats would go on to become the neo-conservatives and the heirs of the left-wing social democrats would increasingly grow quiet or even critically supportive of the Reagan Revolution as the 1980s progressed. The left-wing social democrats never programmatically broke with their belief in this old elite coalition to keep people in their place. By the 1990s, they could not muster any independent or coherent opposition to the dominance of the new neo-liberal social and economic policies, the dismantling of the New Deal, critical support for the reconstructed triumph of U.S. imperialism after its defeat in Vietnam, and dabbling in the new orientalist racialist quackery.

This is why Berman's "progressive" support for comprador Muslim and Arab intellectuals can only find him (and them) in the camp of rising white populism, fascism, apartheid and imperialism. Since Berman cannot develop his ideas in relation to any real movement of Arabs and Muslims, whether in the Middle East, Europe or the U.S., he can only justify those things he is supposedly against as the lesser of evils. His hilarious and grossly misinformed attack (or smart propaganda) on the Muslim liberal Tarik Ramadan shows the pattern. Berman is developing the racialist discourses of pathology and social deviancy that is at the center of the White Man's Burden and has been applied by "liberal-minded" whites to all democratic people of color movements and aspirations to negate white supremacy. Berman cannot abide letting people of color liberals into official institutions until they swear allegiance to the status quo. This same exact thing happened during the 1960s with Civil Rights and Black Power in the U.S. When Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War, called for a poor people's movement in the U.S., and called for recognition of black culture as foundational to America, he was hysterically denounced by the liberal establishment. A figure like Ramadan does no different today, yet Berman, and his friends like Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, stand with the rising tide of white populism and fascism in Europe against the democratic movement of people of color in Europe.

Berman isn't alone. There is an intellectual industry out there, with journals such as openDemocracy, Democratiya and Engage, based in the university and corporate money reconstructing an ideology of progressive imperialism and racism. Unfortunately, democratic forces from below are deeply unprepared for such an assault and the result is a profound passivity among the Left in regards to what could possibly be a new stage of U.S. imperialism. U.S. elites work undisturbed at home in literally destroying whole nations in the Middle East and shoring up their allied dictatorships. Such work to create a progressive imperialism may reflect an ideological crisis of the Western middle classes, but without counter-work that exposes these forces and engages with the real democratic tradition at home, it isn't necessary that they will fail at their task.

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Free Political Prisoner Sami Al-Arian

There is a new documentary out on the arrest and show trial of Palestinian professor Sami Al-Arian that you can watch online. He was arrested in 2003 after being the subject of a sustained attack by Israeli propagandists and agents, the Federal government and Fox News. He spent most of his two years in prison in solitary confinement and was acquited of almost all charges thrown at him by the Feds. They accused him of being an organizer for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and planning terrorist attacks in the U.S. At one point, the Federal prosecutors took the jury on a field trip to watch a car bomb.

In turns out that the Feds had nothing accept his speeches, phone calls, writings, conferences and rallies he attended, and what books he owned. Many prosecution witnesses came from Israel to testify about Palestinian terrorism. Al-Arian's defense attorneys were prevented by the racist judge from mentioning the history of Israeli apartheid at all.

The jury, recognizing the government was putting him on trial for free speech and association, acquitted him in 2005, after the Feds spent tens of millions of tax dollars putting on a show trial.

Such show trials have been part of the government's propaganda efforts to expand secret police powers since 9-11. Most of these have been entrapment cases in which Federal informants have schemed-up crimes to dupe less than capable people into terrorism charges as in cases in Chicago, Albany, Miami, Detroit, and New York City. Other attempts have been to go after Islamic centers and charities. The most famous case was the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which featured central testimony from Israeli agents, that collapsed in a mistrial.

These cases are meant to normalize political repression, either in the form of creating a specter of "al Qaeda" where none exists, and attack solidarity efforts with Middle East struggles, in particular Palestinian and Lebanese movements. And to think of all the tax dollars spent on supporting Israeli apartheid, all those private funds raised, think tanks created, all those Zionist fascists sitting in city councils and state legislatures.

Since the Feds had lost, they had Al-Arian sentenced to another year in prison for 1 count of conspiracy. Breaking the plea agreement, in which it was stated he would not have to testify in any other cases, he was then forced to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a fishing expedition against Islamic charities, which he has refused to do. He was then held in contempt of court. He is currently on hunger strike.

The documentary is on the road currently. Check the free Al-Arian website for more details.

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