For those educated in the Trotskyist tradition, it is easy as pie to come up with an answer. The revolution has to be “Bolshevik” in character with the working class in the driver’s seat. ... I wonder if the answer is to synthesize the popular hopes of the Arab Spring with a class orientation that is more implicit than explicit. Keep in mind that the Bolsheviks called for “Peace, Bread, and Land”—not a proletarian dictatorship. Also, keep in mind that the July 26th Movement in Cuba formulated its demands in terms of fulfilling democracy and social justice rather than Communism. Louis Proyect
-------------- I watched AJE and the Egyptian revolution all through the spring of 2011, then read Trotsky for the first time in the Fall of 2011. I was stunned by the parallels, most particularly by the backdoor manipulations and collusion of the European and US elites in proping up the Egyptian military and Egyptian elites who were for the most part completely hidden from the daily actions in Tahrir. The importance of the Bolsheviks was the absolute rejection of forming a parliamentary government---precisely because the Russian bourgeois would control the new government, just as they did the Kerensky government, with the collusion and support of the WWI Allied governments of France and England who held the Russian war debts---the financial support given to the Czar and then to the Kerensky government to keep it in power. If the financial strings were cut with the West, that was good-bye to the tottering Russian economy. The Bolsheviks took that risk and sure enough the economy collapsed and quickly degenerated into civil war. The key element was the dissolution and reconstitution of the army and its transformation into the Red Army, combined with dictatorial control of the governmental bureaucracy...and the direct take over of the industrial infrastructure. The battle front immediately shifted to the countryside and all the difficulties of carrying out an agrarian revolution while fighting a civil war. That was vastly aided in the breakdown of the much hated landed estate system ... Once free of the overlords, of course the foremen, managers, and independent farmers wanted their own land and control... In effect the events in Egypt illuminated all the best and worst of the Russian events a century before. The Egyptians had to dissolve the connections between the ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers from their superiors in the military elite and they didn't do that. There were all kinds of completely understandable reasons, with large scale fighting and many more deaths in the offing, with no likely promise of winning. Egypt could have gone the way of Syria. It must have been decided on some intangible collective conscieousness, no we don't want to destroy ourselves and our country. Better to live another day. ... Egypt is in a precarious state of suspension ... The other component is the spread of the Egyptian example to Europe in its economic crisis which is also in precarious suspension. As long as the various branches of the global elite control enough political power to fight popular movements to a draw, I suppose they consider it a win. But they are in a war of attrition by thousands of small wounds. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
