Egyptian Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists under attack

Copied from: feartosleep, originally posted on Anarchist News

It's about time! For weeks, several internet sites, and facebook pages that belong to the Muslim Brotherhood, either officially or administered by its members, launched an attack against Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt trying to single them out as inciters of violence and propagandists of state demolition. Today, a member of the Brotherhood filed a lawsuit against three socialists, one of them is comrade Yaser Abdel Kawy, a well known anarchist and a member of the Egyptian Libertarian Socialists Movement. The General Attorney forwarded the lawsuit to the State Security GA, an exceptional apparatus of the legal system that works only under a state of emergency.

It sure was expected. While small in numbers, Anarchists in Egypt have been quite prominent amongst the different revolutionary forces taking part in the Jan25 Egyptian revolution. Anarchists are distinguishably vocal on the social media sites, but more importantly they are always in the front lines on the streets whenever revolutionaries take a stand in the face of the brutal crackdown of the state.
[We are a beautiful naive bunch aren't we.]

The uneasy but strong alliance between the Brotherhood and the ruling military junta has been evident since the very beginning. The Brotherhood was the only political force that had one of its members in the legislative committee responsible for preparing the modifications of the 1971 constitution approved by a referendum on March 19th. The brotherhood refused to take part almost in any rally against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), and in many cases sought to tarnish these rallies and attack those who called for them.

The Brotherhood, had also taken an aggressive stance against laborers in their continuous struggle against the masters backed by the military junta. It has always condemned workers rallies, sit-ins, or occupations, and described the workers fight for their rights as counter-revolutionary and incited by clients of Mubarak's regime.

Poised for a landslide victory in the current parliamentary elections along with the more radical Salafi Islamists, the Brotherhood is keen on getting rid of future opposition, namely socialists. It's easy to know why if one takes a look at the policies that their counterparts in Tunisia have adopted once confident in their new seats in the parliament. It's even clearer when one takes notice of their prominent leaders' (mostly businessmen) statements to the media, especially ones describing the neoliberal financial and economic policies of Mubarak's regime as good and effective, if not coupled with corruption and crony capitalism.

We are sure that these new attacks by the SCAF and its Islamist allies are nothing but an early beginning. A new phase of the Egyptian Revolution is already starting to take shape. This time the true conflict lines will be clear for all after being only clear for some. The Egyptian Revolution will take its true face of a class war of us the proletariat against them, the masters, the military junta, and the conservative fascist Islamists.

I remember one day back in spring 2010, a few weeks before May Day, when I was working at LPC. This man who played in an underground band came in to talk about everything, and the two of us ended up chatting for hours. He brought up the fact that one of his former wives was in Iran working on her dissertation as the 1979 regime change was happening. The surprising thing was, the "revolution" which took place in Iran started off not as an "Islamic revolution" but as a giant uprising against the Shah consisting of marxists, anarchists, western-style intellectuals, and classical liberal types who worked alongside the theocrats to kick the Shah out of power. Then the religious fundamentalists took over and granted all that illegitimate power to themselves. He told me, some of the first people whom these tyrants imprisoned, expelled, or killed were those leftists (anarchists, marxists, etc.) who fought alongside them just months before. As I listened to this man recall what his ex-wife experienced, the first thing I thought of was what happened in Russia after their revolution (as we all know exactly what happened). Old oppression being replaced by a new oppression - it never ends.

In all seriousness though, could anarchist comrades PLEASE stop assuming that authoritarians (be they authoritarian state-socialists, statist reformists, market authoritarians like the "an"-caps you see here in NH, or religious nutjobs) are our allies, especially when every single time we work with them we end up being stabbed in the back? Holding common short-term goals does not equal having common long-term goals. We may fight together against the old tyranny, but as anti-authoritarians we need to fight against the new tyranny as well.