The conviction of six socialists in Zimbabwe on trumped-up charges highlights the brutality of Robert Mugabe’s regime, writes Ken Olende

A magistrate in Zimbabwe convicted six socialists of “inciting public violence” on Monday. The six had watched a video of news footage from the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

Some 160 supporters in the public gallery showed their outrage. Riot police were positioned outside to control hundreds more demonstrating there. The verdict shocked protesters as the state’s case had looked as if it was collapsing due to lack of evidence.

One of the defendants, Munyaradzi Gwisai, said after the verdict, “The judiciary is being used by the regime to persecute and intimidate the opposition and civic society, to keep them confined by court cases that drag on, even if there is no case against them.”

Munyaradzi is general coordinator of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), the Socialist Workers Party’s sister organisation in Zimbabwe.

His five co-defendants are leading ISO activists Tafadzwa Choto and Tatenda Mombeyarara, trade unionist Edison Chakuma, debt rights activist Hopewell Gumbo and student leader Welcome Zimuto.

The six plan to appeal—and activists around the world are stepping up the campaign for justice. Protests took place on Tuesday including in London, New York, Johannesburg and Melbourne.

Munyaradzi told the court the charges were “outright silly”, and that this was “a case of political harassment by the state”.

The prosecution’s star witness was a spy in the meeting. He said under oath that he was Jonathan Shoko, a police officer attached to the Criminal Investigation Unit.

The defence exposed him as Rodwell Chitiyo from the secret police, the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation.

The defence said that the case should be dismissed as there was no evidence to answer. But the magistrate went ahead.

And the prosecution went on to submit an inflammatory statement, which said, “The uprising had gone beyond the planning stage. The date had been set.”

In the run-up to the verdict Zimbabwe’s head of police, Augustine Chihuri. He repeated the allegations, adding, “The warped and polluted agenda is to try and overthrow the government.”

The six were awaiting sentence as Socialist Worker went to press. Each could face ten years in prison or a fine of 2,000 US dollars (£1,262).

This is part of a clampdown by the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, terrified that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could spread south.

Police stormed a meeting organised by the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare on 19 February last year.

The meeting was to discuss the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and commemorate the death of Navigator Mungoni, an Aids activist and ISO member.

Forty-five people arrested at the meeting were held in prison, tortured and initially charged with treason—which carries the death penalty.

Defendant Hopewell Gumbo said, “We were subjected to heavy physical beatings from which I suffered a broken nose.

“Others had various injuries depending on the instrument used and part of the body assaulted.”

All were prevented from receiving prescription drugs and medical attention—including those who are HIV positive.

One detainee, David Mpatsi, later died after this treatment.

The majority were released without charge. The trial of the remaining six has continued ever since. The defendants have filed a lawsuit against the police and Zimbabwe’s two home affairs ministers for their torture.

• Send money to support the defendants to ISO Zim Solidarity, Unity Bank, Birmingham, account number 20136938, sort code 08‑60‑01, IBAN: GB11 CPBK 0800 5150 0732 10
• Send solidarity messages to solidarity@freethemnow.com

IS-tendensen

Følgende erklæring om solidaritet med almindelige mennesker i Grækenland blev udsendt den 29. februar 2012.

1. Nedskæringer dominerer nu de økonomiske politikker i den udviklede kapitalistiske verden. Som svar på en global krise, der blev fremskyndet af de store bankers spekulation, har de vestlige herskende klasser valgt at flytte omkostningerne over på ryggen af arbejdende mennesker og de fattige. Beskæringen af de offentlige udgifter har fanget verden i en fælde med langsom vækst. Men det har også givet mulighed for at presse flere af de nyliberale ’reformer’ igennem, der i det hele taget har gjort det muligt for de finansielle markeder at slippe for kontrol.

2. Det er Grækenlands ulykkelige skæbne at være det vigtigste forsøgsområde for disse politikker. Euro-zonen har netop vedtaget den anden ”redningspakke” til Grækenland. Dette er en redning af de hovedsageligt franske og tyske banker, der lånte Grækenland de penge, landet nu skylder. Dette er tydeliggjort gennem oprettelsen af en spærret konto, hvortil de nye lån vil blive betalt, og hvorfra afdragene til bankerne vil ske, før nogen som helst penge når til Grækenland.

3. Almindelige grækere betaler en grusom pris for denne bank-redningspakke og dens forgænger. Økonomien er skrumpet i et tempo, der ikke er set siden Den Store Depression i 1930’erne (7 procent sidste år, sandsynligvis det samme i 2012), mens arbejdsløshed, hjemløshed og selvmord er steget kraftigt. Suppekøkkener breder sig, mens de rige sørger for at deres rigdom er sikret. De vigtigste græske partier samarbejder om at gennemføre endnu grusommere nedskæringer (mindstelønnen beskæres med 22 procent og supplerende pensioner med 15 procent, og 15.000 offentligt ansatte fyres) med ”trojkaen”, bestående af Den Europæiske Centralbank, EU-kommissionen, og Den Internationale Valutafond, som hele tiden strammer skruen.

4. At gennemføre nedskæringerne har krævet en massiv udhuling af demokratiet. Grækenland og Italien er blevet påtvunget ”teknokrat-regeringer”. Der har været opfordringer fra nordeuropæiske politikere om at udsætte det parlamentsvalg, der skal finde sted i Grækenland i april. Grækenlands økonomiske suverænitet er reelt blevet suspenderet, mens trojkaen i stigende grad udøver detaljeret kontrol af ministerierne. Uropoliti angriber brutalt demonstranter og strejkende. Alt dette er ikke kun et problem i Grækenland: I november viste det sig, at tyske parlamentarikere havde fået detaljerede oplysninger om det kommende irske budget, længe før disse var blevet fremlagt for Dáil, det irske parlament.

5. Grækenland er ved at blive gjort til et skræk-eksempel for at svække modstanden mod nedskæringer andre steder. Men, som euro-zonens egen hemmelige gældsbæredygtigheds-analyse indrømmer, er det en politik, der er dømt til at mislykkes. At beskære de offentlige udgifter reducerer også efterspørgslen efter arbejdspladser og tjenesteydelser og får derfor økonomien til at skrumpe og gør målene om gældsreduktion sværere at opfylde. Lande, der fører nedskæringspolitik laver Sisyfos-arbejde (Sisyfos blev i den klassiske legende dømt til at skubbe en kampesten op ad en bakke, men den rullede ned igen, så snart han løb tør for kræfter).

6. Heldigvis har Grækenland den mest militante arbejderbevægelse i Europa. Nedskæringerne er blevet mødt af generalstrejke efter generalstrejke samt af en række meget militante massedemonstrationer. Almindelige arbejdere presser deres faglige ledere til at tage mere militante aktioner. De to største partier er i krise, lider under splittelser og ekskluderer et stort antal af deres parlamentsmedlemmer. I meningsmålingerne står partier til venstre for det social-liberale PASOK til at have omkring 40 procents opbakning. Der er ved at opstå en revolutionær antikapitalistisk venstrefløj, der støtter de stigende kampe.

7. Hvis denne modstand bliver stærkere og mere fokuseret, kan den danne grundlag for politiske programmer, der bryder med nedskæringer og nyliberalisme. Disse politikker vil omfatte at nægte at betale gælden og forlade eurozonen; ikke at redde den græske kapitalisme, men at skabe en ramme for foranstaltninger baseret på nationalisering af bankerne og et program for offentlige investeringer, som ville prioritere arbejdspladser, velfærd og levestandard. De ville være en del af en bredere kamp for ikke blot at forsvare demokratiet, men at uddybe det, ved at arbejdere erobrer stadig større kontrol over økonomien. Dette kunne åbne op for et bredere perspektiv om demokratisk socialistisk planlægning som alternativ til kapitalismens kaos og uretfærdighed.

8. De græske arbejderes, studerendes og fattiges kamp er også vores kamp. Hvis de vinder, vil det blive meget vanskeligere at gennemføre nedskæringer andre steder. Hvis de taber, så vil de planer om reelt at gøre nedskæringerne permanente, der er blevet godkendt af de fleste EU-medlemslande, blive meget lettere at gennemføre. Vi forpligter os til at føre kampagne i solidaritet med den græske kamp mod nedskæringer. Det betyder ikke blot at støtte den græske modstand. Jo mere effektivt vi bekæmper nedskæringerne i vore egne lande, jo større chance har vore græske brødre og søstre har for at vinde.

Koordinationsgruppen for den Internationale Socialistiske Tendens
All Together (Sydkorea)
En Lucha/En Lluita (Spanien)
International Socialist Organisation (Zimbabwe)
International Socialists (Botswana)
International Socialists (Canada)
International Socialists (Pakistan)
Internationale Socialisten (Holland)
Internationale Socialister/ISU (Danmark)
Internationella Socialister (Sverige)
Keep Left (Sydafrika)
Linkswende (Østrig)
Marks21 (Serbien)
Mlodzi Socjalisci (The Young Socialists, Polen)
Mouvement pour le socialisme/Bewegung für sozialismus (Schweiz)
Pracownicza Demokracja (Workers Democracy, Polen)
Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (Tyrkiet)
Socialist Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Socialist Workers League (Nigeria)
Socialist Workers Party (Storbritannien)
Socialist Workers Party (Irland)
Sosialistiko Ergatiko Komma (Grækenland)
Solidarity (Australien)
Turn Left (Thailand)
Workers Democracy Group (Cypern)

2. It is the unhappy fate of the Greece to be the main testing ground for these policies. The eurozone has just agreed a second ‘rescue’ package for Greece. This is a rescue of the mainly French and German banks that lent Greece the money that it now owes. This is made visible by the creation of an escrow account into which the new loans will be paid and from which the banks’ repayments will be made before any money goes to Greece.

3. Ordinary Greek people are paying a cruel price for this bank bailout and its predecessor. The economy has shrunk at a pace not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s (7 per cent last year, probably the same in 2012), while unemployment, homelessness, and suicides have soared. Soup kitchens are spreading, while the rich make sure their wealth is safe. The main Greek parties are cooperating in implementing even crueller cuts (the minimum wage slashed by 22 percent and supplementary pensions by 15 percent, and 15,000 civil service jobs to go), with the troika of the European Central Bank, European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund continually tightening the screw.

4. Implementing austerity has required a massive erosion of democracy. ‘Technocratic’ governments have been imposed on Greece and Italy, there have been calls by North European politicians for the parliamentary elections due to take place in Greece in April to be postponed, Greece’s economic sovereignty has been effectively suspended as the troika exercises increasingly detailed control of ministries, and riot police viciously attack protesters and strikers. This isn’t just a problem in Greece: in November it emerged that German parliamentarians had been given details of the forthcoming Irish budget long before these had been submitted to the Dail.

5. Greece is being made an example in order to weaken opposition to austerity elsewhere. Yet, as the eurozone’s own secret debt sustainability analysis concedes, it is a policy that is bound to fail. Cutting public spending reduces demand for jobs and services and therefore causes the economy to shrink and makes the debt targets harder to meet. Countries that pursue austerity are making the labour of Sisyphus, who in classical legend was doomed to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll down again.

6. Fortunately, Greece has the most militant workers’ movement in Europe. Austerity has been met by general strike after general strike as well as by a succession of very militant mass demonstrations. Rank-and-file workers are pressing their union leaders to take more militant action. The two main parties are in crisis, suffering splits and expelling large numbers of deputies. In opinion polls parties to the left of the social-liberal PASOK are winning around 40 per cent support. A revolutionary anticapitalist left is emerging that supports the rising struggles.

7. If this resistance becomes stronger and more focused it can lay the basis for a programme of policies that break with austerity and neoliberalism. These policies would include refusing to pay the debt and leaving the eurozone, not to rescue Greek capitalism, but to create a framework for measures, based on the nationalization of the banks and a programme of public investment, that would give priority to jobs, services, and living standards. They would be part of a broader struggle not simply to defend democracy but to deepen it through workers winning increasing control over the economy. This could open up the broader perspective of democratic socialist planning as the alternative to the chaos and injustice of capitalism.

8. The struggle of Greek workers, students, and poor people is our struggle as well. If they win, it will become much harder to implement austerity elsewhere. If they lose, then the plans effectively to make austerity permanent that have been approved by most European Union member states will have a much easier ride. We pledge ourselves to campaign in solidarity with the Greek struggle against austerity. This doesn’t mean simply supporting the Greek resistance. The more effectively we fight austerity in our own countries, the better chance our Greek brothers and sisters have of winning.

The Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency
All Together (South Korea)
En Lucha /En Lluita (Spanish state)
International Socialist Organisation (Zimbabwe)
International Socialists (Canada)
International Socialists (Pakistan)
Internationale Socialisten (Netherlands)
Internationale Socialister /ISU (Denmark)
Internationella Socialister (Sweden)
Keep Left (South Africa)
Linkswende (Austria)
Marks21 (Serbia)
Mlodzi Socjalisci (The Young Socialists, Poland)
Mouvement pour le socialisme/Bewegung für sozialismus (Switzerland)
Pracownicza Demokracja (Workers Democracy, Poland)
Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (Turkey)
Socialist Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Socialist Workers League (Nigeria)
Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
Socialist Workers Party (Ireland)
Sosialistiko Ergatiko Komma (Greece)
Solidarity (Australia)
Turn Left (Thailand)
Workers Democracy Group (Cyprus)

For more information go to http://www.e-socialists.net/

A group of armed civilians in cooperation with the military police attacked a group of Revolutionary Socialists a short while ago. Sameh Naguib, labor lawyer Haitham Mohammedein, and human rights lawyer Ahmed Mamdouh were attacked while participating in a march in Alexandria, after which Naguib was turned over to the headquarters of the military governor on the military base at Ras al Tin.

Following word of the news, Kamal Khalil, Revolutionary Socialist and founder of the Democratic Workers and Farmers Party, chanted in the march headed to the Ministry of Defense in eastern Cairo, “Release him, open up, release him, Sameh is one of us and we will not leave him.”

The attack on the Revolutionary Socialists comes after an intense defamation campaign undertaken by the military council in conjunction with the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The most recent offensive came via the official page of the military council on social networking site Facebook, accusing Sameh Naguib by name of mobilizing students at the American University, where he works as professor of sociology, to carry out a plan to destroy Egypt. The students of the American University responded by stating that they are an integral part of the Egyptian Revolution.

The panic that the military council is showing toward peaceful calls for the rights of the martyrs and surrender of power makes clear that our revolution is on the correct path. This is demonstrated by the military council’s use of techniques from the previous regime. The use of groups of armed thugs proves to us and to all that the military council was, and still remains, an illegitimate continuation of the deposed regime. They are at the head of the counter revolution, which seeks to overturn revolutionary and parliamentary legitimacy.

Freedom for Sameh Naguib… Freedom and victory to the revolutionaries

The revolution continues…victory to the revolution…glory to the martyrs.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters are braving tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and live ammunition in demonstrations against the ruling military council in Egypt. By late on 20 November there were an estimated 100,000 in Tahrir Square according to eyewitness accounts and thousands protesting in every major city in Egypt. Their demands are clear: the downfall of Marshal Tantawi and Mubarak’s generals. As of Sunday 5 people at least had been killed and around 1000 injured.

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions issued a call on Saturday 19 November to its 1.4 million members in affiliated unions to join the protests in Tahrir.

Our brothers and sisters in Egypt inspired us all with their courage over the past ten months. Without them, would we have seen the Occupy movement? How would our own struggles against austerity and cuts look without the model of the Egyptian revolution, and the knowledge that ordinary people can change the world?

If you are organising a protest or a picket, particularly if you can mobilise support from the trade union movement in solidarity with the call from the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, please let us know. We will list as many protests as we can on this page. Either leave a comment on this page or email menasolidarity@gmail.com. Send us pictures and we will publish them too.

From Mena Solidarty: http://menasolidaritynetwork.com/

1. We cannot ignore the role of the working class and its struggles over the past five years, or its role during the Egyptian revolution. It was the wave of strikes that paralyzed the regime in the final week of Husni Mubarak’s reign.
2. Today the working class is putting the revolution back on the road. The important centers of the working class have announced a number of strikes due to begin over the next few days.
   The strikes are in defense of the right of workers to a fair wage, humane working conditions and against corruption and the dominance of Mubarak placemen in institutions and public bodies.

3. These strikes are being spearheaded by the textile workers of Mahalla al-Kubra; teachers and lecturers; health workers; workers in aviation, transport and other sectors.
4. The struggle of workers was not only a major episode of Egypt’s January revolution, it was the most important stage of the revolution that had at its heart the demand for dignity and social justice.
5. While there now is a race to harvest the spoils of our revolution, and devide the spoils of our victory, there remains millions of workers and toilers who are suffering the same poverty and oppression that they endured before the revolution.
6. Now the working class is returning to the struggle, and with it comes all its might. This struggle will put the train of revolution back on the track towards social justice, and restore the rights of working people.
7. If the storm of strikes that swept the country in Mubarak’s final week were successful — despite their spontaneity and lack central leadership and coordination — it was inevitable that these strikes spread across all sectors and drew in all the independent unions.
8. These strikes expressed the collective demands of workers — raised by the workers themselves — they were not dictated from outside the movement.
9. We need the formation of a single unified committee to lead the upcoming strikes that will not only draw in representatives of all the affected sectors, but also encourage the rest of the working class to raise their demands as part of a general strike.
10. We need this committee to lead strikes over the next year, and to unite the working class movement in order to complete the tasks of our revolution — a revolution in which hundreds of poor and working people sacrificed their lives for a better life.
11. Today we are at the gates of the general strike to reclaim our dreams for justice, freedom and our hope. In this the working class has never failed us.

Revolutionary Socialists, Egypt

Original version here http://www.e-socialists.net/node/7376

The global economic crisis is now in its fourth year. It is evidently not a ‘normal’ cyclical recession but a systemic crisis on a comparable scale to and with the same disruptive potential as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like that earlier crisis, the present one is protracted and goes through different stages – credit crunch, financial crash, global slump, and now a ‘recovery’ marked by mass unemployment, intensified competition among the leading capitalist powers, and the sovereign debt crisis. There is room for discussion on the left about the precise causes of the crisis – are they to be traced to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall or are they restricted to the more specific problems generated by neoliberalism? – but it is clear that overcoming the crisis will be difficult.

What prevented the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008-9 developing into a slump as deep as that of the 1930s is the willingness of the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist states substantially to increase public spending and borrowing: in 2009 budget deficits grew by five percent of national income in the advanced economies. But they have rejected calls to break with the neoliberal policies that helped to precipitate the crisis. Instead they have defined the increased government borrowing caused by the crisis as a problem that requires harsh austerity measures representing a radicalization of neoliberalism and threatening the survival of the welfare state. In Europe these policies are now being forced through by the bourgeois right, which is now in government almost everywhere.

But the crisis continues to pose an acute political danger to the ruling classes because of the intensification of the class struggle it can provoke. This danger has been realized in the Arab world with the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Here material privations intensified by the crisis – mass youth unemployment, rising food prices, etc – have fused with the accumulated hatreds of corrupt, brutal, and misogynistic regimes backed by the US and the EU. The result has been astonishing popular explosions whose future is uncertain but that have put revolution back on the political agenda.

But although the Arab revolutions are the most spectacular cases, there has been a more general upsurge in resistance. 2010 saw the struggle over pensions in France, general strikes in Portugal and Spain, multiple general strikes in Greece, student movements in Britain, France, and Italy, and the anti-precarity movement in Portugal. The 15th May movement in the Spanish state, beginning with a call for ‘real democracy’ and refusal to be ‘commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers’, has struck a chord with tens of thousands of mainly young people who have rushed to form their own ‘Tahrir squares’ all over the country, engaging in self-organized and increasingly self-confident civil disobedience, attracting a good deal of sympathy and with the prospect of spreading to other countries. A similar movement has developed in Greece with a dynamic that combines the squares and the strikes.

The recent movement to defend collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin shows that the austerity drive has now reached the United States, thanks especially to the victories won by the Republicans with the support of the Tea Party movement in the mid-term elections last November. But it also shows the persisting combativity of the American working class. The workers’ movement in the advanced economies has been weakened by the neoliberal offensive of the past generation, but the latest attacks risk stimulating a revival of militancy.

This big offensive can only be resisted through the cooperation of the anticapitalist left with a trade union movement that is combative, fully democratic, and based on the strong participation of the rank and file. This requires a break with the policies of class collaboration that too often dominate the trade unions, and which are rooted in the social pressures on trade-union officials both to express and contain workers’ struggles. The growth of the influence of the anticapitalist left in the unions, as well as the greater confidence and self-organization of rank-and-file workers, are the most powerful forces in achieving such a break.

More concretely, we must:

• Defend the democratic and social rights of the workers, the popular classes, and the youth against austerity, to be in all circumstances their spokesperson, to pursue in particular within the trade-union organizations a policy independent of the bosses, as well as of the state and of the government, whatever it might be.
• While starting from unconditional opposition to the parties of the bourgeois right, we pursue an unrelenting political critique of the so-called Socialist, Labour, and Social Democratic Parties for their capitulation to neoliberalism;
• Defend in mobilizations as well as on the electoral terrain, as in parliament, an anticapitalist alternative to offer a perspective of rupture with capitalist society, rupture that can only be achieved by a movement of the whole of the population challenging the absolute power that the capitalist oligarchy exercises over society and posing the question of a democratic government of the workers and the people.
• Persistently and creatively us the united front tactic in order to build the unity of the working class for the struggle and and cooperate in a critical way with all those political forces that are against neoliberal policy and with the movements/trade unions who resist neoliberal policy.

This approach is likely to most effective when it based on active involvement in building resistance to austerity. The very severity of the crisis means that this resistance will confront ideological questions: above all, what is the alternative to austerity? The Western ruling classes have rejected Keynesianism and social democracy has refused to take it up. The anticapitalist left must oppose cuts in public services and the privatization of public services and campaign for an audit of the debt. But it should also be willing to put forward an alternative programme that begins to break with the logic of profit – for example, the nationalization of the banks, energy, rail, and the main service industries under democratic workers’ control, progressive taxation of income and wealth, cancelling the debt that has been created by financial speculation, investment in ‘climate jobs’ that would simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions and unemployment. We support the people of Iceland in their determination to refuse to pay the debt of bankrupt banks.

Anti-capitalist politics must continue to go together with anti-imperialism. American imperialism, already weakened by the Iraq debacle, has been further undermined by the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. But the United Nations Security Council resolution on Libya has given the green light to Western military intervention aimed at rebuilding the imperialist-dominated system of states in the Middle East. The radical and revolutionary left must combine support for the struggle against the Gaddafi regime with opposition to the continuing military intervention in Libya by the US, France, Britain, and NATO. It is also necessary to continue campaigning against the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the many negative consequences of the ‘war on terrorism’ is the impetus it has given to the development on racism and xenophobia in Europe and the US. Official attacks on multiculturalism by the likes of Merkel, Sarkozy, and Cameron lend respectability to the attempts by the far right – whether it is Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, or the English Defence League and its allies in Britain – to make anti-Muslim racism the cutting edge of their attempts to build up a popular base. Elsewhere in Europe it is the Roma who are the main target of the racist offensive. Building broad opposition to racism and Islamophobia and countering the attempts of fascist organisations to build themselves electorally and on the streets are among our most important tasks.

This means resuming the offensive on the social and political fronts, putting to work a politics of solidarity of the exploited classes against the dominant classes, who seek to divide the better to impose their policies. The surrenders and retreats create a climate of demoralization that opens the way to the reactionary ideological offensive. To resume the offensive on the social terrain means also to build a new socialist class consciousness.

It is clear that the situation places many demands on the radical and revolutionary left. We have therefore to build our own organisations to increase our capability to meet these demands – to win new militants to our ranks and to deepen our roots in working-class communities. We can also strengthen ourselves through cooperating together more. The anti-capitalist left has to match the international organisation of capitalism. Our strength is limited, but it is greater when combined. Through meeting and discussing together we can arrive at common initiatives and actions and, we hope, to define the political basis of a European anticapitalist regroupment.

In this spirit, we support and, where possible, will intervene together in the following initiatives :

• July 16 : mobilization of the ENOUGH campaign against the IMF in Dublin
• October 1st : European conference against Austerity and Privatisation in London
• October 15th : call from indignatos movement for action against austerity throughout Europe
• November 1st : mobilization against the G20 summit in France

Belgium : Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR/SAP)
Croatia : Radnicka Borba
Denmark : Red-Green Alliance
France : Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)
Great Britain : Counterfire – Socialist Resistance – Socialist Party – Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
Greece : Anticapitalist Political Group (APO) – Sosialistiko Ergatiko Komma (SEK)
Ireland : People Before Profit – Socialist Party – Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
Netherlands : Internationale Socialisten – Socialist Alternatieve Politics
Poland : Polish Labour Party (PPP)
Portugal : Bloco de Esquerda
Scotland : Scottish Socialist Party (SSP)
Spanish state : En Lucha – Izquierda Anticapitalista – Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR)
Sweden : Socialist Party

Only a short while ago, the spokesman of the Military Council, Major General Fangari, saluted the martyrs of the revolution and melted Egyptians’ hearts with the memories of the days they spent chanting that the army and the people were “one hand.” Today he delivered another kind of message to the revolutionaries: threats to “take all necessary measures to confront the threats which encircle the homeland unless this questioning of the ongoing process ceases … as do the rumours and misconceptions which lead to discord and rebellion and the promotion of the interests of a narrow minority over those of the country as a whole.” He calls for honest citizens to work for the return of normal life for the children of “our great people”, and, brandishing his finger in the face of the people like Mubarak, insists that “the armed forces will not allow anyone to seize power or override legitimate authority, except within the framework of legal and constitutional legitimacy.”

Thus ended the speech, which came less than 24 hours after Essam Sharaf’s short announcement, and confirmed that the ministry Sharaf heads is nothing more than a mask designed to hide the ugly face of military rule. But over the last six months the people have grown wise to this division of roles between the “good cop” of the Prime Minister and the “bad cop” of the representative of the Military Council. The revolutionaries’ position is that, this time, there will be no going back. We will occupy the streets until the demands of the revolution are met. This inevitably means justice for the martyrs who shed their blood in the squares of Egypt as the price of freedom. We will not settle for less than the fair and public trials of the criminals of Mubarak’s regime and the killers of the martyrs. We will not give up our demand social justice and human dignity through the implementation of a decent minimum wage, humane working conditions and an end to the slavery of fixed-term contracts. We will defend our right to strike and occupy. These rights were not granted, but were won by the people through years of struggle in the street; years which had the bitter taste of arrests, torture and prosecutions. No law issued by the Military Council to criminalize strikes and occupations, and no punishments it imposes can take this right away from the free people.

The military tribunals which steal years from the lives of our young people should have been reserved first for the deposed president in his capacity as former head of the armed forces, rather than enjoying the luxury of a civilian trial. Instead he is protected by the Military Council, which one time postpones the court date under the pretence he is ill, and another spreads rumours of Mubarak’s impending death.

We are not “questioning the ongoing process”, rather we are announcing that the process is slow and compromised in order to protect the killer police officers from justice. We are telling the world that ten thousand of the children of this country are locked up in military prisons after suffering the worst tortures. We know that the system is making the maximum effort to stop the people from regaining the wealth which was looted from them over the decades. We know that only revolutionaries are brought before the military tribunals, while the killers enjoy trials in the civilian courts, with release on bail between sessions.

We are not “spreading false rumours” but spreading the truth that you are trying to hide; the truth that poverty and repression, torture and detention, are still everywhere after 25 January, just as they were before. We have only exchanged the state jails for military prisons, gained the military prosecutor in place of the state security prosecutor, swapped the military tribunals for the exceptional courts. The Emergency Laws were not enough for our military rulers: they added new laws criminalising strikes and occupations in an attempt to clamp down on Egyptians’ freedoms. The budget which the government promised us would be fair turned out to consist of cuts in spending on health, education and old age in order to fund the Ministry of the Interior and the Army.

The people’s interests are not “narrow”. The demands for a loaf of bread, for health care, education, housing fit for human beings, freedom of expression, the right to work and the achievement of justice are at the heart of the demands of the revolution. They do not compare to the narrow self-interest of businessmen and their associates, who, not content with plundering the people’s wealth. These people are terrified by the falling stock market, but unmoved by the blood of 1200 martyrs or the fact that half the population live below the poverty line … or that young people are losing years of their lives in prison. All they care about is that their bank accounts are still swelling and that they continue to drain the blood and sweat of the workers for as little pay as possible.

Finally, revolutionaries do not “seize power”: it is theirs by right. This country should be governed by those who shed their blood for it. If anyone has “seized power”, it is the Military Council and its supporters who were asked by no-one to rule the country, but whole stole – or tried to steal – the revolution by force, taking advantage of the people’s euphoria over the overthrow of the dictator.

It seems as if the one who is shaking his finger and threatening the revolutionaries does not think they understand what it means to lose their children, not on the field of battle with a foreign enemy, but on the soil of their homeland, at the hands of police officers whose salaries were paid by their own taxes. He does not understand what happened on the 25th of January. On that day the people of Egypt rose up, determined never again to be enslaved, inherited or exploited. On the 25th of January the Egyptian people regained their sense of dignity and confidence that they could overthrow the symbols of dictatorship. The head fell, leaving the corrupt body behind. The people swore they would not stop before the downfall of the regime: if not today, then tomorrow.

Glory to the martyrs
Victory to the revolution
Power to the people

The Revolutionary Socialists
12 July 2011