EXTRACT: Obviously we have no hesitation in calling for the overthrow of the regime in Egypt - and all the other reactionary regimes in the region, including the 'anti-imperialist' or 'anti-Zionist' ones like Gaddafi's Libya or Assad's Syria. However, our revolutionary-democratic approach is tempered by the sober fact that proletarian rule is not on the immediate agenda - the working class cannot come to power either today or tomorrow. The reason for this is quite straightforward. After decades of state repression the working class in Egypt just does not exist politically - at least as far as Marxists understand it.
Accordingly, our essential strategy is for pan-Arab revolution, which we believe to be usefully informed by the broad Marx-Engels approach to Germany in 1848-51 - we are for the revolution in permanence (a somewhat different perspective, it needs to be mentioned in passing, from VI Lenin's call for "uninterrupted revolution" in Russia or Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution"). What is required are the tactics and programme of forming the working class into a party - a party that can win a majority of the Egyptian population and thus has a realistic possibility of spreading the flame of revolution. By definition, for such an approach to be even vaguely viable, space is needed to enable the workers to organise, educate and generally exert themselves as a political force - for which the very first condition, of course, is the winning of freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom to form parties, trade unions, popular assemblies, militias, etc. Precisely the sort of aims being advocated by those occupying Tahrir Square, even if the left forces involved are at the moment weak and divided. But we are optimistic about the left in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. There is every reason to believe that it will both rapidly grow and rapidly learn.
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