Everyone is rightly upset about what the army did in Tahrir Square last night.  Let’s remember, however, the military already moved against peaceful protesters in Suez and is accused of involvement in arrest and torture of hundreds during the uprising. And almost every day there is a statement from the army warning strikers and protesters, coupled with an orchestrated media campaign in both state and private TV channels discrediting labor strikes and renewed protests in Tahrir.  What happened last night should not come as a shock.

If Mubarak’s regime was corrupt (and it was), then why do we treat the military institution, which provided the backbone of his dictatorship, as “neutral” or “pure”?  The leadership of this institution, namely the generals of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, are part of Mubarak’s regime.  And any real change would affect their privileges and control.

We cannot and will not carry arms against the army.  I salute and support all the efforts to resume the protests in Tahrir, including the one planned for today at 2 pm.  But still, the most effective weapon is mass strikes. Do not stop the working class from striking (and good luck if you try anyway — they won’t listen to you).  Let’s put our energy into supporting strikes and help unionize workers.  We need a general strike to bring down this regime once and for all.  The revolution must continue. . . .

by Hossam el-Hamalawy, 26 Feb 2011

Egyptian Soldiers Violently Break Up Protest

Cairo – Egyptian soldiers used violence and intimidation to break up a demonstration early Saturday morning in Tahrir Square, according to activists with the youth movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak.Troops fired into the air with live ammunition, and used tasers (stun guns) and clubs to clear protesters out of the emblematic site, where a peaceful demonstration began early Friday. “The honeymoon (between soldiers and civilians) is over; they attacked with force,” Ashraf El-Helaly told Prensa Latina, describing the attitude of the soldiers, which had shown restraint during the 18 days of anti-Mubarak protests. The young man said dozens of soldiers entered the square, shot at streetlights and attacked the protesters who had been demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. Hundreds of activists had assembled in Tahrir Square and in front of the nearby Parliament building, some with tents, despite pressure from soldiers to leave so that traffic could begin circulating again. Another young man identified as Mohammed said that after midnight, soldiers and plainclothes agents wearing ski masks knocked over protesters’ tents and beat them with clubs. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had celebrated the two week anniversary of the fall of Mubarak, and repeated demands for the ruling military junta to undertake promised political reforms. In that sense, many placards bore the slogan “The People Demand the Resignation of Shafiq,” who was appointed days before Mubarak stepped down and ceded power to the armed orces. Other placards demanded the end of the emergency law and expressed solidarity with Libya Prensa Latina, 26 Feb 2011 ————— http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1985/patterns/part1.htm

Rosa Luxemburg, 1905 and the classic account of the mass strike

By far the most brilliant exposition on the mass strike is the classic work of Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, The Political Party and The Trade Unions, which deals with the role of the mass strike in forging the working class into a fighting unit, in bringing about their spiritual growth, changing them so that they become able to change society.

Rosa Luxemburg sketches the rising waves of strike in Russia in the ten years 1896-1905. In May 1896 a general strike of 40,000 textile workers took place in St Petersburg. This was followed by another general strike of the same workers in 1897. Following this, a whole number of small strikes took place until the next mass strike in March 1902 of the petroleum workers in the Caucasus. Then in November a mass strike of railwaymen in Rostov turned into a general strike. In May, June and July 1903, the whole of South Russia was aflame. Baku, Tiflis, Batum, Elizavetograd, Odessa, Kiev, Nikolayev, and Ekaterinoslav were in the grip of a general strike. The year 1904 brought with it war, and for a time a pause in the strike movement. But this ended with the defeat of the Tsarist army and navy at the hands of the Japanese. In December 1904 a general strike broke out in Baku. Before this news had time to reach all parts of the Tsarist empire a mass strike broke out in St Petersburg in January 1905. This was the start of the Russian revolution of 1905.

The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetus of the St Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionary declaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as if for the first time awoke class feeling and class consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of the tugging at these chains. All the innumerable sufferings of the modern proletariat reminded them of the old bleeding wounds. Here was the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here were brutal foremen driven off in a sack on a handcar, at another place infamous systems of fines were fought against, everywhere better wages were striven for and here and there the abolition of homework.

Mass economic strikes led to confrontation with the Tsarist regime, its police and army, and this led directly to political strikes. The latter awakened previously dormant workers to undertake economic strikes to improve their conditions, and the economic strikes again gave new impetus to the political strikes. The mass strike overcomes the separation of economics and politics that is inherent in reformism (as well as in its symmetrical opposite, syndicalism). The mass strike fuses together the struggle for reforms inside capitalism with the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The mass strike is a bridge between the here and now and the socialist future.

In the mass strike workers stop being onlookers of history, or a stage army; they step on to the historical arena shaping their future and forging themselves.

In former bourgeois revolutions where, on the one hand, the political education and leadership of the revolutionary masses was undertaken by the bourgeois parties, and on the other hand the revolutionary task was limited to the overthrow of the government, the short battle on the barricades was the appropriate form of revolutionary struggle. Today, at a time that the working class must educate, organise and lead itself in the course of the revolutionary struggle, when the revolution itself is directed not only against the established state power but also against capitalist exploitation, mass strikes appear as the natural method to mobilise the broadest possible proletarian layers into action, to revolutionise and organise them. Simultaneously it is a method by means of which to undermine and overthrow the established state power as well as to curb capitalist exploitation.. . In order that the working class may participate en masse in any direct political action, it must first organise itself, which above alt means that it must obliterate the boundaries between factories and workshops, mines and foundries, it must overcome the split between workshops which the daily yoke of capitalism condemns it to. Therefore the mass strike is the first natural spontaneous form of every great revolutionary proletarian action. The more industry becomes the prevalent form of the economy, the more prominent the role of the working class, and the more developed the conflict between labour and capital, the more powerful and decisive become the mass strikes. The earlier main form of bourgeois revolutions, the battle on the barricades, the open encounter with the armed state power is a peripheral aspect of the revolution today, only one moment in the whole process of the mass struggle of the proletariat.

Contrary to all reformists who see a Chinese wall between partial struggles for economic reform and the political struggle for revolution, Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that in a revolutionary period the economic struggle grows into a political one, and vice versa.

The movement does not go only in one direction, from an economic to a political struggle, but also in the opposite direction. Every important political mass action, after reaching its peak, results in a series of economic mass strikes. And this rule applies not only to the individual mass strike, but to the revolution as a whole. With the spread, clarification and intensification of the political struggle not only does the economic struggle not recede, but on the contrary it spreads and at the same time becomes more organised and intensified. There exists a reciprocal influence between the two struggles. Every fresh attack and victory of the political struggle has a powerful impact on the economic struggle, in that at the same time as it widens the scope for the workers to improve their conditions and strengthens their impulse to do so, it enhances their fighting spirit After every soaring wave of political action, there remains a fertile sediment from which sprout a thousand economic struggles. And the reverse also applies. The workers’ constant economic struggle against capital sustains them at every pause in the political battle. The economic struggle constitutes, so to speak, the permanent reservoir of working class strength from which political struggles always imbibe new strength …

In a word, the economic struggle is the factor that advances the movement from one political focal point to another. The political struggle periodically fertilises the ground for the economic struggle. Cause and effect interchange every second. Thus we find that the two elements, the economic and political, do not incline to separate themselves from one another during the period of the mass strikes in Russia, not to speak of negating one another as pedantic schemes would suggest.

The logical and necessary climax of the mass strike is ‘the open uprisings which can only be realised as the culmination of a series of partial uprisings which prepare the pound, and therefore are liable to end for a time in what looks like partial “defeats”, each of which may seem to be “premature”.’

For Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The most precious thing, because it is the most enduring, in the sharp ebb and flow of the revolutionary waves is the proletariat’s spiritual growth. The advance by leaps and – bounds of the intellectual stature of the proletariat affords an inviolable guarantee of its further progress in the inevitable economic and political struggles ahead.’

And what idealism workers rise to! They put aside thoughts of whether they have the wherewithal to support themselves and their families during the struggle. They do not ask whether all the preliminary technical preparations have been made. The mass strike can ‘generate such a tremendous volume of idealism among the masses that they appear to become almost immune to the most terrible privations.’

Rosa Luxemburg’s account concentrates on the great dissolving effect of the mass strike on the boundaries between economics and politics in workers’ struggles. But she is also clear that it tends to dissolve other barriers as well – sectionalism, regionalism, etc. – at the same time as demonstrating the unbridgeable gulf between workers’ interests and those of the bosses and their state. Her description fits a number of mass strikes: Russia 1905, 1917; France and Spain 1936; Hungary 1956; Poland 1980, and others.

However, there are many mass strikes that have little in common with Rosa Luxemburg’s description. Where the workers are highly organised in trade unions, the extent of their independence from the conservative trade union bureaucracy is largely a function of their confidence in facing the capitalists. The higher the level of organisation and confidence of the rank and file in fighting the capitalists, the more able are they to break the shackles of the trade union bureaucracy, and vice versa. The extent to which a strike is a product of rank-and-file initiative, determines how near it is to the norm of the mass strike described by Rosa Luxemburg. Unfortunately many people use Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the mass strike dogmatically, so that instead of comparing her concept with an actual mass strike, they use it to obscure instead of enlighten. The mass strike, like all social phenomena, is not absolute, but largely depends on the circumstances in which it takes place. To underline this we shall deal with two mass strikes which are completely different from those analysed by Rosa Luxemburg: the purely economic, bureaucratically centralised Swedish general strike of 1909; and the purely political, bureaucratically controlled Belgian general strike of 1913…..

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