In solidarity with the struggling people of Tunisia and Egypt
The South African Communist Party (SACP) welcomes the political revolts and developments in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere, and strongly condemns the brutal responses by the collapsing regimes of dictators, in the case of Egypt we appreciate the restrain of the Military force.
These developments increasingly point out the correctness of our party's shared strategic analysis with many of the forces in the Africa Left Networking Forum: "the crisis facing Africa, including Tunisia and Egypt, remains its deepening marginalisation and impoverishment within the global imperialist system, the failure over many decades of a variety of elite-based neo-colonial agendas on the one hand, and the degeneration and in several cases, the collapse of more radical national democratic revolutions led by former liberation movements on the other".
We observed that "at the heart of revitalising the African revolution (part of which is currently underway in Tunisia and Egypt) is the task of creating the conditions (i.e. the social, economic, democratic, and organisational space and capacity) for the key national democratic protagonists - the working class, the peasantry, the mass of urban and rural marginalized (many of them youth), together with patriotic middle strata in the state and civil society - to become the key motive force of re-radicalisation, not just in theory but in practice".
It is imperative therefore as part of this ongoing class analysis, which the SACP will more comprehensively debate in its forthcoming Politburo and Central Committee meetings, that we fully support the popular aspirations of the people of Tunisia and Egypt to seize power by mobilising progressive strata, students, youth, women, in alliance with working people against the reactionary dictatorial state, to support its complete revolutionary overthrow and the transformation process towards broad social, political and economic change.
Whilst much of the analysis of these developments is reductionist and not located in the long range, strategic class character of Tunisian and Egyptian societies, it is important to appreciate these developments as being uniquely shaped by objective historical factors in the generalised crisis of development over many years.
The origin of the Egyptian crisis - the absence of popular democracy and participation for instance - can be traced back decades ago, from right wing public policies in the social, political and economic domain, in which many of the sovereign political and economic functions were completely abandoned by the state to the service of bourgeois ideological forces backed by imperialism.
Our party also welcomes the massive strategic backlash suffered by the neo-liberal character of media reportage on these developments, in which opportunistic consensus by a promotional lining-up of capitalist oriented successors is forged from the back door.
These agendas must be defeated by increasing the tempo of alternative reporting, which thus far has provided a much sober description, that what the people of Egypt and Tunisia are demanding, constitutes not a neo-liberal stabilisation, but a complete rupture with dictatorships, in which people insist on complete over-haul of the ruling capitalist class and its machinery.
We should remain alert to the mechanisation of Imperialist forces to propel such revolts only to spill the victory like they did in some of the areas in the former Soviet states which today yearns the socialist system.
The SACP also notes that these revolutions are not immune from reversal and counter-revolutionary ambitions, in which they can be subverted and turned into sectoral mobilisation for reactionary ends. It is thus important that the revolutionary tasks of current social, political and economic mobilisation, goes far beyond tinkering with the superficial, but addresses the class character of the current states and its apparatus.
Central to these revolutions is the dismantling of the repressive machinery of the Tunisian and Egyptian state and forging a unifying strategic platform to address popular aspirations of the working people, by transforming political power, meetings peoples basic needs for quality jobs, food, shelter, to defend workers, women struggles and the rights of young people to education and decent jobs.
Our party will also join in on solidarity demonstrations and continue the debate on the character of these revolutions.
Statement issued by the SACP, February 2 2011
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