Egypt in the Gulf
EGYPT there?
The Egyptian workers have a long tradition of struggle. Although these were suppressed under Nasser, they have since been rapidly rediscovered. There are fre-
Crisis
Interview with Egyptian Marxist quent spontaneous explosions, which have not led to the creation of powerful workers' organizations — whether unions or parties.
In general these movements have economic motives, but direct clashes with the state are inevitable given that the state is the main owner of the means of produc tion. Thus economic demands give way
EGYPT has sent 20,000 troops and 150 tanks to Saudi Arabia as part of the US-led crusade against Iraq. In return, Egypt will see some of its massive debts cancelled. However this is unlikely to resolve the grave economic crisis afflicting the country. IV spoke to Egyptian revolutionary militant Ahmed
Shafei about the situation. The interview was carried out on
October 10 by Luiza Maria.
V
IEWED from Europe, Egypt seems to have given its support to the Us in the
Gulf crisis almost automatically. Is this accurate?
In fact, there was a delay of two days before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs came up with a statement demanding the resolution of the Iraq-Kuwait conflict in an Arab framework and calling for the
Kuwaiti people to have the right to choose their government. This position - which does not imply support for the emir of
Kuwait — was considerably modified after the Congress of the Arab League in
August 1990, where Egypt aligned itself with the Gulf countries and condemned the Iraqi actions!. This decision was followed up by a series of concrete measures, most importantly the sending of Egyptian armed forces to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
This position needs to be understood in the light of the economic crisis facing
Egypt and the pressure of international financial institutions which restrict the
Egyptian government's room for manoeuvre. The Egyptian regime is compelled to accept everything the imperialists do to protect their interests in the region, in the hope of seeing the cancellation of some of its debts, or at least the postponement of interest repayments.
Egypt owes a lot of money to Kuwait, which from the lending point of view operates like one of the big imperialist institutions. Iraq offered to cancel Egypt's debt to Kuwait in return for support, but
Egypt is too dependent on imperialism to take such a course. The US supports the
Egyptian economy with loans and grain deliveries - between 75% and 80% of the staple food of the population comes from the US.
• How can the apparent popular support for the Egyptian government's position be explained?
The regime is able to touch a specific chord in the Egyptian people to gain at least tacit connivance - the relations between Egyptian workers and the Iraqi regime. Despite the Arab nationalist demagogy of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has been undergoing an unprecedented economic crisis after the eight year long war
After the hostilities ended, the Iraqi regime exploited the competition between Egyptian and Iraqi workers for its own ends. The Egyptians found themselves subjected to various forms of administrative persecution as well as hostility from Iraqis. The result was repeated attacks on Egyptian immigrants, including dozens of killings. Thus, it is easy enough for the Egyptian government to reawaken resentment against Iraq to justify its alignment in the Gulf crisis.
Certainly nothing has been seen in Egypt to compare with the massive popular displays of support for Iraq in, for example, Yemen, Sudan or Tunisia. • Is that the only factor at work?
No. The extent of the economic crisis is everyone's main preoccupation pushes everything else into the background. The Egyptians are in the grip of austerity and mounting poverty. Each year they await the budget vote. Today, the Mubarak government is holding out the hope that his pro-imperialist position will offer some sort of alleviation of the crisis. Even though outbreaks of popular anger at the regime's anti-Arab posture cannot be ruled out, the expectations of economic relief make for their postpone• Egypt has a large and concentrated working class. What is going on rapidly to political demands and the government-controlled unions are swept aside to be replaced by "workers' committees".
democratic demands, since in Egypt it is forbidden to strike or demonstrate. Often such movements end up in bloody confrontations between the strikers and the forces of order, as at Helwan in 1989 (see /V 174).
This class consciousness can also be found amongst the Egyptian emigres, who, unlike their Europe-bound North African cousins, are mainly to be found in the neighboring Arab countries, such as Libya, Jordan, Iraq or the UAE. The Egyptian emigrant workers confront their new employers, be they Libyan, Jordanian or Iraqi, as their bosses rather than their Arab brothers. Thus class consciousness replaces Arab national consciousness.
Having being expelled in their thousands by Libya, exploited in Jordan or murdered in Iraq, the Egyptian workers do not feel an urgent need to denounce imperialist attacks on Libya's Qadhafi, support the Palestinian Intifada or the Iraqi regime. While this does not explain everything, the anti-worker outlook of the Arab nationalist regimes only reinforces the failure of nationalism after the defeat of
Furthermore, the working class lacks a political framework. The left has not managed to implant itself. On the other hand the present combative mood offers enormous possibilities to the left, especially in a situation where the economic opening threatens the interests of layers of the petty bourgeoisie, poor peasants and sections tied to the state apparatus.
The Communist Party is torn by internal problems, weakened by clandestinity and has been sent into a spin by the events in Eastern Europe. It is currently updating its propaganda, not from any concern for theoretical rigor, but in order to justify Gorbachev's policies. Its contortions over the 1. The transfer of the seat of the Arab League from Tunis to Cairo was more than a coincidence. Egypt ceased to be the home of the League due to the boycott of Egypt by Arab countries after the visit by Sadat to Jerusalem and the Camp David accords with Israel in 1978. The boycott was broken by Yasser Arafat's visit to Cairo in 1983. Subsequently Egypt re-established relations with the League. The fact that the League is again to be centred in Egypt is a victory for the Egyp tian bourgeoisie and a demonstration of the failure of
Arab nationalist demagogy.
International Viewpoint #194 • November 12, 1990
EGYPT / USSR Gulf issue are in the same style as at the time of the Camp David accords, when the CP contrived to support the EgyptIsraeli agreements, the PLO, the international conference proposal and so on all at the same time. • What about other political forces?
The liberal opposition is going ever further in the direction of support for imperialism. The left forces remain marginal except in the universities, where, indeed, they were the dominant force in the 1970s. Since then they have been overtaken by the fundamentalists, although the left has been able to regain ground recently through mobilizations on anti-imperialist themes.
The fundamentalists have been embarrassed by the imperialist intervention in the Gulf. They are in a very uncomfortable position, since they have traditionally been both anti-Western and tied politically and financially to Saudi Arabia, where the Constitution is the Koran. They are unable to justify the "Western" presence in that country. They have adopted a three-point position: condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; defence of Saudi Arabia; and condemnation of the American presence. * ence of its prices from those in the neighboring republics, the Estonians moved to set up a customs service on their frontiers.
Given the weakness of the "sovereign republics" state machinery, such internal customs services create the threat of political clashes without offering any real economic protection. After all, even the heavily militarized border between the two parts of Ireland has never been made proof against smuggling.
There is no aspect of the debate over marketizing that is so contradictory as the relation of the market to the national question. In presenting the economic policy decided on by the plenum (Pravda, October 20), Gorbachev said: "The market makes it possible to unite peoples not by the dangerous force of weapons but by solid economic interest." This parallels his policy of trying to maintain the rule of the bureaucracy through a stacked-deck parliamentarianism rather than totalitarianism. In this case as well, he has read his capitalist examples too superficially.
THE WORST aspect, in a way, of the market orientation
Gorbachov proposed to the plenum of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the second week of October was the pragmatic argument he used to defend it. "Worldwide experience shows the vitality and effectiveness of the market economy." The market is, thus, the best of all possible worlds for the chief of the Soviet bureaucracy, as for Margaret
Thatcher.
GERRY FOLEY
D
ESPITE the fact that marketism has become the received wisdom in the Communist Parly, as well as most of the opposition, in the USSR, more and more misgivings are being expressed in the
Soviet press about its actual and prospective effects. It is becoming harder to cover up the ruthless logic of the market and socio-economic relations based on competition. At the CC plenum, the first secorganization, B. V. Gidaspov, was bru-
"We have become more and more convinced that the market is possible only with the attributes that belong to it, including the exploitation of wage labor.
All this terminology about a regulated socialist market is only verbal acrobatics.
There are going to be poor people and there are going to be rich people. Therefore, we must clearly determine the least painful mechanisms for transition to the market — they will be painful - and most important a mechanism for protectthe population from its negative ing effects. Of course, it would be nice if this side of the market did not affect our perspectives and those close to us, first of all children seems, unfortunately, problematic."
Gidaspov was also categorical another basic point: "It would be wrong to start any moves to the market without adopting a Treaty of Union. It must condrawing four clear dividing lines between the prerogatives of the center and the republics, the republics and the autonomous republics and the regions and even among the regions themselves, within the regions themselves, between the regional and district soviets, and it could even go lower."
Differences in pricing policy among the republics, which are beginning to try to exercise rights of economic sovereignty, have already created sharp conflicts. For example, the Russian republic government under Yeltsin raised food prices unilaterally. The higher Russian prices threatened to pull such products out of Ukraine, which then took protectionist measures. On October 15, the Estonian government raised the price of basic food products by 250 per cent. In order to prevent the trafficking that could be expected to result from the drastic differ-
Who is strengthened by the market?
Paradoxically, while both Moscow and the national-democratic fronts agree about the market, they draw opposite conclusions about its results. The Baltic front leaders think that it will strengthen them against Moscow, that is, that they are economically stronger relative to it than they are politically, because their level of productivity is higher. What Moscow sees is that the Baltic cannot do without petroleum produced in the Russian federation. Actually, the strength of the Baltic movements up until now has been political, since they have provided an example and leadership for the national movements of far more numerous and potentially powerful oppressed nationalities.
The more the Baltic front governments try to apply the policy of marketization, the more divisions and disenchantment appear, as indicated by the protests of the cultural unions in Estonia (see International Viewpoint, No. 192, October 15, 1990).
Communist party leaders in the Central Asian republics protest that the market can govern their relations with other parts of the Soviet Union when their income and productivity are a fraction of those in more developed regions. Furthermore, private property in land is an unattractive prospect in areas where land is scarce and where its value depends largely or entirely on irrigation.
At the October CC plenum, L. V. Potapov, first secretary of the Buriat Mongol Autonomous Republic Party Committee, said: "For Buryatia and many other regions of Siberia and the Far East, transition to market relations is a problem of unprecedented complexity, bordering on the danger of a social-economic earth-
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Each to their own market
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November 12, 1990 • #194 International Viewpoint quake, if special supplementary measures are not taken. For a number of reasons, Buryatia, like other regions of our country, lags considerably behind the average Soviet and average Russian level of development, in particular in the area of social infrastructure....Today, Buryatia, with respect to many of the most important indicators, occupies the sixtieth or seventieth place in the Russian federation. Moreover, more industrial enterprises are unprofitable or barely profitable."
No private ownership of the land
V. Kh. Bambaev, secretary of the Kalmuk Autonomous Republic Committee, reported that practically all livestock and arable land in his republic had been leased or turned over to cooperatives, but that "the only thing that cannot be private property is land." At the same time, he said that the republic would soon go on a system of rationing for necessities and that the prevailing opinion was that "in the context of sovereignty" the republic should be declared "a free enterprise
The population of Kalmukia is about 322,000, of which 135,000 are Kalmuks and 138,000 Russians. The Kalmuks were one of the peoples driven from their homeland by Stalin during the second world war. Their territory borders on the
Sea. Kalmukia is number of autonomous republics within the Russian federation that have declared themselves independent.
The most important is probably the Volga Tatar republic, which has a population of 3,640,000, of which 1,736,000 are Tartars. Important sections of the Volga Tatar people (which altogether numbers about 6 million) live in other republics. The Tatars historically were the most developed of the Muslim peoples in the Russian empire, and played a leading role in the rise of nationalism among the peoples of Islamic tradition.
and more, a demand is expressed for a greater Tataria, setting off alarm signals in the Soviet central
The Russian federation includes a large number of small peoples engulfed by the spread of the Russian empire. The justification for granting the Tatars only autonomy, when they are six times as numerous as the Estonians, was
816 that their lands are entirely surrounded by Russia. The concept at the formation of the USSR was that in order to enjoy the formal independence of a Union republic, it was necessary to have a sea or foreign border. This position may have been a vestige of the idea that nations were a bourgeois category and therefore they have to be able to defend themselves in the same way as a bourgeois nation state. In line with this, the expression has appeared in the Soviet press that if the Tatars want to be independent, they will have to dig into the earth or fly up into the sky.
Tactical alliances with pro-independentists
In fact, the Russian federation is a sort of half-way Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But while the Yeltsin government is making tactical alliances with the independence-minded republics, Pravda of October 11 claimed that the Russian legislature was taking a tough line against those seeking more independence within the Russian Federation. E. Sorotkin wrote that the debate on a bill on relations among the Soviets of People's Deputies during the period of economic reform "shows that the deputies are beginning to understand that the threat to the state sovereignty of Russia comes not just from above but from below. It would be a good thing if only the autonomous republics were declaring sovereignty in the framework of the Russian Federation.' But even regions are now grasping
"Thus, the Kemerovo regional soviet has decided to conduct its own tax policy, independent of the Union and Russia....In essence, what is going on is the tearing up of the Russian state into principalities and counties. The deputies quite correctly remarked that in these conditions there cannot even be any talk about a market. Democracy requires dis-
USSR cipline, and therefore the bill quite rightly proposed the supremacy of all-Russian laws over the laws of the subjects of the Federation. This shows that the Russian deputies are deeply disturbed by separatist moods in localities." The Kemerovo district (the Kuzbass) precisely is a center of the miners' movement. The attitude of the Russian parliament, if accurately reported in Pravda, raises the question about whether the aspirations expressed by a delegation of Kuzbass people's deputies that visited the Latvian front in August are now being dashed.
The August 28 issue of the main publication of the Latvian front, Atmoda, quoted the leader of the delegation, Alexander Aslamidi, as saying: "Business is the locomotive of progress. Our task as deputies is to offer secure conditions for business. Boris Yeltsin has already signed a document granting economic self-management to our district, providing for its transformation into an economic free zone. Important other steps have been taken. The package gives the district soviet almost the same powers as US states. Boris Yeltsin has agreed in principle to consider this document in the near future. In a word, we will have our own miners' republic. " (My emphasis.)
Privatization prospects sweetened
In fact, the Gorbachev regime has sweetened the prospect of privatization with various suggestions that it would open up the way for self-management. Now it seems to be feeling the need to management. Thus in Pravda of October 6, A. Nekilepov, deputy director of the Institute of International Economic and Political Research of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, writes:
"Many failures in the "launching' of market mechanisms in this gradually led to the conclusion that the solution should be sought in changing the property relations. In this connection, the idea of self-managed socialism based on group forms of property has become quite widespread. For example, S. Alekseev sees the transfer of ownership of work collectives as 'the true way of solving nearly all our crucial problems.' (Sovetskaya Kul'tura, July 21, 1990).....
"Unfortunately, there is more than enough confirmation of the unworkability of an economic system based on self-
International Viewpoint #194 • November 12, 1990
USSR management (precisely of the system and not individual enterprises). The most telling example is Yugoslavia. The crisis of this system is now not being questioned in practice, and the solution is generally management in Hungary and Poland are being energetically dismantled."