Editorial from Solidarity 291, 3 July 2013.
(This article was written before the 3 July coup in Egypt.)
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not just a neo-liberal capitalist party, but clerical-fascist.
Former SWP leader Tony Cliff used that term for it in 1946. Despite the SWP’s subsequent shifts, which went as far as recommending votes for the Brotherhood in last year’s elections in Egypt, he was right.
The Brotherhood is an approximate Islamic analogue of the Catholic fascist parties of Europe between World Wars One and Two. It is a canny, cautious variant of the type, but like those parties it has a mass plebeian activist base and a political trajectory which would shut down living space for the labour movement in the name of populist demagogy (“Islam is the answer!”)
The Brotherhood was the only political force able to build up a big semi-tolerated organisation, and large funds, under the Mubarak dictatorship; and so it won the elections last year despite its equivocal role in the battles against Mubarak.
After a year, though — after November 2012, when Morsi claimed powers to rule by decree; after the killing and wounding of many activists by Brotherhood thugs on the streets; after Morsi has offered only Islamist rhetoric for the economic plight of Egypt’s people — millions have turned against the Brotherhood.
Egyptian socialists have been right to join the street protests against Morsi. They understand, also, that ugly forces are jumping on the anti-Morsi surge.
In most circumstances, we would side with any elected government facing a threat of military coup (or semi-coup, or quarter-coup). We would do that even if we hated the elected government and continued to oppose it.
There are cases in working-class history of socialists being swayed into support of populist military coups against unpopular elected governments (Pilsudski in Poland, 1926). We learn from those errors.
This is not the same. We are against a military coup. We are not for defence of the Morsi government. Why not? Because that government threatens, if consolidated, to squeeze out the light and air for the Egyptian labour movement even more fully than Mubarak could — or even more fully than the army could in foreseeable conditions.
The Egyptian working class is not yet politically strong enough to take power against both the Brotherhood and the army. Its priority must be to develop its political independence and to be the first fighter for democracy and secularism against Morsi, against any “transitional” government if he falls, and against the army.
