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Action programme for Egyptian revolution

League for the Fifth International

Victory to the Egyptian revolution!

Also in Arabic & Indonesian

The revolution in Egypt is an inspiration to everyone fighting against oppression across the world.

The League for the Fifth International is a revolutionary socialist organisation which is in solidarity with the people of Egypt fighting for democracy. We must learn the lessons of previous revolutions and how we can really change society. The League proposes the following slogans and ideas for a revolutionary transformation of society.

The central task now in the revolutionary situation is to establish workers councils across the country, based in the workplaces but drawing in wider forces from the youth and ultimately the soldiers to really shift the power into the hands of the revolutionary forces.

• Prices must be slashed. Immediate distribution of food to the poor and unemployed. Wages must be raised to compensate for the inflation and protected by a sliding scale

• The unemployed must be offered work in a programme of public development to replace the crumbling shantytowns with decent housing, sanitation, schools, clinics

• The ill gotten gains of all the top figures of the Mubarak regime, of the super rich, must be seized and used for reconstruction

• The privatised industries and services must be renationalised without compensation

• The revolution must spread to the countryside where half of all Egyptians still live. Small farmers’ debts must be cancelled, large farms and agribusinesses must be expropriated and put under workers’ control, life in the villagers must transformed by improved provision of healthcare, education and housing

•The freedom, dignity and human rights that people are demanding on the streets must be firmly established and protected against any return of the old regime

• The 12,000 or so political prisoners in Mubarak’s jails must be released and all exiles given the right to return

• The police chiefs and torturers must be arrested and their crimes exposed and punished

• The secret police and the paramilitary squads must be disarmed and disbanded, a workers’ and youth militia must keep order, soldiers’ democratic rights must be protected by establishing soldiers’ committees and the election officers so that they cannot be used again as blind tools of coups and dictatorship

• The ruling party must be dissolved, its property confiscated and its officials and ministers punished for their corruption

• There must be complete freedom to form political parties, to demonstrate, to meet, to have unfettered access to the broadcast media and to publish newspapers

• Elections must take place to a sovereign, revolutionary constituent assembly under the control and protection of workers’ and popular committees and militia

• There must be active support for popular uprisings and revolutions against the ruling tyrants in all the countries of North Africa and the Middle East

• Renounce Mubarak’s treacherous complicity in the oppression of the Palestinians – declare solidarity with the Palestinians break the blockade of Gaza from the Egyptian side

Make the revolution permanent

What government should the masses on the streets – the youth, workers, and unemployed be aiming to bring to power?

No intelligence chiefs, no army generals, no businessmen or Nobel Prize winners with the blessings of the USA can meet the people;s need for “bread, freedom and social justice”. Only a government of the workers and small farmers can do this.

That means utterly destroying the institutions of the old regime and putting power in the hands of councils of workers, peasants and soldiers.

A workers’ and peasants’ government would start the process of socialising the economy – the factories and all the large-scale workplaces would be nationalised without compensation and the land brought under cooperative and communal ownership.

This is the Trotskyist strategy of permanent revolution.To carry this out the most advanced sections of the workers and youth need to convene to form a new revolutionary party aiming to fight to stop the bourgeoisie, the generals and the Islamists wresting control of the revolution, and instead directing it towards its true historic goal: working class power and socialism.

The revolution in the Arab world has begun. It is shaking the whole world. Rulers are trembling at the power of the masses revealed, not just in Arab capitals but in Tel Aviv, not just in America but in China too.

Victory can be a beacon to masses struggling everywhere against repression, against poverty, against the global capitalist crisis. It gives the lie to those who say revolution is a thing of the past – it opens the broad horizon of world socialist revolution in the 21st century.

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