Cairo's Communists

On Friday (18/2) hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo's Tahrir square both to celebrate their revolution and to keep up the pressure for meaningful change in their country.

Sadly this has not been enough for some small groups who have been calling for even more protests in the last week. These have tended to be organised labour groups answering a call from western trade unions who have a broadly Marxist ideology. The funny thing is that from the 1960's up to the fall of the USSR Egypt was actually a closer ally of the Soviets then it was of the USA and there are still many reminders of that relationship alive in Egyptian society. These include Egypt's command economy where the government fixes the prices of everyday essentials like fuel, sugar and flour. It was the failure of this economic model that helped drive Egypt's revolution in the first place.

So you could argue that the people calling for further protests are actually being counter-revolutionary by fighting to put things back the way they were before. This is very similar to what happened in eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR.

Starting with Poland in April 1989 the next seven months saw revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups, riots and crackdowns sweep across seven countries. The rapid pace of this change affecting so many people at the same time meant that no-one was able to bring proper and stable change to their country. This led to a very dark two decades for eastern Europe with countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria slipping into poverty and corruption while countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia violently broke apart amid civil war, genocide, UN peacekeeping missions and NATO bombing campaigns. Some people say that this chaos was orchestrated by the USA in order to break these Eastern European nations into small, easy to control parts and help Israel's campaign against the Palestinians.

So, to me, this current wave of protest that is sweeping across the middle east looks less like Arabs bravely fighting off US repression and more like poorly educated Arabs getting themselves killed in order to strengthen America's hold over the middle east which is a shame because I think we all know who dictates America's middle east policy.