The News Line: Editorial
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Mubarak regime offers 15 per cent rise in pay and pensions!
WORKERS and youth in Cairo held mass demonstrations yesterday following the release of the detained Google executive and facebook radical Wael Ghonim.
The demonstrators in Tahrir Square remain determined not to be forced out of the Square by the army, and have condemned all the groups who are now negotiating with Mubarak, through their talks with Vice-President Suleiman (the head of the secret police apparatus). Included in the groups is the Muslim Brotherhood, from whom Mubarak had said that he was trying to save the world for the last 30 years.
The revolutionary youth have now held the square and the centre of Alexandria for 16 days, and in both places have set up hundreds of tents plus mobile medical facilities.
In an attempt to appease the workers the government offered, on Monday, a pay and pensions rise to public sector workers of 15 per cent.
This offer has backfired with workers saying that it proves that the only way to better one’s lot is to make a revolution, and then to complete it by bringing down the regime. Yesterday the turnout in Tahrir Square was the biggest ever.
Vice-President and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, whom WikiLeaks has revealed is in touch with the Israeli leadership on a daily basis, announced yesterday that Mubarak was setting up a committee that would carry out constitutional and legislative amendments to give the appearance of a shift of power.
Suleiman pledged that Mubarak will form another committee to follow up government measures to solve the crisis, including talks with the opposition, while a third committee will investigate the violence and the attacks that were made on the Tahrir Square protesters.
Ghonim, who was jailed on January 28 and was blamed for establishing the facebook page that played a part in beginning the wave of protests, is now being courted as a man who could be used as a figurehead to front a managed change of the Mubarak-Suleiman police state.
On Monday, there was a symbolic funeral procession for a journalist who was killed by a sniper during the fighting in the Square.
At least 400 people have been killed in the struggle between the masses and the Mubarak regime, so far.
Samir Radwan, Egypt’s new finance minister, has said that increasing pensions will cost the government 6.5 billion Egyptian pounds ($940m), while a five billion pound ($840m) fund has also been created to compensate those affected by looting or vandalism during the protests.
The popular view of the talks with the regime has been enunciated by demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
This is that ‘The political parties can do whatever they please because they don’t represent us. This is not a revolution made by the parties. The parties have been there for 30 years and they’ve done nothing. This is the people’s revolution.’
The class struggle between the bourgeois Mubarak regime and the working class is now set to come to the fore, with the road to a bourgeois democracy well and truly blocked by Mubarak and Obama.
The working class will go forward to establish workers councils to lead the rural population and the middle class to the complete overthrow of the bourgeois police state regime and the establishment of a workers and farmers government.
The favourable international conditions of world capitalist crisis are creating the situation for the emergence of the Egyptian revolution as a socialist revolution.
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