Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda.  Tahrir Square has been retaken.  This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday.  Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight.  They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square.  The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square.  Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military.  Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places.  The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime.  There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas.  The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in.  The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events.  Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate.  The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity.  The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order.  Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated.  Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF.  The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small.  Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end.  Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979.  Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one.  Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal.  They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants.  Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded.  Abstraction governed their responses.  Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence. 

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers.  We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play.  They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation.  But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations.  The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation.  In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists.  The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday.  The level of brutality is shocking.  I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry.  Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return.  Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative.  As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

The revolutionaries demanded Mubarak's overthrow, and insisted that Suleiman should not be put in charge. They have won that. They demanded that the NDP-dominated parliament be prorogued in the interim before elections, and the constitution suspended. They have won that. But they also demanded that between now and elections, there should be a collective, civilian governing council, that the emergency law should be terminated, that unions and parties should have the right to form without the permission of the state. They haven't won that. The army has instead taken control, is attempting to dismantle the democracy village in Tahrir Square, and has been arresting activists today. This does not mean that the army is going to get its way over the future of Egypt, or even that its hesitant, faltering efforts today - and they did falter - represent anything but a tentative foot in the water, an attempt to see if something like order can be restored. In fact, the army's premature provocation resulted in thousands of people pouring back into the square, some rough confrontations, and eventually groups of army and police standing around looking perplexed. Some police even came to the square pleading to be accepted as comrades of the revolution. The army will have to concede some form of representative electoral system, with some basic political freedoms. The state will be weakened in its repressive capacity, and the government will be strengthened in its representative capacity. But the precise balance of forces in the new polity has still to be decided, and in particular the army's central role has to be negotiated (and struggled against). Everything the army does, therefore - whether they decide to keep the NDP men in place or throw them aside, for example - has to be read in terms of their determination to remain in charge.

The army's manoeuvering now is presumably aimed at breaking up the remarkably broad coalition that was first assembled in 2006. This has included of course the Muslim Brothers, the Nasserist 'Karama' party, the Labour Party (which is Islamist), the Tagammu Party (leftist), the Revolutionary Socialists (self-explanatory), Kefaya (an alliance which includes many of the above elements), the Ghad Party (a liberal offshoot of the Wafdists which was the first party to be approached by Mubarak for negotiations), and Mohammed El Baradei's National Alliance for Change. It has to be said that the alliance might have been quite difficult to maintain if the left had taken the sectarian attitude of some of the older layers of marxists who basically maintained that the Muslim Brothers were a tool of the capitalist class, simply an ally of neoliberalism and imperialism, and so on. The Revolutionary Socialists played a key role in overcoming that. Samir Najib, working in the Centre for Socialist Studies, argued that it was vital to understand that the Muslim Brothers as in part a movement of the oppressed, involving many rank and file activists who came from poor and working class backgrounds. Some of them had been on the Left, and been alienated from the Left because of their experiences under Nasser and because of the way the poor bore the brunt of the crisis that marked the latter years of the Nasser regime. He argued that socialists should act independently of the Islamists, but not dismissively of them. They should defend them when they were opposed to the state on issues such as the emergency laws, or the independence of the judiciary, and should be prepared to work with them on democratic demands. Such was an important argument in preparing the socialist Left to be directly involved in, rather than secluded from, the mass movements that have precipitated Mubarak's downfall. The subsequent alliance also meant that the Muslim Brothers were more sensitive to criticism, as when they were forced to recant on their 'Islam is the solution' slogan in 2005, which Christians and socialists argued was sectarian.

The army's strategy of forcing a transition managed by the armed forces themselves is partly possible because both Mohammed El Baradei and the Muslim Brothers appear to have supported an army takeover to avert an all-out social explosion. One expects that, though they were the slowest to support the recent revolution, they will be the first to be consulted by the armed forces. Under Mubarak, the Muslim Brothers were effectively coopted, operating as a loyal opposition. There were and remain tensions in the organisation between the businessmen and professionals who dominate the leadership and the poorer base, with more radical layers wanting to take a more uncompromising stance, and these started to come to the fore in the context of the Second Intifada. This building pressure contributed to the decision by the Muslim Brothers to form an alliance with left-wing and secular forces to depose Mubarak back in 2006. So, it would be mistaken to assume that the rank and file of the Brothers will necessarily accept whatever carve-up the leadership opts for. Similarly, while many of the leading middle class activists are declaring the revolution to be over, effectively throwing in the towel before they've even secured the minimal political and democratic rights that they are in it for, there is likely to be a mass of middle class radicals who will continue to want to fight. I expect they'll be among the thousands of people who remained in Tahrir Square as of today.

Internationally, the armed forces seem determined to hold on to Egypt's current role. The indications so far are that the Camp David peace treaty with Israel, which underpins the Palestinians' miserable plight and Egypt's participation in the seige of Gaza, is to be maintained. This is purchased with $1.5bn a year in aid plus training, but it's also part of a global orientation of power predicated on US-led neoliberalism. Again, the army's task is made slightly easier here, because El Baradei supports the peace treaty. The Muslim Brothers do not, but they are highly unlikely to push for its abrogation. Unless an alternative orientation for capital accumulation emerges, the Egyptian ruling class will likely continue to seek a profitable alliance with the US. Only the continuation of the popular movements can force an alternative path.

It seems clear enough that the revolution has further convulsions to go. It seems equally clear that the alliance which led to this revolution is going to be reconfigured. Juan Cole has long argued that this revolution was centrally based on the labour movement, the alliance of blue and white collar workers that first emerged in 2006. This has united textile workers with tax collectors. But the movement has also been characterised by a fairly broad alliance between the most militant sections of the working class and the liberal and radical sections of the middle class, the latter including lawyers, doctors, probably a lot of small businessmen not integrated into the regime, and so on. The focus, in the Anglophone media, on the Twitterati, may have overstated the relevance of the middle class, but they did not fabricate their role. In the current situation, it is often the small businessmen and middle class professionals (like the Google marketing head Wael Ghonim, currently in a meeting with the higher council of the armed forces) who are in a hurry to call an end to hostilities. They want to get back to earning money. The accent is shifting far more clearly to the organised working class. Perhaps more serious than today's arrests, then, is the attempted banning of labour activism. This is where a new front of struggle is going to be opened up.