Sameh Naguib on Egypt's second revolution

We have just removed the second president in only 30 months. It is a second revolution, a mass movement of millions. The scale of the mobilisations is unprecedented.  On the ground people have gained huge confidence in their ability to change history.

This is a contradictory situation. It is formally a military coup. The army has effectively arrested the president and 77 leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.  They intervened to save themselves from a new revolution.

But at the same time it is a mass popular revolt. The people forced the army to act, and the army only did so because they were worried about their own future. 

This is the second time they have done so. They are running out of choices. If Morsi was a failure then the bourgeois alternatives, such as Mohamed El Baradei, are weak.

This is not the end of democracy, nor a simple military coup. Revolution is actually an extremely democratic process. Simply voting every few years is a joke compared to this. The army is trying to cut this process off.

Major strikes were planned for tomorrow, Thursday. Bus and train workers, cement workers and Suez canal workers were all due to walk out. The protests could have developed into a general strike—the vast majority of the protesters are working class.

It’s not over...
 Read the full article by Naguib - a member of the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt - here.  Naguib is meant to be speaking at Marxism 2013, and while this would be an amazing privilege for those of us in the UK, I guess the way things are going in Egypt who can say whether this will actually happen now.  To paraphrase Lenin in The State and Revolution (a highly relevant book today given the military coup),  ''it is more pleasant and useful to go through the "experience of revolution" than to go and give speeches about it elsewhere'', and am sure Naguib is feeling the same way...

Edited to add: Four Days that Shook the World - another piece by Naguib