[D66] Egypt: State in flux

[Antid Oto]

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12112

Egypt: State in flux

Feature by Anne Alexander, October 2012

The waves of strikes that have swept Egypt since the overthrow of 
Mubarak have fractured the state machine, giving a boost to reformist 
forces. Anne Alexander looks at how revolutionaries should relate to 
these new forces, especially those emerging around Hamdeen Sabahi.


...

Revolutions in the modern world always involve a war by the state 
against itself. Great revolutions force the decomposition of the state 
into hostile classes, and require its rebuilding. The Russian Revolution 
of 1917 was the first in which the proletarian parts of the state (rank 
and file soldiers, workers in state enterprises and the lower ranks of 
the government bureaucracy) were able not only to break down the 
existing state, but to build the institutions of their own alternative 
government in the soviets together with workers in private industry and 
peasants. Usually, of course, the state only partly decomposes. Some of 
its lower layers rise to the top, or its institutions expand outwards to 
absorb "new blood", but large parts of the old structures remain intact.