Is it February in Tunisia?

The PCOT has called for a national assembly of opposition forces to discuss the way forward. It also says (translated from a French language website):

The Tunisian people need a new democratic government, both national and popular and born of the will of Tunisians and representing their interests. A system of this type cannot emerge from the current system and its institutions or its constitution and its laws, but only on its ruins by a constituent assembly elected by the people in conditions of freedom and transparency, after ending the tyranny.

The task of a People’s Council is to draft a new constitution that lays the foundations of democratic republic, with its own institutions and its laws.

A Party statement in Arabic can be found here.

Links has nine major demands from the PCOT in English. They say:

Tunisia: The 9 points of the Workers Communist Party

January 15, 2010 - Tunisia Solidarity Campaign, translated from Arabic by Nadim Mahjoub

1. The success achieved so far is only half of the way and the other half is achieving the wanted democratic change and implementing it on the ground.

2. The democratic change cannot spring from the same party, the figures, the institutions, the apparatuses and the legislation that maintained the dictatorship and deprived the people from basic rights for more than half a century, 23 years of which under Ben Ali.

3. The interim president is one of Ben Ali’s clique and a president of an appointed body which does not represent the people in any aspect whatsoever, and the plan to hold presidential elections in a 60-day time has no purpose but to maintain the continuation of the dictatorial regime through one of its former leaders.

4. The most dangerous of what could happen now is robbing the Tunisian people of their victory and their legitimate ambitions for freedom and a dignified existence and sacrifices through preserving Ben Ali’s regime without Ben Ali and through forming a democratic decor around it.

5. The democratic change, with its political, economical, social and cultural dimensions, requires a real end of the repressive regime by taking a direct step which consists of forming a provisional government or any other body that has executive powers and undertakes the task of organising free elections for a Constitutional Assembly which would establish the bases of a real democratic republic in which people would enjoy freedom, social equality and national dignity.

6. All the forces, whether they are political organisations, unions, human rights groups, cultural organisations, organised or non-organised and the people, who have played an effective and decisive role in toppling the dictator, have the task to decide on Tunisia’s future, and no one could replace them in their negotiations or contacts with the authority.

7. It is of a high urgency that the democratic forces form a national and unified body to carry out the democratic change and has the tasks to protect the gains of the revolting Tunisian people and to negotiate with the authorities to yield power to the people in a peaceful way.

8. All the democratic forces all over the country have to unite in organisations, committees, or local, regional and sectoral councils in organising the popular movement and to undermine the manoeuvre of reaction and the acts of looting and vandalism perpetrated by hidden groups aiming at spreading fear among the citizens, threatening their safety and scaring them of a democratic change to compel the people to surrender to the repressive apparatuses.

9. The armed forces, which consists in the main of the sons and daughters of the people are required to provide safety for the people and the motherland and respect people’s aspirations towards freedom, social justice and national dignity, which requires lifting the state of emergency as soon as possible so that it doesn’t become an excuse that prevents the Tunisian people from continuing their struggle and achieving their goals.

For a provisional government

For a constitutional assembly

For a democratic republic

Hamma Hammami

Workers Communist Party of Tunisia

The thinking to an outsider like me looks somewhat like a two-stage strategy - a bourgeois democratic revolution now and a socialist one unmentioned and sometime in the future.

Yet as Lenin recognised after the February revolution in Russia in 1917 the working class could not and should not limit itself to bourgeois demands.

The bourgeoisie in late developing capitalist countries is incapable of undertaking the bourgeois revolution. The working class, in using its power to push the bourgeois revolution forward in furtherance of its own political and economic interests, will not and cannot limit itself to merely bourgeois tasks and will push on or be pushed, through the concrete circumstances and the existence of a mass revolutionary workers’ party, to establish a workers’ government.

Historical analogies are lies which contain a truth. There is one important difference between Tunisia today and Russia in February 1917.

While it might emerge over time, there appears to be no Bolshevik Party in Tunisia, no party built up over the years of underground and other struggles with deep roots in the working class to lead the working class and learn from it, to argue for pushing the revolution forward, for workers’ councils, for seizing the land, for all power to the workers’ councils (once they are set up).

Trotsky’s analysis of the inherent conservatism of the bourgeoisie in late developing capitalist countries is valid today. His idea that the working class in backward countries would of necessity be revolutionary is not. Revolutions after 1917, for example China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959, show that the working class as working class can be absent from history’s stage.

Sections of the petit bourgeoisie - peasants, declassed peasants, intellectuals - step in to take the place of the working class, often using the language of socialism.