We have been enslaved—not just for the past three decades of Mubarak’s rule, or since the 1952 military coup but—for five thousand years with the start of the Egyptian civilization.
Amid all the ongoing talk about political reform and the post-Mubarak scenarios, I can’t help but thinking we haven’t waited that long, that long, that long, just to end up with liberal democracy and people we can at best elect every five years.
This nation deserves no less than a republic, run by direct democracy.
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York: 1971. Page 147, Cited in Audrey Farrell, Crime Class & Corruption: The politics of the police. London: Bookmarks, March 1993. Page 88:
The fact that the policeman was originally recruited from [the ranks of]… workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.
Audrey Farrell, Crime Class & Corruption: The politics of the police. London: Bookmarks, March 1993. Page 82:
It is only in times of rising class struggle that the need to buy off the police is absolutely obvious. So it is ironic that police forces do best in terms of wages and conditions when workers are fighting back. The police can gain from the struggles of the very workers who they are sent to bludgeon.
