“We are here to overthrow the government.”¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter delivers a Marxist analysis of the Tunisian revolution in late January 2011, arguing that the revolutionary movement had reached a point where the old state apparatus was critically weakened and the government of Prime Minister Ghannouchi was suspended in mid-air. The core narrative thrust is that the balance of forces was extremely favourable to the masses, who held real power in the streets, but that a decisive victory was being squandered due to the absence of a clear revolutionary leadership and a working-class party.
The chapter documents a wave of mass demonstrations, strikes, and occupations. Key evidence includes the police joining protests, with officers in Ben Guerdane seeking union support and declaring they would never again use violence against the population. This is presented as proof that the state apparatus—the armed bodies of men defending private property, as Engels described—had been severely weakened but not yet destroyed. The author recounts how demonstrators marching on the Prime Minister’s office were met not with repression but with police pleading, and how the revolutionary youth of Sidi Bouzid organised a “Liberation Caravan” to Tunis, explicitly comparing the Kasbah to the Bastille of 1789. The chapter also details the occupation of the governorate in Siliana and the establishment of local councils there, presenting this as a concrete example of dual power.
The text draws heavily on the historical context of the French Revolution and the Marxist theory of the state. It argues that the situation was one of dual power between the government and the streets, a condition that could not last indefinitely. The polemical target is twofold. First, the chapter attacks the national leadership of the UGTT trade union federation, accusing it of trailing behind events and being more concerned with restoring normality and the economic order than with overthrowing the government. The union’s call for a “national coalition government” is dismissed as a reformist attempt to channel the revolution. Second, the chapter polemicises against the idea that the revolution could be completed by replacing Ghannouchi with less tainted bourgeois figures from the Bourguiba era or by the army stepping in. It warns that unless the workers and youth seize power, expropriate the elite, and convene a constituent assembly, the ruling class will reorganise behind new faces and prepare a comeback. The missing element, the chapter insists, is a revolutionary party capable of leading a general strike and sweeping aside the remnants of the old regime.