Students at Modesto Junior College are faced with the most drastic cuts in several years. Reacting to the current Brown budget, which slashes community colleges of $400 million and the UCs and CSUs of even more money, according to Resist MJC Budget Cuts, "MJC will likely take an $8 million budget cut." In the wake of this decision, President Gaither Loewenstein has begun austerity measures such as the gutting of entire departments and the laying off of up to 8 full-time faculty members. What's worse for students is that student fees will jump to $66 dollars a unit, making a full load at MJC (12 units) cost close to a $1,000 with text books. And, like Schwarzenegger before him, Brown may also decide to cut student aid which many MJC and CSU Stanislaus students depend on. At the same time, the interim Chancellor Joan Smith, who currently makes over $200,000 a year, plus a car allowance, will likely get a $100,000 raise once made full time Chancellor. Hard times for who?
These attacks on MJC students, most of which are from working families and have jobs, bills, and/or kids themselves, mirrors what has also been happening at CSU Stanislaus over the past few years. There, under the direction of President Shirvani, faculty were laid-off, programs were gutted, winter term was abolished, fees rose, and Shirvani, got a nice pay raise along with the Board of Trustees of the CSU system.
In the past week, some students, many associated with the Student Government at MJC, have launched a series of protests on the campus. Today, students and staff were encouraged to wear black armbands to signal protest with the current budget decisions. Last Friday, students protested outside of Loewenstein's office, which resulted in a several hour discussion between angry students and the President. While the President took questions, he made it clear that he was not going to get into detail about why he had made the cuts that he did and repeated the line that he was "just doing his job," and was "working with what money was available."
One flyer that circulated addressed the issue of how capitalism is an ongoing cycle of boom, bust, and crisis and is unable to meet the needs of the people it exploits - leaving only the option of social revolution.
This crisis is not a mistake, it is an indication that capitalism is unable to reproduce itself. Capitalism exists by expansion but, being that the whole world is now under the rule of a capitalist world economy, there is now nowhere else for it to expand. This is not the first crisis, and every time this happens, the destructive effects of capitalism on working people worldwide is amplified.
Battle stations!
Don't think for a second, students, that you are not workers. We work our jobs and then on our school work. We go to college to become workers with careers. Being that we are workers, it is our concern to recognize the fundamental contradiction in capitalism, and this is that capitalism absolutely requires workers to perpetuate and continue the production of capitalism, while at the same time it needs to destroy the workers as individuals and grind us down to mere doers that perform certain tasks in the hopes of a wage.
Capitalism absolutely cannot provide us a good and attainable education while balancing it's budget. The honeymoon of unsustainable lending and market expansion has finally ended and we find ourselves facing a threat to our very livelihoods. But, the possibility of a future in which labor benefits humanity as a whole is possible. It requires the disruption of the currents means of production, be it food, housing, and even the production of future workers, it must be taken from the individuals that own them and made a common concern amongst all people.
The crisis that is inherent to capitalism is upon us and the transformation of this social relationship isn't just possible - it is an absolute material necessity.
Speaking to ideas on how to fight in the current terrain, another flyer stated:
We must occupy the college, disrupting the ability of the administration to operate. Students and faculty must strike together, blocking the flow of human labor that keeps the school afloat. Solidarity is our strongest weapon, one that we must direct at our enemies.
On the minds of many of the protesters are the events in Wisconsin, which many pointed to as a possible model for resistance. However, union leaders there recently announced that they were going to agree to most of Governor Walker's cuts, except the one which stops collective bargaining and the collection of union dues. In short, the union bureaucrats saved their own asses and sold out those that they claim to represent. Tom Eley writes:
The union officials have limited their efforts to persuading several state Republicans to break with Walker and sign a “compromise” bill with Democrats that would slash public employees’ wages and benefits, gut Medicaid, public education and other social services. In return it would preserve the legal status of the unions to collect dues and bargain away the jobs, living standards and working conditions of the workers they ostensibly represent.
[On orders from union leaders] the teachers’ union called off job actions by their members as a “sign of good will” to the Republicans. Union officials have gone on record in opposition to the popular demand for a general strike. As of this writing upwards of 800 protesters remained in the capitol defying the threat of arrest and pressure by state Democrats and AFL-CIO officials who urged them to end the two-week occupation of the building.
After shutting down job actions by teachers last week, the unions have aligned themselves with Walker’s efforts to clear out the State Capitol building. The area open to demonstrators has been progressively scaled back, and on Saturday only one small door was left open for workers to enter the building. Workers say that the unions advised them to clear out on Sunday so the building could be “cleaned.”
Just as in Egypt, where the military has been cracking down on ongoing strikes and protests, the unions are interested only in saving themselves and containing working class (which includes students) action - not accelerating it. Students at MJC face a similar situation. The current budget was passed and given the thumbs up by many of the largest unions in the state - all of which helped Brown into office. What is important for them is that they stay in their position as managers of the working class, whether for workers in Wisconsin, or for workers in California. It is also telling what union leaders are calling on workers to do, besides end occupations and strike actions - and that is to "call their representatives in government." Eley writes:
[Union leaders are o]pposing any sympathy strikes by private sector workers—who have turned out en masse to express their solidarity with public employees—Wisconsin AFL-CIO president Phil Neuenfeldt called on workers to appeal to “their state senators and representatives about supporting workers rights.
Those that seek to control us
must be broken.
This refrain mimics the calls by student "leaders" at Modesto Junior College to negotiate, talk to elected officials, and 'remain civil' - all while claiming to support 'resistance' and 'take action if needed.' When is the time to act but not now? Student organizing at MJC by the student government has remained the same throughout the years, mainly encouraging students to march on Sacramento in March, in a symbolic act of protest which has done nothing to stop the attacks on education. Perhaps if students do attend demonstrations this year, they can take a cue from workers in Wisconsin and across the country and occupy. During recent MJC protests, student government leaders have also attempted to direct and control the actions of students. Here, as in Wisconsin, will workers fall into line by those that claim to represent them? We already know what the protest managers and union leaders will do, let's not be surprised when they do it. It's up to us to get organized and fight for our interests, not wait for them to direct us. At this point, both the unions and the two political parities are united in demanding that the working class fit the bill for the crisis. We have to flip the script, not only in our struggles, but also in order to create an entirely new world in place of this one.
As we speak, tens of thousands of people are fighting back in Madison, Wisconsin. What began as an attempt by Republican governor Walker to implement sweeping austerity measures and take away the ability of unions to collectively bargain, has created a massive grassroots working class response. At a time when students and workers here in California face similar attacks, it is important to note how collective action is not only necessary, but possible.
Many teachers first responded to the news that their jobs might be lost by launching wildcat strikes through the calling in of sick days. Students, not to be out done by their teachers, walked out of their schools, and in some instances, launched brief occupations. Disability activists today also occupied for a short time the Republican HQ, before police arrived to spoil the party. Tea party activists have largely been shouted down, and despite their 'grassroots' efforts to counter the united force of public and private sector workers and their kids, have been totally unsuccessful. Seems their bumper sticker militancy only goes so far. Tens of thousands are now occupying the capital to demand that the bill be struck down and are threatening a general strike; at the same time Walker readies the National Guard. Many have also been inspired by the unrest in the Middle East. If people can get their leaders removed there, what is stopping us from doing it here?
Mubarak, Walker, the same motherfucker!
Where this revolt goes now is up to us. Will people accept the attacks of the Republicans and also the sell outs of the Democrats and the union heads? Will they listen to the union leaders when told to return to work or to stop calling out sick? Will kids return to school? The choice is ours. Capitalism offers us nothing. While we must resist each and every attack, a return to the status quo is a defeat as well. In the end, we don't want the ability to argue over crumbs with the scum who would sell us out for polluted skies and potato chips. We want freedom, we want control over our lives and streets, and we want a future that does not include wage slavery and a ravaged earth. We have power now in Madison, let us use it - to sweep this class divided society into the dustbin of history once and for all.
District 4 rep Joe Muratore won his seat by only a few hundred votes, but enough to beat challenger Robert Stanford (who with Sheriff's helped shut down the Modesto Needle Exchange program in the Airport District). For those that read this blog regularly, Joe Muratore's name comes up quite often, as he was one of those responsible for the shutting down of Paperboy Park in 2010, and has helped push a 'tough on homeless stance' that will lay the ground work for gentrification in Modesto and money in the pockets of Muratore and all his developer friends.
Regular readers will also be aware that Muratore is a big player in the La Loma Association, a 'non-profit' that exists in the largely up scale neighborhood by Dry Creek. It's home to some of Modesto's biggest Mansions, and for years has waged a war on the homeless that travel through it in order to get between downtown and the Gospel Mission, and also camp along Dry Creek. The LLA has been around since 1995, according to the Voice of Modesto blog, and still claims 'start up status.'
However recently the LLA has landed in hot water because as a non-profit they do not have the ability to endorse a political candidate - yet at the same time during Muratore's bid for District 4 for they, surprise!, backed him all the way. So while the city of Modesto was funneling tax dollars from citizens into the La Loma Association (which was spending that money on putting in surveillance cameras to catch homeless veterans sleeping and pushing for heftier fines for dumpster diving), the LLA association was turning right around and putting that money right into Muratore's campaign. According to the VOM: "The question was then put to him “If the LNA isn’t a non-profit then isn’t it a for profit enterprise? Muratore’s response was murky at best saying [LLA President Mike] Moradian had explained to him about the LNA having some tax problems."
Class war.
That's what makes the recent actions of Muratore that much more hard to stomach. Here's a guy that takes your tax money and then turns around and uses it to shut down something that your taxes paid for - like a park. Now, Muratore is rounding up his buddies and plans to do more of the same, whether it's buying up farmland for development or closing down more parks. What we can learn from this situation though is that the upper class in this city are very well organized. They have their own organizations, their own politicians, and their own police force. They back each other up every step of the way. We have to start getting organized around our class interests as well - pushing back against these people that see us simply as dollar signs and passive sheep.
Our friends at the Revolutionary Hip Hop Report have released the latest issue of their magazine. You can come by and pick up a copy at Firehouse 51 at an upcoming event or on the street somewhere. Not to be out done, Modesto Anarcho #16 should be finished very soon.
New Download:
Some friends in Canada managed to put down their maple syrup and hockey sticks long enough to put together a great looking version of our interview with A Murder of Crows, an anarchist journal from Seattle. Check that out here, or in the downloads section.
New Event:
We will be hosting a film showing of 'Salt of the Earth,' the only film ever to be blacklisted by the US Government when it was released. It is about a coal mining strike of Mexican and white workers. It is being shown, completely for free, on Friday, February 25th, 7pm, Firehouse 51.
The mother of Craig Prescott released a statement, claiming that Craig Prescott was murdered in the downtown jail for being a "whistle blower" and released new information on the case. The Sheriff's Department claims that Prescott died after being shot with a taser, but an autopsy report and a released video confirm that Prescott instead was murdered while in his jail cell by several large guards who suffocated him to death. Hopefully in the future, more information will come forward as to what Craig was trying to blow the whistle on. This comes at a time when the Modesto Police department is being investigated for corruption and brutality, as well as dealing the black eyes of several recent drunk driving cases, and the Stockton Police are being investigated for steroid use.
"You must know that the tragic death of my son was the most horrific and horrendous event that both my family and I had to endure. We will never regain the peace and contentment we once had. We may eventually heal from the great loss we suffered but healing will not come until we receive justice. The deputies’ crimes against my son Craig cannot nor should be dismissed as anything less than an assassination of a righteous man whom they viewed as a whistle blower. WE BELIEVE those who murdered him were under the leadership of a corrupt sheriff. Eight deputies murdered my son and I demand the highest degree of punishment for their heinous act. They vindictively carried out atrocities from which my son greatly suffered to death. These men should be sent to prison. My son was viciously murdered when eight deputies rolled on top of him in a jail cell, and did not allow him to breathe for more than five minutes, crushing him to death. Medical records can prove that my son Craig suffered from the trauma these eight deputies inflicted upon his body. While trying to protect himself from being hit with the projectiles deputies were shooting at him (pepper balls, tasers, water balls) as they made him their human target, Craig held up his bed mattress in order to shield himself from being injured. Eight angered and enraged deputies entered his cell to subdue him because they said he would not comply after they ordered him to drop his mattress. My son was never aggressive toward the deputies. He was actually suffering through the terrorist attacks he experienced from deputies while going through a severe psychotic episode. He had been yelling and screaming in his cell for a lengthy period of time, days, I understand, but never received any medical or psychiatric treatment from jail officials.After deputies murdered my son and learned that an ambulance had been summoned and was on its way, they tried to cover up their murderous behavior by dragging and desecrating his lifeless body into a safety cell where they, a homicide detective and two CFMG nurses continued to abuse his body in order to make it seem that Craig was combative and aggressive toward them. They hovered over his stilled body as he remained in a face-down position with his hands tied behind him, in order to pretend they were trying to keep him from struggling with them.
Craig was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Two days later, he was taken off life support at Doctor’s Medical Center by unauthorized individuals who violated my family’s civil rights by denying us the right to make the decision to have Craig removed from the ventilator. We were never given that choice even after Rachel practically begged the hospital staff to allow him one more day for the sake of his six little girls and family members who were traveling from other states. My son’s heart was “BUTCHERED” according to pathologist David Posey, MD, who thoroughly examined Craig’s body during a second autopsy. Dr. Posey also stated that Craig had been deprived of oxygen for more than five minutes and crushed to death by eight deputies. Posey told me that the county’s pathologist, Eugene Carpenter, did a “sloppy” job on the autopsy he performed on my son. Deputy District Attorney Nathan Baker told my daughter-in-law Rachel and I what the deputies told him had happened to Craig at the jail and how he died, which confirmed Posey’s conclusion for the cause of Craig’s death. The AMR paramedic who treated Craig after at the jail, stated that deputies “F*CKED UP”. A dispatch operator told us that the call for the ambulance from the jail came from the visitor’s area which means not one deputy involved made the call to get help for my son.Homicide Detective Brandon Kiely appeared in the safety cell video before deputies claimed Craig stopped breathing. I ask you, how could a homicide detective be called to the jail to investigate a homicide before a homicide occurred?
I can go on and if you say that this is all irrelevant, I beg to differ.
All injuries my son suffered at the hands of these deputies are relevant.
According to the Voice of Modesto blog, Joe Muratore and others have selected a group of people to be involved in a "Blue Ribbon Homeless Commission." The Commission, which includes not a single person who is actually homeless, will study the homeless issue in Modesto for six months and then report directly to the city council with how best they best believe the issue should be dealt with.
Public enemy #1?
It is telling looking at the people who have been selected to be on the commission. Joe Muratore, the developer turned city councilman who helped shut down Paperboy Park, selected surprise surprise, another developer who is the Vice President of the Building Industry Association. Muratore also nominated Mike Moradian Jr., head of the La Loma Association, an organization which (surprise again?) strongly endorsed Joe Muratore in his bid for the council seat and to which he is a member. The La Loma Association itself helped push several anti-homeless initiatives, such as the 'Dumpster-diving ban," calling for the punishing of homeless campers, and the installation of surveillance cameras in local parks.
Some of the other people selected for the commission include many people who are involved in organizations that already 'manage' and 'control' the homeless population, including representatives with the First Methodist Church, Renaissance Christian Center, and the Modesto Gospel Mission. Other selections include the Chief Deputy District Attorney and business people such as Frank Ploof, a consultant, and J. David Wright, a business owner of Farmers Insurance. Rounding out the group is Vanessa Czopek, who is a librarian at the County Library.
Big pimpin - poverty.
So what can we gather about those selected for this special commission on homelessness? Well, who makes up the commission? It is comprised of people from the religious, business, and political community. Those with access to money, power, political, and business connections.
To the political players like the representative from the District Attorney's office, the homeless represent another part of the population that needs to be controlled and managed, as well as a population that constantly ends up in jail, receives tickets, and faces jail time - another big money maker for the city.
And finally, for the religious organizations, they want to be sure that in any future plans that the city makes towards the homeless, they are able to secure their position within it. Ensuring that money that comes into them through grants and donations, as well as their control over sections of the homeless population is secured.
Who's streets?
So what will this group of people find? And more importantly, what will they decide that those that run this city should do about the homeless? It can be safe to assume that it will be more of the same. We will see more and more attacks on public space, as perhaps more parks will be 'privatized' such as Paperboy Park was in 2010. We will see the 'consolidation' of homeless services in select areas, which will also help the police harass and further criminalize not only homeless but those that bring food to share with them. But moreover, will will see this process of increasing police powers and harassment with a smiling face go hand in hand with record breaking developer deals with cost taxpayers millions and do nothing for the average person. The bigger question is, are we going to allow the developers and business interests to take the city from us?
"I don’t know why did we have police in the 1st place. We seem to be taking good care of each other, organizing traffic, cleaning streets.” - Egyptian on Twitter
The two following articles regard the ongoing events in North Africa and the Middle East. Many people here in California have heard of these uprisings, but many don't know much beyond the fact that people are angry and in the streets. What is interesting about these revolts is that they mirror so much of what has been going on here, where we live. Riots in the face of police brutality. People angry over poverty, lack of housing, and unemployment. People starting to occupy their workplaces...There is a revolution going on in North Africa and the Middle East, but how far it goes or if it stays a revolution and leads to a better life is up to the everyday people revolting and fighting in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and everywhere else. Will the window into freedom that people are creating allow them to get to somewhere new, or will they allow just another group of thugs and gangsters to fill the current rulers shoes? It's up to us if we want to follow their courageous example. The following articles are taken from Anarchist News and Crimethinc.com. Several videos and further links are supplied throughout the text.
Recent Events in North Africa and the Middle East From Anarchist News.org
Riot like an Egyptian.
The current revolutionary wave started 6 weeks ago in a poor working class suburb of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia when an unemployed man publicly burned himself after being abused and humiliated by police and public officials. Four weeks later the dictator Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. Since then revolt has spread to Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Syrian youths are planning demonstrations and even in Albania protesters have gained confidence from Tunisian example. Now, the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is struggling for survival and even the mighty Chinese government is taking no chances and censoring the word “Egypt” from the local Internet.
Everywhere, left-wing parties and non-hardline, populist Islamists, despite being the most prominent examples of opposition and having fairly decent reputations, have been left behind and mostly ignored by self-organized masses. Religious leadership is not desired by most demonstrators, who, according to one report, overwhelmed “Allah Akbar” by much louder chants of “Muslim, Christian, we are all Egyptian.”3 Various trade unions and federations are playing a secondary, but significant part in these events. Generally they have not taken initiative. Most significant has been the Tunisian UGTT federation (being the second largest organized force after the ruling party) but even in their case, support for demonstrations and political strikes, according to one report, came from local and regional impetus against the wishes of the national executive. And recently UGTT has sided with the interim government.
Self-organization has been a great source of strength for the protesters. Many demonstrations were started on Facebook and publicized by phone and word of mouth. After initial clashes with police, protesters adjusted their tactics and taught each other how to outsmart the cops. When the Egyptian government disabled the Internet, neighbors went door-to-door quietly at night to invite everyone to join. On the streets people have shared food and medicine widely with other protesters in need and some have come prepared with medical supplies to tend to the injuries of strangers. Everyone describes powerful solidarity among the protesters and for many each new day brought new friends.
One female demonstrator in Cairo described a surprising absence of sexual harassment in the crowds and automatic respect from male strangers – a previously unimaginable experience for her in Egypt4 , a country infamous for sexual harassment in the streets. Although women have been a minority in these protests, they are now taking to the streets in greater numbers to replace the men.
Burning police station.
Besides changes in interpersonal relations, there have been many instances of powerful political self-organization. Both in Tunisia and Egypt, workers in factories, newspapers and other workplaces kicked out their bosses and CEOs and replaced them with self-management by worker committees or in some cases by new, more popular bosses.5 Almost overnight there arose numerous neighborhood committees to guard against government-sanctioned thugs and looters. Similar committees have taken to cleaning and otherwise running their communities. Some committees are arresting any police officers that pass through their areas. One tweet from Egypt said: “I don’t know why did we have police in the 1st place. We seem to be taking good care of each other, organizing traffic, cleaning streets.”
In Egypt, Union members from many industries have created a new trade union federation and are starting to form factory committees to “defend” their workplaces (the word can also be translated as “occupy”) and to organize a general strike.78 In Egypt and elsewhere in the region there have been various strikes, including general strikes restricted to cities or internal regions. In Suez, public servants have gone on indefinite strike until Mubarak resigns.
In Egypt and Tunisia numerous police stations, ruling party headquarters, banks and residences of ruling party members have been burned and looted by protesters. The police have been beaten from the streets by demonstrators fully willing to attack them and burn their vehicles. Bedouins have charged police stations and looted their weapons to defend themselves against State violence. In Libya, protesters upset by lack of housing took direct action and squatted 800 vacant lots. Read the rest of this article here.
North Africa is in revolt. As usual, the most striking thing is how familiar everything is: the young man with the prestigious degree working at a coffee shop, the unemployment and bitterness, the protests set off by police brutality—for police are to the unemployed what bosses are to workers. These details cue us in that what is happening in Egypt is not part of another world, but very much part of our own. There are no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21st century. Make no mistake—though these events dwarf the riots in Greece and the student movement in England, they spring from the same source.
What is happening—first in Tunisia and now in Egypt—is the beginning of the wave of full-scale revolutions that will inevitably follow the global financial crisis of 2008. Taking place in the wake of the failed “War on Terror,” these revolutions combine the latent force of massive numbers of unemployed youth with the dynamism of modern communication networks. They signal the conclusion of the decade of counter-revolution that followed September 11, 2001. Although they continue the exploration of new technologies and decentralized forms of organization initiated by the anti-globalization movement, the form and scale of these new revolutions is unprecedented. Largely anonymous groups are using the ubiquitous World Wide Web to spark leaderless rebellions against the pharaohs of the global empire of capital.
Made in the USA.
The self-styled rulers of the world are truly at a loss as to how to understand the new social and technological forces at play; the aging dictator Mubarak is a perfect example of this, but he is hardly the only one of his kind. One can almost smell the fear, not only amongst the despots of China and Saudi Arabia but also the supposed leaders of representative democracies. The contortions the US government has been going through are the most grotesque of all; it isn’t lost on the Egyptian people that the bullets striking down their comrades came from the USA. Egypt receives $1.3 billion dollars of military aid from the US every year. The suppression of “democracy” in the Middle East has been a deliberate policy of the US government: they know popular sentiment would never support their agenda as the military enforcement of global capitalism.
The best efforts of Mubarak’s dying regime to put its fingers in the ears of the world have not silenced the people on the streets of Cairo. Even blocking cell phones and trying to turn off the entire Internet have proved futile. For generations, Arabs and Africans have been silenced, represented by various colonial governments and portrayed as “primitive” and “terrorist” in Europe and the US. Now the people of Egypt are speaking in thunderous unison for freedom—not for political Islam, as demagogues from Iran to Israel would have the world believe. In doing so, they are realizing the ideals to which the US government pays only hypocritical lip service.
Today, the common condition from Egypt to Tunisia is approaching universal unemployment—especially among the younger generations, which comprise the vast majority of population. This is increasingly the case in the United States and Europe as well. Unemployment is no accident, but the inevitable result of the last thirty years of capitalism. Capitalism reached its internal limits at the end of the 1970s; now the factories of every industry produce ever more commodities, while increasing automation renders workers less and less necessary. The only way to make profits off these commodities is to eliminate workers or pay them next to nothing. To discipline the skyrocketing unemployed population and prevent revolt, the police wage a never-ending war on the population. We live in a world overflowing with cheap shit, in which human life is the cheapest of all.
In these conditions, people have nothing to left to lose. Nothing, that is, but their dignity—and it turns out they will not surrender that. It was precisely this innermost core of dignity that led Mohammed Bouazizi to light himself on fire rather than face humiliation at the hands of the police, who in seizing his fruit-selling cart took away the only way he could feed his family. The blaze lit by Mohammed Bouazizi has spread, carried by other unemployed people who thereby transform themselves from abject beggars into world-historical heroes. The people of Egypt are not only burning police cars, they are organizing popular committees to clean the police and other trash off the street, and the streets of Cairo have never felt safer.
It is not surprising that a wave of revolutions should begin now. Not since the days of pharaohs and monarchs has the world been controlled by as senseless a force as the global financial market. As capitalists became less and less able to produce profit from industrial production over the past decades, they had to invent means of profiting based on expected future returns. But in a world of increasingly cheap commodities and poor consumers, how could capitalists keep people buying stuff and still make a profit? They had to invent a way for consumers to continue buying even when they weren’t paid living wages: thus the invention of mass debt. When the sale of real goods can no longer produce profit, profits must be made on increasingly fantastic expected future returns—in other words, on finance.
Strike, occupy, takeover.
Yet like any house of cards, debt cannot be built up forever. Eventually, someone wants to be paid back—and so the entire house of cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008. The financial crisis signals a deeper metaphysical crisis of our present order: capitalism is unable to provide for the real material needs of the global population. The high poverty rates in Egypt are not simply the result of mismanagement by Mubarak, but the inevitable consequence of the contradictions of our era.
Their eyes hopelessly clouded by their own ideology and lack of vision, heads of state can only stand dumb and surprised as the crisis goes on and on. They lamely hope to re-start the financial markets through “austerity” or “green” capitalism, refusing to consider systemic change despite the fact that the system cannot even deliver jobs and affordable commodities to people—much less a good life. Just as it took an era of revolution to overthrow the divine right of kings, it will take new revolutions to overthrow the divine right of things: the power of financial capital and its puppet dictators.
Revolutions are never brought about by technology, but rather by the collective action of human beings who radically transform their relationships with each other and the world they share. However, one cannot deny what an important role the World Wide Web has played in Egypt and Tunisia. Especially among cybernetically skilled and predominantly unemployed youth, it enabled people to call for and participate in mass mobilizations without any need of leaders. The demonstrations in Egypt on January 25 were called for by a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” named for a victim of police brutality much like Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece, [or Oscar Grant in Oakland CA, editor's note]. The page itself was set up by the anonymous “El-Shaheed”—that is, “martyr” in Arabic. Meanwhile, youth throughout the world are mobilizing as Anonymous; in the battle over Wikileaks and more recently in actions against the Tunisian government, Anonymous has showed itself to be a potent new international with an awakening political maturity beyond the message boards of 4chan. Demonstrators’ ability to communicate with large numbers of people and react immediately to events via mobile phones, Twitter, and Facebook is swiftly making previous forms of Leftist and industrial-based political organization obsolete, along with other hierarchical formations such as political Islam.
This revolutionary use of social media should come as no surprise. In the hands of an elite few, expensive communications technology will naturally be used for self-aggrandizement and consumerism. In the hands of unemployed youth and other excluded classes, this technology can be re-purposed to organize revolution. The Internet is the new global factory floor, and we are seeing its first workers’ councils form—a new kind of collective intelligence that enables people to organize themselves directly without representation.
The blank confusion of global capitalists as to who is “really behind” the mysterious resistance in Egypt and Tunisia is revealing. It’s obvious how desperately US politicians wish they had anyone, such as Mohamad ElBaradei, with whom to negotiate. These revolts are anarchist in form if not content—and even the content is becoming increasingly radical. The absence of any organized group or leader in the early days of the protests speaks volumes: increased information technology has not only destabilized the old Leftist forms of organizing, but also the justifications for having hierarchical government in the first place. When people can communicate, they can organize their own lives. Expanding such horizontal structures to a global scale no longer seems impossible, even if it is not yet well thought out.
To make things even worse for capitalists and nation-states, the massive secret apparatus of the state has been revealed in all its incompetence by sites such as Wikileaks. While Wikileaks had nothing to do with the Egyptian revolution, the cables describing Ben Ali’s pet tiger being fed a luxurious diet while Tunisians starved further stoked the flames in that country. Wikileaks has produced paranoia in the global state apparatus itself, as the state cannot function without the subjugated population believing that it is necessary and according it the right to exercise violent force. Now the empire has no clothes—and its naked corrupt power is disgusting to behold. There is a growing consensus that the state apparatus is an archaic holdover no longer worthy of respect.
The Mubarak regime made the classic mistake of conflating technological structures with the people using them, an error typical of Silicon Valley and certain theorists as well. In a poorly thought-out move, the regime shut down all four ISPs in the country, effectively turning off the Internet. In addition, cell phones have been intermittently blocked before major demonstrations. If anything this only enraged the Egyptian people more. It may even have interrupted their spectatorship—it is easier to watch a demonstration over the Net than to participate—and driven more and more people into the street.
The lesson here is clear: the supposedly decentralized Internet is quite centralized, and while it may be useful, it is a mistake to depend on it as long as it remains in capitalist hands. Yet rulers such as Mubarak face a no-win situation. If they keep communications technologies up and running, these will be used to organize against them—but if they take them down, it will provoke worldwide outrage.
These days belong to us.
How do you organize without the Net? You might start with existing social institutions; in Egypt, this meant the mosques. The “Days of Wrath,” characterized by street-fighting with the police far more intense than the Greek insurrection of 2008, culminated in the torching of the headquarters of Mubarak’s party. Afterwards, in a brilliant move, the protesters called for people to gather after prayer at mosques—where most Egyptians would be gathered anyway. In this regard, the mosques served the same purpose that social centers and squats did during the Greek insurrection, only for a much greater part of the population.
So while communications technology may be advantageous in the early stages of organizing, a movement must become powerful enough not to need the Internet once it takes to the streets. In Egypt, the revolt actually grew in intensity after the Internet was shut off.
If there is one regard in which the Internet is indispensable, it is in spreading the news of disorder elsewhere. As the Empire’s power has become increasingly spectacular, it has become more vulnerable to being damaged on the terrain of the spectacular. Obama’s first response to the uprising was to call for the “violence” to cease—even though his government routinely administers violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and inflicts it on US citizens through the world’s largest prison system. He and Mubarak are not against violence, but they appear to be afraid of images of violence. If these images escape, they undermine the state’s cover story about maintaining order.
At the same time, the state desperately needs people to distrust and fear each other. This explains why Mubarak released undercover police in civilian uniforms to pose as looters in order to justify his crackdown. When that failed, he turned off the Internet and denied media access in order to prepare the conditions for the kind of massacre it would take to restore his control. Yet now it seems doubtful that the army is willing to carry out such a massacre.
The insurrection that began by burning down police stations then shifted to massive peaceful demonstrations intended to win over the army. Pamphlets that have circulated indicate that Egyptian organizers planned from the beginning to pit the army against the police. Insurrectionists in Europe and the USA should take note of this clever strategic move. After the front line of the party of order was effectively defeated, the Egyptians clearly understood that the only force capable of stopping them was the army. Instead of attacking it directly, which would surely have resulted in a massacre, they undertook to win over the hearts and minds of the soldiers. Thus far they have been successful in this, demonstrating that they can self-organize and maintain a leaderless yet disciplined rebellion that makes the streets of Cairo safe and clean for the first time in years.
Break on through to the other side.
This leaves the army without a reason for existence, let alone any excuse for a massacre. Once an insurrection has reached a certain phase, as a friend has said, weapons are unnecessary. For a revolution to succeed in overthrowing the state, the army must refuse to shoot its own people and instead join them in revolt. In Egypt, the army is at least paralyzed enough right now not to start shooting; it may yet join the people, or more likely attempt to broker a transition to representative democracy.
All this shows that billions of dollars of military equipment can’t stop a revolution. Once things reach a certain point, military force is no longer the determinant factor. If the Egyptian people persist in revolt, the military can hardly bomb its own cities.
Yet even if a military defeat is avoided, the insurrectionary process begun on the “Days of Wrath” is more likely to be side-tracked into representative democracy than to end in a genuine communization of society—that is, in the immediate sharing of all production for the survival of the people. This is not to be pessimistic—already the neighborhood assemblies and defense committees resemble nothing more than the Paris Commune. But Mubarak is a dictator, and the youth of Egypt have not yet tasted the bitter fruits of representative democracy. They may have to learn about them the hard way. Even if a representative democracy is established, it will not be the end of the story—witness the continuing protests in Tunisia. There would inevitably be another insurrection sooner or later, although that could take years or decades.
In this context, it is promising that many young Egyptians seem aware that representative democracy will only limit their movement and redirect into yet another form of enslavement. This is visible in many ways—for example, in the message sent to self-appointed leaders like ElBaradei, “Shall we just call your mobile when we have finished the revolution for you?” The insurrection has also seen unparalleled action and power of the Egyptian women, who will not go back to being subservient under the Muslim Brotherhood after these upheavals.
Yet the popular occupation of Tahir Square cannot last forever; there must come a moment when food will be produced, train lines reactivated, and the Internet turned back on. These are the real keys to the success of the insurrection and to preventing the return to capitalism, even under the mantle of representative democracy. It seems that the steps in this direction have not yet begun.
Let’s step back now and ask larger questions. If Egypt is not fundamentally different from Europe and the US, why haven’t such insurrections happened there as well? First, let us not be too hasty—the dominos are already falling, with massive protests in the streets of Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and Mauritania. One reason the insurrection has such popular power in Egypt is that, as many Arabic-speaking countries, the Egyptian form of life has not yet been fully subsumed into capitalism. For example, in many cases one only pays as much as “one feels” one should pay for goods. Haggling is not so much a way to maximize micro-profits as to ascertain an affordable and ethical price for an exchange. The commodity exchange itself is often less important than the social relationships that the commodity symbolizes. The collective responsibility and power of the family knits people together over generations, in contrast to the alienated individuals of the United States and most of Europe. The vibrant and public street life of the Middle East is a natural fomenting ground for insurrection.
Yet are there not dark forces waiting in the wings? This seems unlikely, as the protest is clearly focused on “freedom” rather than Islam, with those wanting to lead religious chants being shouted down on occasion. This is not to say that Egyptians are not Islamic—indeed they are—yet there are subtle distinctions. Political Islam is effectively the Tea Party of Egypt, a hierarchical religious movement mostly of the older and conservative generation; but Islam exists in other variants, binding social relationships and promoting a collective ethics. One can even interpret the giving of alms in Islam as a ritual to avoid excessive centralization of wealth. “Allah” does not necessarily denote a commanding deity; the notion may also point to the ineffable, the invisible excess of life that denies reduction and resists the catastrophic harnessing of all to the imperatives of profit.
Of course, currents far older than Islam hold sway in Egypt as well. Unlike many in Europe and America, many Egyptians are profoundly aware of their history from antiquity onwards, and feel deep shame at their present state of impoverishment. The dignity and respect they show each other in the streets in midst of the insurrection attests that this revolution is not abstract, but rooted in everyday lives; it is the deep metaphysics of these forms of life that provide the subjective conditions for transformation.
The old world is behind you.
Communism is older than Marx, just as anarchy is older than Proudhon. The age of revolutions did not begin with the Paris Commune, nor did it end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As capitalism now encircles the earth, the one thing that could unite the world would be a common rejection of it and the police that defend it. The communism of Marx was trapped in the abstract metaphysics of economics and poisoned by a misunderstanding of the danger posed by the state; this sabotaged the revolutions of the early 20th century, bringing about the catastrophe of Soviet-era state capitalism.
But the age of revolutions is not over; on the contrary. In a song of the Tuareg—“the desert is our mother, and we will not sell her”—we can glimpse a form of communism far more alien and hostile to capital than anything imagined by Lenin. Many of the calls for “freedom” in Egypt have little to do with the freedom to elect a president or choose among commodities on the market, but resonate with a common desire to live with their heads high and not cowed to any ruler. For this they are ready to die, whether by self-immolation or in the streets together.
Yet one can sense a profound need at this time for a common international revolutionary purpose that resonates outside of the Middle East, for something truly universal to fill the void left by capitalism. The nationalist flags of the protesters were tactically effective at confusing the army, but they also reflect a lack of critique of the conceptual apparatus of capital and the state. While the conditions are right for revolution, over the last thirty years revolutionaries have largely failed to create and spread the organization and analysis necessary for insurrections to become genuine anti-capitalist revolutions. What does it take for people to realize that the true potential of their neighborhood defense committees is not as a means of temporarily replacing the police, but of prefiguring the abolition of all police, in every country?
All power to the people.
No event occurs in a vacuum; events originate in concrete conditions, and consequently they tend to come in waves. The events in Egypt show that the center of revolutionary impetus is no longer “the West”; this new age of revolution will culminate first in areas where the living conditions are becoming unbearable and the ways of life are not yet completely colonized by capital. However, it would be a mistake to see this as merely the conclusion of an unfinished anti-colonial revolt. It is something much bigger and deeper. The financial crisis is a sign that capitalism is on a declining trajectory. The conditions that precipitated the events in Egypt are rapidly becoming universal across the globe, spelling another cycle of revolution and possibly war. Eventually these same forces will hit Saudi Arabia, Europe, China, and finally even the United States with the strength of a tidal wave.
Make no mistake about it, we are entering an era of revolt. These revolts will reject and attack capitalism in their concrete practice, even if the systematic destruction of earlier revolutionary currents has left a vacuum. Hopefully the participants will realize that freedom is impossible without the destruction of capitalism and the state, and a new generation of revolutionary thought will update the concept of revolution for the dawning era. We are at a point now where it should become clear to all that we can direct our own lives—that the state is a historical fossil holding us back. As shown in Egypt, the stranglehold of the state and capitalism must be broken in the streets; over the coming decades the results of this ultimate struggle will likely decide the fate of humanity itself.
There will be a presentation of Frank Lopez's new film, END: CIV, featuring author Derrick Jensen, the Central Valley's won Dr. Mike Becker, and many more! The event is free but donations go to help cover travel costs. Free literature will be on hand, and the director will be available for a Q and A.
A 28 year-old Sonora man, Andrew Clemo was arrested on misdemeanor vandalism charges and a probation violation, and was described by police as a 'transient.' Andrew was caught after he entered a store where he had bought a can of red spray paint and asked to exchange it for a new can because it had "exploded." After the store exchanged the can of paint, clerks followed Clemo and called the police when he began spray painting in the back of a chain store around 7:10 PM. Police claim that the graffiti includes the slogans "No More War," and Clemo could possibly be responsible for other graffiti recently found in the area.
It's sad that Clemo will have to go back to jail just for changing the color of a surface, and that the clerks at the hardware store felt so low of him that they called the police. Furthermore, it's sick that we live in a world where people like Clemo go to jail for calling for an end to war while people like Obama get the Nobel Peace prize and the bodies in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan continue to pile up. Free Andrew Clemo!
Modesto Anarcho produces a magazine and is based out of the Central Valley town of Modesto, California. Modesto Anarcho exists to create revolutionary literature from a combative working-class perspective. We engage and participate in struggles in our area. Modesto Anarcho is free to all and can be picked up around the Modesto area. We also operate a social center and event space in downtown Modesto, Firehouse 51.
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