I cite

Inequality 101

For a political science symposium, I've been asked to respond to a new book by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. They aren't Marxists or theorists (they don't use the word neoliberalism and appear not to have read David Harvey). Still, their book, Winner-Take-All Politics, has the potential to reach the pundits and politicians who proceed as if the far left doesn't exist (maybe I'm being too optimistic; after all, Keith is out and the Obama administration pays little heed to Krugman and Stiglitz). Another possibility: this is the kind of book that could reach concerned, educated middle class readers unlikely to come across or connect with contemporary left theory.

Their thesis: the dramatic inequality in the US over the last thirty years is the result of political decisions. It's political. "The transformation of Wall Street reflected the repeated, aggressive, application of political power" (68)In different words, it's the result of class struggle where the top one percent use the state to benefit themselves and screw everyone else. Politics matters. Without political choices and decisions, the top one percent would not have been able to make out like bandits. And how did they get so rich? Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.

That this is news rather than obvious is an indication of the disastrous sway of neoliberal ideology.

Hacker and Pierson rely on a compelling accumulation of economic facts:

1.  Between 2001 and 2006 the top one percent took over 53 percent of US income gains. There was an economic expansion (particularly from 1979 to 2006) but the goodies went to the top one percent. The middle benefited a bit (slightly less than one percent a year) but only if one discounts the fact that they were working more (2 income families) and more hours. Without that additional work, the incomes of the middle would have barely budged. The income of those in the bottom would have fallen.

2.  If the economy had grown at the same rate that it actually did and if inequality had stayed at its 1979 levels, the average income of households in the middle would be more than 12,000 dollars a month higher than it is now. Differently put, the rich took our money.

3.  US economic growth wasn't exceptional. Most of the European economies grew at the same rate. The primary difference: our inequality soared. Another difference: we were working more hours. Put that way, their economies were actually stronger (GDP per hour worked rose faster). And, we should keep in mind that they have more secure retirement and health benefits.

2.  The top .1% collectively rake in more than a trillion dollars a year. Also, most of the executives in this tier get amazing retirement packages--even when most workers have no defined benefits (so we hear all sorts of crap about the cost of pension funds for workers in the auto industry, for example, and nothing about the massive resource suck of executive perks, particularly executive perks for retirees).

3.  A substantial majority of the top .1% are executives and managers (corporate and finance bad guys, the same one's rolling in the dough right now). In the US gains at the top are driven by outrageous executive compensation and low taxes:  "markets have been politically reconstructed to aid the privileged" (45). In 2007, average CEO pay for the top 350 companies was 12 million dollars a year.

4.  The shift toward the super rich is a trend that begins in 1980 and continues to steadily increase (hmm...1980. What--or who--could have started this??). Tax rates on the rich have fallen dramatically. The rich are richer because they are taxed less heavily than they used to be (and our infrastructures are crumbling, schools are failing, people are dying because the rich are taxed less heavily than they used to be). Hacker and Pierson write: "if the effects of taxation on income at the top had been frozen in place in 1970, a very big chunk of the growing distance between the superrich and everyone else would disappear" (49).

5.  And get this: this diminution of taxes for the rich happened even as support was growing for taxing them more. In 1939, 35% of Americans supported making the rich pay more taxes; in 1998 45% did; in 2007 56% did.

6.  Taxes aren't the only factor. Another is the decline in unions, again a decline that ocurred even as more and more private sectors workers said they wanted a union. This decline also has political causes, most significantly the failure of a major labor law to pass in 1978 not to mention Reagan's stacking of the National Labor Relations Board with pro management appointees.

Well, how did we get here? The politicians did it.

The seeming paradox with any explanation that emphasizes political decisions is that the US is a representative democracy. Those guys are elected. So how could they vote for policies that screw the majority of their voters?  I should add here what I see as a weakness in Hacker and Pierson's discussion--ideology doesn't matter; that is, their explanation does see ideology as a factor. But I wonder whether this makes their discussion more radical, more compelling: ideology doesn't matter because of the disconnect between voters and the folks they elect. So it isn't even necessary to persuade voters; the views of voters simply don't matter.

I'll explore this further in a later post.

Democracy Now!'s Sharif Abdel Kouddous Live from Egypt: The Rebellion Grows Stronger

There really is an unbelievable feeling of community now, of people coming together. I’ve never seen Egypt this way. People are picking up trash in Tahrir Square. People are handing out food. People are helping each other. People are sleeping in the middle of Tahrir Square and setting up tents in the middle of the square. It is a scene that is very emotional. It’s something that no one thought could come together. It’s largely leaderless. I mean, no one—there’s no one organizing group. This is a popular uprising across all segments of society. Opposition groups have come now into the fold. They are—the Muslim Brotherhood is here, and other opposition groups. But people don’t want it coopted. And, you know, one of the things that I witnessed that was very moving was a lot of the Brotherhood started chanting, "Allah Akbar," and then—which means "God is great" in Arabic. And then the counter chant that was much louder, reverberating over them, was to "Muslim, Christian, we are all Egyptian." And that really symbolizes what’s happening here in Egypt today.

And, you know, Amy, I’ve seen some reports—I’ve had very little access to any kind of outside news. They really have shut down—the internet is completely shut down here. Cell phones do work now, and people are starting to be able to call each other. There is no texting; no SMS texting goes out. And they are very afraid of the internet, because Facebook was how they organized this uprising, to begin with. It was organized on Facebook. And there’s also mass SMS texting that is very common here in Egypt. And so, they’ve kept that shut down to try and cut off the communications from people. But people in Cairo do not care. They are going right now—I can see droves heading to Tahrir. And what’s significant, they go at the time of the curfew. They go when the curfew is there, and that’s when they start heading out.

And there’s been many reports of violence, of looting. And I just want to be very clear about this, that there was a significant amount of looting on Friday after the police completely disappeared from the scene. Certain places in Mohandessin in downtown Cairo were burned. Banks were burned. Some shops were looted. And, you know, there’s been reports of armed gangs coming around and robbing houses. Some of that did happen, yes, but what’s been amazing and what’s also kind of another phase of how this is Egypt coming together in this popular movement is that people have taken to the streets and formed these very efficient neighborhood watch committees. Where I live here in Zamalek, there’s groups of men, young and old, they stand, they form barricades. They are armed with metal pipes, some with bats. Some do have guns. And what they do is they check people coming in. They check their IDs. They’re very courteous. They allow people to go through if they believe you live in the neighborhood. They have really—they’re protecting their own. They’re protecting their homes. They are directing traffic. Well, the traffic cops are back in the streets of Cairo today, but before that, they were directing traffic. I’ve never seen Cairo traffic so smooth. One former diplomat I spoke with said, "It’s amazing. These 15-year-old kids are doing such a much better job than our traffic police."

via www.democracynow.org

Why do people in finance make so much more than the rest of us? (Les Leopold)

Les Leopold, "Why do people in finance make so much more than the rest of us?"

Most Americans rightly sense that our mixed free-enterprise economy, which once built a broad middle class, has devolved into a system of financial socialism by and for elites. The public wants and deserves answers to these basic questions:

1. Why do people in the financial sector make so much more money than the rest of us? Mainstream economists claim that your income reflects the economic value you produce -- at least in free and open markets. But are proprietary traders, for example, really 100 times more valuable than neurosurgeons? In the UK, some economists say no: The British New Economics Foundation calculates that "While collecting salaries of between £500,000 and £10 million, leading City bankers destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate."

Let's try a back-of-the envelope calculation of Wall Street's net social value. Compare their bonuses and profits for roughly the last five years (about $500 billion) with the economic losses produced in the financial crisis the bankers caused (about $4 trillion in value destroyed, not counting the ongoing travails of the 22 million people who haven't yet been able to find a full-time job). For every dollar "earned" on Wall Street, about 8 dollars were destroyed. (In case you're suffering from financial amnesia and forgot how the financial sector single-handedly caused the economic crisis, please see The Looting of America. Chapter One can be found gratis on AlterNet.)

There's plenty of room for argument about this kind of calculation. But even Wall Street wizards would have trouble defending the billions they've acquired by profiting from a bubble that blew up the economy. What's the real value of junk CDOs that were rated AAA and then sold for enormous profits before they blew up? We could make a strong case that those who profited from such bubble investments - like the people who sold synthetic CDOs to Wisconsin school districts -- should pay back their fraudulent profits. (In fact, the school districts have filed a lawsuit toward that end.)

2. Do current profits of financial firms come from tax-payer bailouts?
The old free-market mantra was that you could make as much as you wanted, so long as you were willing to accept all the risks that went with it. Joseph Schumpeter, a great defender of capitalism during the 1940s when much of the world was turning towards socialism, called the process of winning and losing "creative destruction." In his vision of capitalism, the best and the brightest staked everything in their quest for success, and only the true innovators survived. Inefficient enterprises would be left by the wayside.

So... are the survivors of the economic collapse like CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, receiving their just rewards?

Actually, it sounds a bit quaint these days to suggest that the rich must actually suffer the consequences of failure. These top financial institutions did not have to pay for their reckless gambling and gaming because they were deemed to big too fail, and so were bailed out. Goldman Sachs, for example, made a very bad bet when it purchased $13 billion of financial "insurance" from AIG to cover its toxic assets. AIG, due to its own enormously bad business decisions, could not pay up and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Had it gone under, as Schumpeter probably would have urged, Goldman Sachs would have received pennies on the dollar for its bad gamble, and might have gone broke. Instead, AIG was bailed out by taxpayers and Goldman Sachs got 100 cents on the dollar. It gambled, lost, and instead of suffering the consequences, was made whole by the government. And now Goldman Sachs execs are hauling in tens of millions in bonuses (disguised as stock options, even as its profits slip a bit from astronomical highs.)

Clearly, the "free and open" market did not determine who should be spared "creative destruction." Instead, CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase et al were saved because of their deep political connections. These companies would be kaput were it not for taxpayer bailouts, hastily contrived loans, and all kinds of market guarantees from their friends at the Fed. Schumpeter would have recognized this scheme in a flash: It's precisely the kind of crony socialism that he detested, only this time the game was was designed by and for financial elites in the world's largest capitalist economy. (Please don't compare the Wall Street rescues to the GM and Chrysler bailouts. Wall Street received ten times as much and will pay themselves a hundred times more than the top auto-executives. And the auto industry didn't topple the US economy and send millions to the unemployment lines.)

3. But since Wall Street is paying us back, why shouldn't they go back to earning whatever they can? Let's follow through on that logic. Let's say you raid your husband's pension fund for $100,000 and take the bus to Vegas, naively hoping to triple your money. As luck would have it, you lose it all. Desperate, you manage to borrow another two million from a rich friend (Wall Street calls it "leverage") -- and then you really load up on your bets. Tragically, you lose that too. I hate to tell you this, but you're in big trouble now. Don't expect the government to come around and offer to cover your losses with taxpayer bailouts so you can keep on gambling till the lights go out, and then, if you win, pay back the government. That is, unless you're too big to fail -- say, a very large, well-connected investment bank. In that case, party on!

It's true, Wall Street has paid us back for much of the bailout money we gave them. That's the good news. The bad news is that, having been rewarded for their bad behavior, they're now back at the casino tables, playing many of the same games that took down the economy in the first place. This time there are even fewer players who are now way too big to fail. And fewer players means less competition -- hence the rise in banking "fees," especially for the average consumer.

4. Where does all their wealth come from? There are only two possible sources for all the money the financial sector is spewing: The bankers are either creating new wealth or they're siphoning off wealth from the rest of us. Hedge fund honchos like to boast about how they weren't bailed out and therefore are entitled to their enormous hauls. (The top 10 in 2009 earned an average of $900,000 an HOUR. The top 25 earned as much as 658,000 entry level teachers.)

But our noble hedge fund managers have a great deal of difficulty accounting for what I call their "paradox of productivity." You see, there's supposed to be a connection between the productivity of your employees and your profits. Apple Corporation, for example, earned about $6 billion in 2009 by expertly engaging its 35,000 employees. (They went on to earn $6 billion in the last quarter of 2010 alone.) Along the way they offered us an array of popular new products that people are enjoying and putting to use. Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on god knows what. But it has fewer than 250 employees and it's not at all clear what these individuals added to our economy -- certainly not the iPad. How can 250 workers, no matter how wise and talented, produce as much real worth speculating on stuff as 35,000 Apple employees can make inventing, manufacturing and marketing useful products? They can't. So hedge funds must be siphoning off wealth from elsewhere, not creating it themselves. (If you think I'm wrong, please prove otherwise, because I haven't found a single book or paper about hedge funds, even from insiders or academics, that explains this paradox of productivity.)

Ever since the crash, I've been calling for a ban on Wall Street bonuses and for new taxes on the financial sector. Though I felt like I was hollering in the wind, apparently most Americans agree (if we can believe the polls cited above). I naively thought that during the crash the government would come done hard on Wall Street as it did during the 1930s. I was wrong. Instead we have institutionalized a festering problem that allows Wall Street to continue siphoning off the nation's wealth. So we have to think about a more radical restructuring. I believe the only way to end financial socialism for elites is to turn the core of high finance into group of heavily regulated public utilities -- like power, water and electricity (not semi-private entities like Fannie and Freddie before they were nationalized).

Rich, Poor and a Rift Exposed by Unrest - NYTimes.com

CAIRO — As the government of Egypt shakes from a broad-based uprising, long-simmering resentments have burst into open class warfare.

via www.nytimes.com

18 Ways to Circumvent the Egyptians Governments' Internet Block

Circulating on nettime :

18 Ways to Circumvent the Egyptians Governments' Internet Block

By: @AnonymousRx @Warintel

01]   Nour DSL is still working in Egypt, Dial up with 0777 7776 or 07777 666

02]   IP addresses for social media: pass on to people in #Egypt: Twitter:
         128.242.240.52. Facebook: 69.63.189.34

03]  How to circumvent the communications blackout in #Egypt http://slink.us?lr Arabic

04] #hamradio frequencies for #egypt http://slink.us?ls PLEASE SPREAD         IRC: http://slink.us?lt

05]  Ham Radio Software software for PC, Mac and Linux http://www.hamsphere.com
        Communicate w/ #egypt

06]  TOR Bridge 189.129.67.78:443  04FD6AE46E95F1E46B5264528C48EA84DB10CAC4

07]  There is an Old DSL Dialup 24564600

08]  Send SMS reports to +1 949 209 7559  and they will retweet for you.  Please spread to         those in #Egypt on battlefield

09]  #Egypt hams are on 7.050-7.200 MHz LSB

10]   Egypt Gov only blocking by DNS. So for Twitter try 128.242.245.148  Facebook                  69.63.189.11 Proxy

11]   VPN Server http://texnomic.com/url/2L  is now stable and open for FREE to ALL

12]   Help the Egypt Revolutionaries by overcoming the Firewall                  https://www.accessnow.org  /proxy-cloud    

13]   0m band, 7.050-7.20­0 MHz LSB, 318.5 degrees (northwest­/north from cairo) Ham         Radio Operators    

14]  We are now providing dialup modem service at +46850009990. user/pass:
        telecomix/telecomix (only for #egypt,     respect that PLEASE!).

15]  People of Egypt ONLY! Use this dial-up provided by friends in France to
       go online: +33172890150  (login 'toto' password 'toto')

16]  FREE VPN Server to bypass ANY Blockage on ANY ADSL or Cell Network.
       Domain: Cloud.Texnomic.com User:   FreeEgypt Pass: #Jan25

17]  Third party apps: Tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/ &         Hootsuite    http://hootsuite.com/ still work for updating Twitter

18]  Follow @AnonymousRx

We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

Please help support #OpEgypt and join anonymous in IRC chat, you can use a
secure web version of IRC called Mibbit @ http://slink.us?ll

Ask what you can do to help when in the chat channel, anonymous members are
always willing to help out new members!

- @AnonymousRx

Harvey: The Future of the Commons

From David Harvey, "The Future of the Commons"

How that form of ownership might come into being is established by turning Locke’s argument on the production of value against itself. Suppose, says Marx,a capitalist begins production with $1,000 in capital and in the first year manages to gain $200 surplus value from laborers mixing their labor with the land, and the capitalist then uses that surplus in personal consumption. Then, after five years, the $1,000 should belong to the collective laborers, since they are the ones who have mixed their labor with the land. The capitalist has consumed away all of his or her original capital. Like the indigenous populations of North America, the capitalists deserve to lose their rights, since they themselves have produced no value.

While this logic might sound outrageous, it lay behind the Swedish Meidner plan proposed in the late 1960s. A tax on corporate profits, in return for wage restraint on the part of unions, was to be placed in a worker-controlled fund that would invest in and eventually buy out the corporation, thus bringing it under the common control of the associated laborers. Capital resisted this idea with all its might, and it was never implemented. But the idea ought to be reconsidered. The central conclusion is that the collective laboring that is now productive of value must ground collective, not individual, property rights. Value, socially necessary labor time, is the capitalist common, and it is represented by money, the universal equivalency by which common wealth is measured. The common is not, therefore, something extant once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is  continuously being produced. The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetary form. A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and to protect against gentrification, for example, may suddenly find its property prices rising as real estate agents market the “character” of the neighborhood as multicultural and diverse as an attraction for gentrifiers. The outcome, writes Marx, is that capital, impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition to maximize (as do the cattle owners in Hardin’s tale) utility (profitability), produces

progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.

This “tragedy” is similar to that which Hardin depicts, but the logic from which it arises is entirely different. The problem of the commons is redefined here along with a range of possible solutions. Left unregulated, individualized capital accumulation perpetually threatens to destroy the two basic common property resources that undergird all forms of production: the laborer and the land. And with capital accumulation occurring at a compound rate of growth (usually at the minimum satisfactory level of 3 percent), these dual threats to land and labor escalate in scale and intensity over time.

A State of Upheaval in Egypt « SpeakEasy

The other point I would make is that when demonstrations like these erupt, they’re inevitably labeled “spontaneous uprisings.” However, that characterization is usually more a product of previous media neglect and ignorance than it is an accurate description of protest activity. If you’re not paying any attention to a country’s politics and only swoop in when things have reached a crisis point, events will invariably look out-of-the-blue. Yet that’s hardly the whole story.

Yes, there are extraordinary moments when public demonstrations take on a mass character and people who would otherwise not have dreamed of taking part in an uprising rush onto the streets. But these protests are typically built upon years of organizing and preparation on the part of social movements.

I haven’t seen great backgrounders out yet detailing movement activity in Egypt and Tunisia, but there have been some signs of foresight and preparation. In Cairo, for example, polished manuals have been passed from hand-to-hand among protesters, serving as guidebooks for action:

Anonymous leaflets circulating in Cairo also provide practical and tactical advice for mass demonstrations, confronting riot police, and besieging and taking control of government offices.Signed “long live Egypt”, the slickly produced 26-page document calls on demonstrators to begin with peaceful protests, carrying roses but no banners, and march on official buildings while persuading policemen and soldiers to join their ranks.

Well-produced twenty-six-page booklets—reflecting a lot of careful thought—do not exactly fit within the image of “spontaneous uprising.” As we continue to watch this story, I’ll be eager to see pro-democracy organizers who have been at it over the long haul get their due.

via blogs.alternet.org

What is to be done? (3)

No one would be surprised by the claim that the setting of communicative capitalism is not the same as early twentieth century Russia. What are some of the differences that matter for communist organization and struggle?

1.  Lenin emphasizes "exposure literature," that is, pamphlets describing the hideous, oppressive conditions in the factories--"the mere publication of these exposures made them effective and they acquired the significance of a strong moral influence."  To be sure, he acknowledges the ways the exposure literature to underplay or efface political struggle. Yet his response--we need political exposures--points to a media politics (the necessity of side, striking, and rapid exposures of shameful outrages) inadequate to communicative capitalism.

In our current setting, Lenin's emphasis on exposures suggests the political immediacy of media, a kind of media spontaneism that presumes in advance the efficacy of a story or image. Under communicative capitalism, there is an equivalence of the utterance; the use value of a utterance degenerates in the wake of its exchange value, that is, its condition as a contribution to the circulation of information and affect. Similarly, one person's exposure is another's porn. Or, differently put, the supposition that exposures work presupposes a unity of meaning lacking in our current setting.

It's worth noting, however, Lenin's attunement to the affective dimensions of politics. He emphasizes exposures because they incite feelings: workers will feel (Lenin's words and italics) that others are

being abused and outrages by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible deisre to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising . . .

If political exposure made sense in the context of autocracy, what tactics make sense for struggle under communicative capitalism? Does Lenin's emphasis on the incitement of feelings suggest the revolutionary potential of an affective politics? Or will that always remain limited, unconscious, spontaneous? Are our conditions those wherein consciousness is no longer possible? Or are they conditions wherein we grasp the inevitable splitting, incoherence, and divisions within consciousness, the unavoidable pressures and excesses of the unconscious? It is possible that discontent is now present and conscious--our task is to organize and channel it?

2.  Lenin rightly emphasizes that working class consciousness is only political consciousness if it responses to all cases of "tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse."  One advantage of our contemporary setting is the development of this political consciousness--for the most part, no one on the left can defense sexism, racism, homophobia, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, environmentalism, animal rights etc. One disadvantage of our setting is the accentuation of these forms of oppression and their disconnection from a theoretical perspective that links them to the antagonism constitutive of capitalism. The struggles have separated, thus diluting their collective strength and obscuring the class conflict traversing them.  Similarly, the legitimate success of the languages of struggle has been appropriated by bad guys, for capitalist and obscurantist ends.  More strongly, the general decline of symbolic efficiency contributes to the thwarting of common desire animating these struggles and its redirection within circuits of drive.

3.  As he emphasizes the need for an all Russia newspaper, Lenin asserts that political exposures in themselves are powerful instruments for disintegrating the system he opposes. Our condition is different--exposes are the primary current of our media, what feed and nourish them. What was previously a disruptive force now drives the system.

These are real differences. A striking point of convergence: Lenin's consciousness of and anger toward the failure and inadequacy of the Russian communists in 1901. He's nostalgic regarding the revolutionaries of the 1870s and envious of the German Social Democrats. Whereas the Russians are embroiled in defending spontaneity and economism, the German Social Democrats get out in front of every single political event in Germany. They have a revolutionary appraisal for everything that happens. Lenin wants to learn from and emulate them.

In the contemporary US, conservatives and capitalism seem to have learned this lesson. Even in the setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency (a setting that strengthens and enables them), the right has an answer, an incoherent, impossible, disruptive answer.

What about us?

Live From the Egyptian Revolution by Sharif Abdel Kouddous

In Cairo, tens of thousands of people--from all walks of life--faced off against riot police armed with shields, batons, and seemingly endless supplies of tear gas. People talked about Friday’s protest like a war; a war they’d won. "Despite the tear gas and the beatings, we just kept coming, wave after wave of us," one protester said. "When some of us would tire, others would head in. We gave each other courage." After several hours, the police were forced into a full retreat. Then, as the army was sent in, they disappeared.

The military was greeted warmly on the streets of Cairo. Crowds roared with approval as one soldier was carried through Tahrir square today holding a flower in his hand. Dozens of people clambered onto tanks as they rode around the square. Throughout the day people chanted: "The people, the army: one hand."

While the police and state security forces are notorious in Egypt for torture, corruption and brutality, the army has not interacted with the civilian population for more than 30 years and is only proudly remembered for having delivered a victory in the 1973 war with Israel. A 4pm curfew set for today was casually ignored with people convinced the army would not harm them. The police were a different story. Their brutality the past few days--decades in fact--has been well documented.

Saturday, some of the police forces were holed up inside their headquarters in the Interior Ministry building near the end of a street connected to Tahrir Square. When protesters neared the building, the police began firing live ammunition at the crowd, forcing them to flee back to the square. Three bloodied people were carried out. "The police are killing us," one man yelled desperately while on the phone with al Jazeera from outside the building. When the firing stopped, defiant protesters began approaching the building again. In the background, the smoking, blackened shell of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters served as an ominous reminder of their intentions.

At this point it seems clear the people are not leaving the streets. They own them now and they are refusing to go until Mubarak does. They chanted, "Mubarak, the plane is waiting for you at the airport," and "Wake up Mubarak, today is your last day."

via www.democracynow.org

Open Left:: "Spontaneity" and social change | reflections on Gramsci pt.1

Thanks to Alain from pointing out this discussion of spontaneity.  It goes in a different direction from my post "What is to be done? (2)". But it helps set up a nice contrast and debate. The clip below is just an excerpt. Read the whole thing here.

In his essay Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership (in his Prison Notebooks), Gramsci clarifies the complicated role of spontaneity in political organizing and collective action.  I connected with his distaste for "political adventurers who argue for it [spontaneity] as a 'political' method."  This language aligns with my negative experiences with activists who believe their ill-conceived "militant" actions-when disconnected from an organizing strategy or a social base of power-might somehow someday magically catalyze a spontaneous mass uprising.

What was new to me, however, is Gramsci's description of the potential strategic value of leaders and movements intentionally creating an aura of spontaneity around their movements.  Gramsci explains:

The leaders themselves spoke of the "spontaneity" of the movement, and rightly so.  This assertion was a stimulus, a tonic, an element of unification in depth; above all it denied that the movement was arbitrary, a cooked-up venture, and stressed its historical necessity.  It gave masses a "theoretical" consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional values...  This unity between "spontaneity" and "conscious leadership" or "discipline" is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes in so far as this is mass politics and not merely an adventure by groups claiming to represent the masses.

via www.openleft.com