The Organic Intellectual - Combating Cultural Hegemony

Black support for Israeli Apartheid?

2011-05-25T13:12:00.009-04:00

Last month the Vanguard Leadership Group (VLG), a group of self-proclaimed “African-American leaders,” paid for the full-page ad titled “Words Matter” targeting Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for their use of the term “apartheid” in labeling Israel. The SJP is “a diverse group of students, faculty, staff and community members…organized on democratic principles to promote justice, human rights, liberation and self-determination for the Palestinian people” which utilizes educational events, film screenings, discussion forums, and demonstrations to raise awareness and further the gowing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement from Israel.

What has become painfully clear is that the VLG ought to be ashamed of themselves. The stench of their propaganda is evident, as this “vanguard” of elite charlatans complain about the “offensiveness” of a word that those who have actually suffered under apartheid use themselves to describe Israel. Perhaps the whines and moans of the VLG would be a bit more convincing if their utter ignorance was not revealed by the fact that Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Willie Madisha, and many other heroes in the anti-apartheid struggle openly label Israel an apartheid state, rebuking the vacuous claims of the VLG.

Archbishop Demond Tutu proclaimed:

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

Willie Mashonda, former president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, articulated the comparison openly:

As someone who lived in apartheid South Africa and who has visited Palestine, I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. In fact, I believe that some of the atrocities committed against the South Africans by the erstwhile apartheid regime in South Africa pale in comparison to those committed against the Palestinians.

Over sixty church leaders and theologians in South Africa released a similar statement with no ambiguity and in no uncertain words:

From our own experience of apartheid, we can clearly and without equivocation say that your situation is in essence the same as apartheid and in its practical manifestation even worse than South African apartheid.

Although Nelson Mandela fell short of calling Israel an apartheid state, the purported letter to Thomas Friedman is not, contrary to popular belief (a mistake I previously made), written by him, he did maintain harsh criticism for Israel:

[W]hat we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. Nobody talks about that. Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white.

And in 1997, Mandela marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, (the official ANC website has, for whatever reason, removed this sourced speech) affirming his support for their struggle:

When in 1977, the United Nations passed the resolution inaugurating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, it was asserting the recognition that injustice and gross human rights violations were being perpetrated in Palestine. In the same period, the UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Zionist organizations condemned Mandela for his relatively moderate, two-state solution approach:

We deplore Mandela’s outrageous and immoral attempt to portray the terrorist dictator Saddam Hussein as an innocent victim of American aggression, and to put Israel on the same level as Saddam. Israel is a beleaguered, peaceful, and responsible democracy surrounded by terrorists and tyrants who have launched four wars against it and murder its citizens daily. Israel, like America, has every legal and moral right to protect itself with whatever weapons at its disposal.

In the normal Orwellian language employed by the Zionist state, it turns out people wanting to return to their homes are, undoubtedly, "terrorists and tyrants."

It is not only major figures in the anti-apartheid struggle, but also South African dockworkers, who had taken up the cause of anti-apartheid struggle by participating in the boycott, sanctions, and divestment movement. In 2009, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo in response to Israel's three-week assault on Gaza, which saw the slaughter of over 1,300 Palestinians, a third of which were children, and injured 5,300 more. Workers followed suit in Sweden and Malaysia. A year later, after the Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla, US activists successfully convinced International Longshore and Warehouse Local 10, not bereft of black members, in Oakland, California to refuse unloading Israeli cargo, marking the first time Israel was boycotted at a U.S. port. I think it is clear that the opinions of working people, especially working people who actually suffered under apartheid, are far more convincing than the vacuous assertions of the VLG, who lace their website with various references to AIPAC and Israel.

Perhaps, also, the VLG is ignorant of the historic connections between Israel and South Africa. For decades Israel propped up the white minority government under the apartheid regime, selling it weapons even while the rest of the world condemned it as a pariah state. The Jewish Defense League, a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda, openly condemned Nelson Mandela and the ANC as a terrorist organization. Even by 1982, when apartheid comparisons were being made, Raphael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli Army during its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon, rejected the comparison, inverting the role of victim and victimizer, oppressed and oppressor:

I don’t understand this comparison between us and South Africa. What is similar here and there is that both they and us must prevent others from taking us over. Anyone who says that the blacks are oppressed in South Africa is a liar. The blacks there want to gain control of the white minority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over. I was in a gold mine there and I saw what excellent conditions the black workers have. So there is [sic] separate elevators for whites and blacks, so what? That’s the way they like it.

Perhaps the “African-American leaders” who hail from such haughty academic perches simply overlooked the historical facts? Doubtful. What is more likely is that they are spewing their propaganda to serve a political purpose.

As far as the evidence to support the apartheid assertion, I will rely upon what the evidence that one commentator has already posited:

One might point the VLG student leaders to The Inequality Report, a freshly-minted report by Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which found that “Inequalities between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel span all fields of public life and have persisted over time. Direct and indirect discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel is ingrained in the legal system and in governmental practice,” and that “More than 30 main laws discriminate, directly or indirectly, against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills which are at various stages in the legislative process.” One might also point the 16 VLG members to the State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Israel and the Occupied Territories, which in 2004, in a rare instance of candor, reported that Israel had done “little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country’s Arab citizens. The State Department’s most recent report, published April 8, 2011, confirmed that 7-year-old finding, that “Principal human rights problems [in Israel] were institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against Arab citizens.” (It should go without saying that racism in Israel is not limited to the anti-Arab variety.)

Furthermore, a 2009 report by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa concluded "On the basis of the evidence presented, this study concludes that Israel has introduced a system of apartheid in the OPT, in violation of a peremptory norm of international law."

All of these studies are worth extensive reads, and show more clearly than ever that Israel is, by all accounts, and apartheid state. Perhaps, as some activists have pointed out, the fundamental difference rests in the fact that the dominance of the white minority in South Africa rested upon the exploitation of the Black majority’s labor, whereas this dynamic is slightly different in Israel, which opts instead for separation and segregation to further its colonial settler goals. Yet, the pillars of apartheid are evident.

Perhaps even more shamefully, the VLG is not only ignoring the words and disfiguring the legacy of anti-apartheid activists who resist all oppression, but it is undoubtedly a shame to the historic legacy of black struggle and black liberation in the US against oppression.

As Malcolm X pointed out all the way back in 1964:

Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the "religious" claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation ... where Spain used to be, as the European zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?

Huey Newton, of the Black Panther Party, articulated the organization’s vociferous support for Palestinian liberation:

We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such. We have respect for all people, and we have respect for the right of any people to exist. So we want the Palestinian people and the Jewish people to live in harmony together. We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.

This was a position which the copycat Black Panther Party in Israel, originally created to challenge the anti-black racism in the country, also supported. Even Martin Luther King Jr., whose face the VLG shamefully plasters all over their website, was no ardent supporter of Zionism as the VLG would have you imagine.

The evidence is clear. How shameful, how repugnant, how utterly disgraceful, then, that the "top African-American leaders," self-proclaimed, have consciously placed themselves on the wrong side of history, on the side of oppression, of colonization, and injustice. How shameful indeed that they have attempted, from the comforts of their ivory tower, to pit the oppressed against the oppressed, to construct a façade of black support for Israeli apartheid against the Palestinians. But no matter, for those struggling for justice in Palestine stand on the shoulders of black intellectuals and giants that the VLG, the self-proclaimed "African-American leaders," could only wish to stand on.

Exchanges with a "Socialist" Zionist

2011-05-04T14:56:00.001-04:00

In the wake of the historic reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, as well as the opening of the Rafah border from Egypt to Palestine, and the continually growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement from Israel, it is clear that the struggle for Palestinian liberation in on the upswing. In turn, it is important to analyze the rhetoric from the so-called "liberal" Zionist wing in Israel that often portrays itself as the "good" or "clean" version of Zionism, opposed to brutal right-wing manifest in Benjamin Netanyahu. Inherent in their conception of "liberalism" or, in the rare case, "socialism," is that Zionism is somehow compatible with the aspirations of the Palestinian people, that somehow colonial settler states can be progressive or "socialist." The purportedly "socialist" wing of the Zionist movement is, undoubtedly, a small minority. Thus, it is a rare opportunity that one gets to engage in debate with a representative of this contradictory trend that attempts to reconcile both socialist internationalism while internalizing Zionist ideology. The end-result, in my opinion, is of the utmost disgust, one that undoubtedly drugs the socialist name through the mud of Zionist propaganda. Here I re-post an online debate between myself and one of these "socialist" Zionists, removing the name of my opponent. What was clear beyond all doubt to me after this encounter was that there is no and cannot be any "socialist" Zionist, as implicit in Zionism is an imposition of rule on an oppressed population by a group of colonialists who aim to push the Palestinian Arab population off their land. Zionism, just like imperialism, ought to be rejected in all of its forms, no matter the disguise it wears. Notice the sly implications that anti-Zionism is anti-Jewish (a false notion which supporters of Israel constantly conflate), notice the libelous accusations of anti-semitism, notice the lack of response to particular arguments, the constant strawmanning and falsifications. These are the intellectual hurdles one must jump to protect and sanction Zionist propaganda.

In short, read the debate, and decide for yourself. The purpose I hope this post serves is to help prepare activists for the sorts of arguments they will run into from the so-called "progressive" Zionists. Nothing in these posts have been edited, and the only things added in rare instances were those in brackets to help clarify what the discussion was referring to. I have, however, left out the other people who engaged in the debate, mostly because I did not ask their permission to post and do not want to drag them into an unwanted public arena without their consent.

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Zionist: I like your profile pic [Vittorio Arrigoni], but am hopeful you support the right to both Palestinians and Jews to self-determination in national homelands and sympathize that the Arab League plays a larger role in the conflict than Israelis and Palestinians themselves. I sympathize with Palestinians and more Israelis should recognize the refugee experience deriving from all Holocaust survivors, but too often I feel too many take one side and do not support justice for both. That being said, Israel needs immediate government reform so more liberal Israelis can push forth negotiations with the PA/Hamas/Fatah and discontinue the wall and occupation. In the same vein, you must understand how important it is to me that the Jewish people also deserve the right to justice and are perhaps one of the historical opitomes of persecution and ethnic injustice. Anywho, peace and may all those who rightfully deserve justice receive it

Derek: ****, I support the right of JEWS. I do not, have not, and will never support, under any circumstances, the political ideology of Zionism. I am one-sided in this, something I will not deny, in the same way that I would have been one-sided in the struggle against South African apartheid. It is of my opinion, and I believe the historical record proves this more clearly than anything, that a two-state solution with a weak, fractured, diminished, and enervated Palestinian state is not the solution. This is exactly the outcome of any two-state solution, as a Palestinian state will, if it were to be created, be forced forever under the auspices and the shadow of Israeli military might (which, we might add, exists today in large part to serve US geopolitical and economic interests in the region). Couching Zionism in the cloak of "Jewish self-determination" can not hide the very nature of the Zionist state, that of a colonial settler state that utilizes techniques of apartheid and violence to achieve it's existence. I support the right of any people to self-determination, but I do not support the right of Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine to create a "Jewish state," and think that a single-state, under the historic name of Palestine, where what we now consider "Israelis" and Arabs (be they Christian or Muslim or, dare I say, Jewish!) live with the same legal, political, and economic rights. I am unequivically opposed to the purported "right" of anyone who claims Jewish heritage, especially those living in the US and Europe, to migrate to Palestine and settle on Palestinian land. But, as you say, "may all those who rightfully deserve justice receive it." I hope, as you claim yourself as someone who sympathizes with the Palestinians, that you support the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement in support of Palestinian liberation!

Zionist: Derek, I respect so much that you responded thoughtfully and without rhetoric and hate. I understand how someone in your position may not acknowledge Zionism in its many different forms, some of which should be ridiculed and perpetuate the conflict, however I believe you're a little misinformed or in denial while you trivialize the Jewish plight. If you'll recall, no nations in the world accepted Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, besides the Dominican republic and few European nations that surrendered their Jews to the NAZI regime; America is no exception, if you're skeptical, look up the M.S. St. Louis a ship in which FDR personally refused via Secretary of State. Thousands sent back and many later perished at Auschwitz. And how about the Mizrachi Jewish exodus from Arab States before the declaration of Israeli statehood. These "Arabic Jews" or so they saw themselves had NOTHING to do with Zionism and identified with Arab nationhood? As tensions grew in the British Mandate (which Palestinians did not exist before Arab nationalism, they were Arabs of the Ottoman Empire and before that Syria, Jordan, and Egypt)

Anyway, these Jewish communities present in Arab states even before the rise of Christianity or Islam were now being persecuted by their leaders and neighbors. Most to which end let to community massacres, probably equivicable to Israel's innocent casualty wrongdoing. Many communities, in the thousands in each Arab nation were either exiled or restricted to emigrate and persecuted. For this reason Israel rescued many of these communities by plane or bus from dangerous nations such as Ethiopia (Operation Moses, Flying Carpet, etc), Yemen and Oman, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, etc. I believe you are unfortunately too idealistic on this issue and only see black and white

At the same time, you won't even comment about the Arab League and how they're nations are revolutionizing toward democracy (like Israel where you obviously do not understand that Arabs, be them Muslim, Christian, or Druze hold equal rights and hold a better opportunity for life and free speech in Israel where they'd never be allowed in Arab nations

Or the fact that nations like Libya and Jordan have historically persecuted their Palestinian brothers and sisters, refugee populations and even exiled them back to Palestine

I think you perpetuate hate and anti-Semitism and won't acknowledge the plight of the oldest persecuted group in history. It saddens me that so many liberals do not remain objective on this issue and makes me believe anti-Semitism will remain until my culture no longer exists. Perhaps you don't know what it feels like to grow up realizing you're entire ancestry was murdered by NAZI regime and surrendered and abandoned by their neighbors; in Western Europe most Jews found Zionism ridiculous and identified with their nations until anti-Semitism exploded. Real liberals choose justice. Free Palestine, free Israel from being forced to deal with a military conflict they don't want for their own and other childrens' nations!

‎"We will never forgive Syria for making us kill their sons." -Golda Meir

if you support self determination for the Jews than where do you propose their homeland be? I honestly believe Native "Americans" deserve their own state which wouldn't even do justice because it would trivialize all native tribal cultures into one state. What do you propose is a solution than? Another holocaust?

And no I don't support that movement, I only advocate for objective Jewish-Muslim alliance oganizations that promote peace and justice for both like you claim to subscribe to

One more thing, almost all European Jews genetically originate in the Middle East and the Levant/ Afghanistan/Persia. This is empirically proven. I'm white in appearance but my father and sister are dark skinned, dark brown to black hair, and brown eyes and our ancestors derive from exiled Jews living in European lands. To support one and not the other, especially when history proves a much longer and deeper plight is contradictory

And my last name **** comes from the name Levite which was a tribe in ancient Israel, just like Cohen and Kohain, and Rubin. Just some more proof for you.

[After flooding my Facebook wall with propaganda] I apologize for flooding your page, and have removed the links except arabs for israel. I just think your position is too one sided an you have not addressed the Arab League whatsoever. I used to be just like you and was embittered by the modern Israeli state, but then I took Jewish history courses in college and realized how important the nation is to my people's existence. You have forgotten about the Holocaust and the 2000 years of persecuted diasporatic life. Either you are anti-Semitic by denying the existence of my culture's right to self determination. Watch Schindler's List brother and then lets talk

How about you practice what you preach and protest against Arab States that hold endless amounts of oil money, give their citizens NOTHING, and murder them if they speak out. Or how about that every major war in Israel has been initiated by the Arab League and not the Palestinian people.

P.S. I have always supported the right for Palestinians to self-determination. There are many Israelis on the left who feel the same way. I spoke out against Islamomaphobia when that asshole Senator Dodd held his ridiculous trial. I would like to see you or anyone from the Arab Muslim world to stand up against anti-Semitism or to acknowledge the right of Holocaust survivors to self-determination. It makes you hypocritical

and why aren't you protesting for statehood for the Native Americans?

We live in America, practice what you preach and demand nationhood now for Native Americans! and you've never been to Israel or Palestine, I have and know how deeply this "apartheid" is in Israel and the fact that Arabic is a national language in Israel, and Arabs serve in the Knessest and can openly criticize their government without fear of murder or imprisonment like in most Arab states. Once again, be objective and actually retort my arguments!

[Referring to me and one or two other anti-Zionists who responded or "liked" anti-Zionist comments] you all need to stop being TRENDY LIBERALS and be objective and provide agency for the Palestinian people in need and with right to a homeland without settlements or occupation, and protection for Israel who consists of Holocaust survivors and their families or exiled Jews from the Arabic world from powerful Arab states

Derek: Now you've done it.

I'm no "trendy liberal," but I'd rather be that than an apologist for Zionist crimes, as you have so obviously shown yourself to be.

First, I am going to correct the slanderous garbage you regurgitate, claiming anyone critical of Israeli policy is an anti-semite or denies Jewish oppression. You, just like the right-wing, are NO different in this regard (nor in your blatant falsehoods concerning Palestinian Arab freedom). Furthermore, not ONCE have I EVER trivialized Jewish plight, which you have mistakenly accused me of. The holocaust, and not only of Jews, but also of Communists, socialists, trade-unionists, gypsies, and homosexuals was, by far, the greatest crime against humanity in the twentieth century. Nor, for that matter, have I EVER denied complicity of European and U.S. governments, or their corporate counterparts, in the crimes of the Nazis. I have never ONCE denied the blunt fact that Western capitalism, manifest in corporations like IBM making deals with the Nazi regime or Henry Ford sympathizing with anti-Jewish racism, facilitated and perpetuated the slaughter of so many innocent Jewish people. Nor have I ONCE denied the blatant crime of Western governments that refused Jewish refugees, all of the purportedly great “anti-fascists” who, by their denial of the Jews, betrayed the roots of their complicity in Nazi crimes.

You start your historical inquiry, no doubt, as a time which is best suits your story. You introduce the debate within the context of the Holocaust, yet ignore the fact that the origins of the Zionist state have little to do with the holocaust. The Balfour declaration in 1917, over THIRTY YEARS before the creation of Israel, had already outlined British policy as creating a “national home for the Jewish people” in historic Palestine. Balfour would go on to say:

“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

So let us do away with this myth that the holocaust was the impetus for the creation of Israel. Already, prior to 1948, Britain was already maneuvering to create a loyal client state in the region. Thus, thirty years after the original declaration 700,000 Arabs, whose homes and lives and desires Balfour callously dismissed, were forcefully and violently removed, bathing the “War of Independence” in Arab blood, baptizing Israel in ethnic cleansing. Call them “Palestinian” or not (your semantic arguments do little to sway anyone, I presume), but those Jews murdered in the holocaust were not murdered by Palestinian guards, they were not sent into Palestinian gas chambers, they were put to death by European Christians, by European fascists, and by so-called European and U.S. “liberals” who refused them refugee status and open borders. Why is it that the Arabs of Palestine, the 700,000 Arabs, many of whom are still alive, many of whom still have the original keys to their homes that they fled from Zionist violence, many of whom have sons and daughters and grandchildren who are denied the right of return to a place where only a few decades ago their ancestors lived. You cannot wipe the crimes implicit in the creation of the Israeli state clean. You are shameful to do so.

As Winston Churchill, an avid Zionist (as not all Zionists are Jews!) famously stated:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

This is how the Zionists, be they Herzl or Churchill, Balfour or Ben-Gurion, felt about the Arabs in Palestine. They were dogs, dogs who had no right to the manger, no matter how long they had been there. Just as Churchill would callously dismiss the suffering and oppression and exploitation of the Indigenous Americans and Africans, he too, along with the founders of Zionism you openly quote on your profile, dismissed the Arabs as sub-human. Israeli “independence,” or what Palestinians call al-Nakba (the catastrophe), was draped not only in Arab blood, but in Zionist racism.

Provide for us, ****, proof of your claim that there were “community massacres” equivalent to the “Israeli’s innocent casualty wrongdoing.” Prove for us where and when there were 700,000 Arab Jews forcefully removed from their home in the same way that 700,000 non-Jewish Arabs were removed from their homes by the Zionist armies, by the terrorist Stern gang, by the so-called “liberators” of the “Jewish homeland.” Provide for us where prior to the Balfour declaration, prior to the whipping up of anti-Semitic hate in the face of the artificial creation of a “Jewish state” and the potential removal of Arabs from their homes, where there was a mass Jewish exodus, where there existed massive Jewish oppression in the Arab world. For hundreds of years Jews escaped European persecution, persecution by Christians, to live in Muslim lands, where they were at least granted some semblance of protection.

As for your preposterous claims of genetic rights to Palestine, you must be having a laugh! You cannot, with a straight face, tell me that because SOME European Jews “genetically originate in the Middle East” that you have a right to Palestine. If that were the case, ALL white European colonialism was justified, as most scientific evidence suggests Africa as the birthplace of our species. Trace our genetics back far enough and perhaps I and other white settlers can remove all the inhabitants of Eritrea on the grounds that humans originally migrated out of the Horn of Africa. Can you imagine if every person claimed the right unequivocally to go back where their ancestors lived 1,500 years ago and displace the people who currently live there? The absurdity of the proposition discredits itself.

****, I have no need to comment on the Arab League, for the Israelis do it well enough themselves! I have no need, no love, and no respect for the corrupt, brutal, nepotistic Arab dictators who are falling under the weight of democratic uprisings. Yet, it is government YOU are defending which does! I have no sympathy for those facilitators of Palestinian oppression, for those dictators who would capitulate and defend Israel, a colonial settler state, against the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. But do not believe my words, look at how the Zionist press, the purportedly “liberal” and most prominent Zionist rag Haaret, treats the subject:

The West’s position reflects the adoption of Jimmy Carter’s worldview: kowtowing to benighted, strong tyrants while abandoning moderate, weak ones… Carter’s betrayal of the Shah [during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9] brought us the ayatollahs, and will soon bring us ayatollahs with nuclear arms. The consequences of the West’s betrayal of Mubarak will be no less severe. It’s not only a betrayal of a leader who was loyal to the West, served stability and encouraged moderation. It’s a betrayal of every ally of the West in the Middle East and the developing world. The message is sharp and clear: The West’s word is no word at all; an alliance with the West is not an alliance. The West has lost it. The West has stopped being a leading and stabilising force around the world.

Was it not Israeli and the U.S. governments which have propped up these dictators and despots? Was it not, for the sake of “stability” and “peace with Israel” that relations were “normalized” through force for the Egyptians? Was it not against the will of the mass majority of the Arab, and in particular the Egyptian, population that their governments have capitulated and given into Western imperialism? 54% of Egyptians favor an annulment of the euphemistically phrased “peace treaty” with Israel. Over 80% of Arabs in that region feel Israel is the greatest threat to security in the region, followed closely by the U.S. at 77%. Do not post propaganda of one individual Arab, an Israeli Arab at that, defending Israel and pretending that you can project it onto the vast majority of the Arab population, whose opinions differ significantly. It was only yesterday that a Palestinian student of mine described to me in detail the humiliation and dehumanization that he faces when visiting Palestine. He explained to me he was ashamed that he did not even feel safe in his own country because of the Israeli occupation, because of the constant presence of occupiers, because of how Israel dictates the land, the resources, the very lives of Palestinians. So, please, save your vitriolic rhetoric, dressed in a liberatory and equitable garb. Do not spew nonsense about how I “don't know what it feels like to grow up realizing you're entire ancestry was murdered” by the Nazis to justify the dislocation and suffocation the Palestinian people. I dare say Arabs, who live with oppression on a daily basis in Palestine, understand it far better than you do living in Ohio.

And as for your barbarous quotes, “we will never forgive Syria for making us murder their sons.” Get off it! Let me tell you something, the people of Syria will NEVER FORGIVE YOU, if I can follow your lead in equating you with the Zionist movement (which you yourself do), for murdering their sons. What right does a Zionist, one who actively promotes the Zionist cause have to present such utterly false and mocking sympathy? Open apologetics for Zionist crimes, for crimes against humanity, are perhaps more than anything else the most disgusting aspect of your entire argument. I suggest in the future you refrain from regurgitating Zionist filth that openly exude the barbarity of Israeli crimes.

As far as your patronizing and paternalistic comments towards me, you are right, I do not utilize my past to justify the removal of people from their lands. I would never exploit my past to protect and defend a government which would initiate the slaughter of innocent Palestinian boys and girls in Operation Cast Lead, like you. I would never manipulate the oppression of my people to justify the existence of a colonial settler state.

It disturbs me that you spew that Zionist propaganda and simultaneously label yourself a socialist. I know of no real socialist that would willingly defend a state which can engage in ethnic cleansing, economic strangulation, and state terrorism to expand and encroach upon other peoples’ land. I suggest you either denounce Zionism as a political ideology, which drapes itself in the blood of innocent Arabs, or you renounce internationalist socialism, as these two things are incompatible and it does us socialists a real disservice to have you parading around under our banner.

Random Responder: simma down fellas [kept for comedic value!]

Zionist: At least I support both and acknowledge Israeli crimes. Let me ask you Derek, how about the Italian peace activist recently murdered in Gaza? He was murdered by an Islamist faction of al quaeda which you will never admit because it exposes the fact this war is perpetuated by nations and political movements that do not actually care about the Palestinian people, like they claim. Zionism began before the Holocaust because of the increasing antiSemitism in Western and Eastern Europe. You do have no idea and Jews have been representing socialism since the emmergence of capitalism. How about Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria give chunks of their ENORMOUS states to their Arab brothers and sisters? Why? Because they use them as political tools at the peoples' expense to push their political and economic agendas against Israel. Please Derek, tell me why we'd want to resettle a land with no oil and no infrastructure or agricultural system in the desert over life in countries that wouldn't accept us anyway. I love that you're white, claim to be a socialist which, israels economy is more similar to than US and European socialistic economies. You still haven't told me what the Jewish refugees should've done after WW2 or where to go or acknowledged that Jews have yearned for Zion throughout all of diasporatic history. You are regurgitating hateful, distored, and biased information. Once again, I support Palestine and Israel even though neither nations existed before nationalism. I challenge you to take a Jewish history course so you can see both sides of the conflict and realize it's not black and white

[Anti-Zionist comment here.]

Zionist: Ever hear of the Jewish question? Probably not, if you did you wouldn't HATE Zionism and Zionists. Native Americans do deserve states rather than "autonomous" reservations where capitalism perpetuates alcoholism, extreme poverty, and no rightful justice? How bout' you focus on this or the Arab states and how they do not give citizenship to minorities and murder those who they claim to be their own. Let a 2state solution arise and stop hating Israel. Hate the right wing Israeli government if you'd actually like to come off as holding a logical position

Derek: You seem to make a hell of a lot of claims about me that you have no evidence to back up. There is no evidence to suggest that Arrigoni was killed by anyone BUT an Islamist faction of al queda sympathizers. Yet, what is fundamentally clear is that NO ONE, not the Palestinian people, not Hamas (who were democratically elected), not anyone in the ISM or any other Palestinian solidarity organization identifies with the murderers, a paltry, infinitely small group that holds no weight with the Palestinian people.

Jews HAVE been representing socialism, and they should continue to do so! Some of the most important leftists and intellectuals that I admire and have learned from, be they socialist or other radical traditions, have been of Jewish origin. Yet, what is fundamentally clear is that they reject ZIONISM, especially those who have lived long enough to see what it has created. I never denied that Jews have been fundamental to the socialist movement. Indeed, that Jews have been part of my tradition is a badge of honor, something to be proud of. You make claims attempting to refute things that I have never said.

Listen, ****, I do not have an answer to what should have happened post-World War II. I would have been fighting here inside the U.S. for Jews to come here had I been alive. Either way, I sure as hell know it should NOT have involved displacing 700,000 Palestinian Arabs.

And don't give me that bullshit about "Jews have yearned for Zion throughout all of diasporatic history." The VAST MAJORITY of the world's Jews rejected Zionism, rejected the idea of resettling in historic Palestine, etc.

Finally, this is no "conflict," a word that intrinsically implies there are no actors, that it is just some neutral event that has spontaneously erupted. This is a conscious war of aggression, "genocide in slow motion," against a largely defenseless and starved population. This is the result of a colonial settler state. And I'll tell you why they choose Palestine, because it provided a religious pretext for colonial settlement. Because it was meant to be not a colony that exploits the labor and land of the people to send back to the imperialist base. It was instead meant as a settler state, one which would have to ethnically cleanse the population, to force them out for a new group of people to settle in. All the while to be utilized strategically by the real imperial masters, originally the British and post WW2 the Americans, to pursue their imperial ambitions in that region that IS oil rich, that DOES have a plethora of natural resources.

Don't be a fool, you surely must see that picture more clearly than you claim to.

Zionist: **** [Anti-Zionist commenter], I appreciate your loving demeanor, but I do believe you're truly misinformed. I do not agree with all forms of Zionism, I simply believe that the Jewish people need a national homeland and deserve justice for over 2000 years of persecution. I am very aware of how Jews flourished historically in Arabic society, however, the Arabic world has changed and unfortunately is controlled by selfcentered leaders. You and Derek must understand I love and defend our Arabic Muslim cousins. I am very against occupation and settlement but truly believe there was no alternative for the Jewish people. I think perhaps if you both lived 50 years ago, you'd be avid Zionists because of your current logic. I'm an anthropology major and studied Southeast Asia in the changing global world and how it affects tribal nations and cultures exposed forcefully to western globalization. I think this has gone too far, I love you guys, but also love my people who have been oppressed far more than any minority in history. Like I said, I say we focus on our similarities as liberal socialists

Derek: Do you support the right of return for Palestinians? ALL Palestinians?

Zionist: Of course duder, but I also support the right of all Jews to return, especially in circumstances, like originally intended to provide an actual refuge and returned nation for the Jewish people because nobody wanted us. The Zionist Congress even proposed Uganda as an ulternative, but that would not make historical or logical sense. The goal was refuge for oppressed Jews, not colonization and murder and oppression of others. The world does not function ideally my friends and this is why not everything is black and white in this conflict. We must support both and bring attention to the wrongs and rights on both sides

Derek: "The goal was refuge for oppressed Jews, not colonization and murder and oppression of others."

But as long as it is a refuge for Jews, colonization and murder and oppression are fine, I take it?

Zionist: Of course not Derek, I've already acknowleged that

Derek: Then why do you defend the origins of the Zionist state, which are marred in the blood and oppression and murder and displacement of Arab Palestinians?

Zionist: Because it's not that simple Derek. I don't dispute the fact that bloodshed was committed on both sides but there have always been peaceful, pro-Arab rights/self-determ Zionists since the origins of Zionism. What rights to self determination, regardless of Israel have you or the Arab League supported for the Jewish people, the most misplaced and oppressed people of all time?

http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm

if you do not feel like going through this I understand, I would see evidence you gave me as biased as well I'm sure, but I'd still look at it. Read it and look at other parts of the website. I feel there are soo many things you are missing out on

Derek: And I respond in kind:
http://www.counterpunch.org/herskovitz04262011.html

Zionist: I agree with many aspects of Herskovitz article, I do, however, point out that he must have had no ties to anti-Semitism in Europe predating and during the Holocaust. Franz Boas, the founder of cultural relativity in cultural anthropology, his family came to the US far before a period of violent anti-Semitism began in Europe. He also deeply felt for the Jews, but did not support Zionism

Many Jews in Western Europe did not support Zionism because they truly believed for once in history they could assimilate with the majority, but of course, once again the Jews were used as a political tool as always the case throughout European history. That's what we get for being misplaced and restricted Israelites in European white society. It's easy for American Jews who's families immigrated before the anti-Semitic influx between 1890's-after WWII.

I also agree there is MUCH racism in Israel even against Ethiopian Jews as you mentioned before, but nowhere near equivalent to that in Arab states. I agree these things are all wrong, but they should not be our focus as liberals, our focus as liberals should be securing freedom for Palestine, maintaining the right of Israel to exist, and support democratic uprisings in the Arab world

[After responding to a commenter who asked why his name was drug into the debate]

I meant to say **** and **** since you both were supporting Derek's arguments without speaking for yourselves, but I apologize if you found that offensive

haha you're right that was pretty lame. I was just in the heat of the moment. Good luck in your research and remain objective. If I truly believed ALL aspects of Zionism and Israel were unethical and wrong I would have a different opinion. I used to feel the same way about Zionism and Palestinian encroachment (understatement), but took courses on Jewish history and Zionism in school and was informed by the truth and now my view supports both Palestine and Israel and I'm sorry, my friends, that you cannot accept this

‎"A classical two-state framework may serve only to feed revanchist nationalist sentiments, leading to renewed ethno-national conflict rather than to a stable peace. We must foster a countervailing force, one which stresses the values of regional cooperation and civic equality. Attachments to the sacred space and time of history and place, rootedness in ancestral family homes and tribal symbolism—whether by refugees insisting they can only return to their long-lost villages in Israel, or by settlers who demand to live everywhere their collective national memory was forged and to extend Israeli sovereign rule to every such area—must be tempered and transformed by new commitments to a shared political identity nourished by the ideal of equal citizenship. Rather than an intifada for winning Palestinian sovereignty over a holy mosque called Al-Aksa, placing both politics and law in the service of religion, we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian struggle for casting off the shibboleths and illusions of absolute national sovereignty itself. This is the hidden secret of human rights and international justice struggling to break free amidst the pious inflammatory nationalisms roiling the waters and sands of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East today." - Gidon Remba

Derek, at least read the abstract for this paper. Once again not black and white, and the world does not evolve ideally

‎"This is the kernel of the problem, as we see it: the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.
"Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed.
"This does not mean, of course, that we must think of waiting for the age of universal harmony.
"No previous civilization has been able to achieve it, nor can we see even in the remote distance, that day of the Messiah, when national barriers will no longer exist and all mankind will live in brotherhood and concord. Until then, the nations must narrow their aspirations to achieve a tolerable modus vivendi." - Leon Pinsker

Strawson, and Anti-Zionist pretty much sums up and explains why I am a Zionist.

Anti-Zionism, however tends to argue one or some of the following ideas (a) Jews are not a nation (b) Jews are only identifiable by attachment to Judaism as religion (c) there is only tenuous evidence linking Jews to Torah historical accounts (d) the Jews come from Eastern Europe, not the Middle East (e) Jews are not a homogeneous group (f) Jews have collaborated with oppressors (Imperialism, the Nazis) (h) Zionism inevitably means oppressing the Palestinians. There are of course other views. These arguments all lead to an uncomfortable position that whereas all other self-declared nationalisms have validity, the Jews have no such claims - John Strawson

My point is that, by calling me someone who supports a simplified linear meaning of what you misunderstand as only one type of Zionism, and associating me with people who murder Palestinians casts you as anti-Semitic (yes I know Palestinians are Semitic as well, just for liturgical purposes) because in doing so, you absolutely deny the right of Jews to nationalism, self-determination, and repatriation of their tribal land. Like Strawson mentioned, so every other ethnicity or nation in the world has the right to their own nation regardless of who has lived there at different points in history, but the Jews do not have a right to a nation in their homeland. I once again support Native American self-determination and am not sure why you're so hyperfocused on Israel, when there are plenty of worse nations and leaders and displaced peoples in the world to focus on. This is what makes your perpetual rejections of my arguments anti-Semitic

‎"To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

In the second place, this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall." -Ze'ev Jabotinsky 1923

read the Iron Wall

[Anti-Zionist Comment]

Zionist: I can associate anti-Semitism with Israel because answer to me why my fellow liberals are so hyper-focused on the Israeli-Palestinian issues, when the world truly has many more, worse human rights problems. They may not be intrinsically anti-Semitic, but they are projecting anti-Semitic preference to Israel and it's human rights issues. I agree to end it

[Small exchange between Anti-Zionist and Zionist]

Derek:

****, your incessant defense of the founding crimes of the Israeli state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the vicious murder and displacement of the 700,000 Arabs is NOT, AND WILL NEVER, be justified by your claim that Jews have been oppressed before, even if they are one of the most oppressed people in history. Your shallow misuse of the holocaust, your superficial conflation of Judaism and Zionism, your implicitly racist accusations of backwards Arabs, who suffer under the dictators YOUR GOVERNMENT SUPPORTS, even while you utter the hypocritical words of multiculturalism, is disgusting to me and anyone who sees the human tragedy in the brutal dismantling of the Palestinian homeland, a "homeland for the Jews" STOLEN by blood, by violence, and by colonization. Your consistent and irresponsible lies concerning Arab freedom in Israel and Palestine, your constant dismissal of their suffering, of the apartheid style conditions under which they live, and your omnipresent denial of the crimes INHERENT in the Israeli state, all of it is an utterly absurd rejection of socialist principles and ideals.

Neither will anyone buy into your arguments that criticism of Israel is inherently anti-semitic. In fact, the ONLY anti-semite is YOU, the man who claims that Jews CAN NOT AND WILL NEVER be able to integrate themselves into other societies or cultures, and because of this they need their own state, a state soaked in the blood of the indigenous Arab population, a state which harbors an ideology of expansion and racism, not only towards the Palestinian Arabs but towards the Jewish people themselves! You, the ZIONIST, finds some inherent flaw in the Jews, some natural aspect of their character that inhibits them from functioning in other societies, that keeps them from living in other places, a feature which you claim is the basis and, by logical extension, the justification for Palestinian oppression.

You are not a socialist, and you do not fight for socialist values. I tell you once again, I would suggest you remove the banner of socialism from your ideology, as your values do not align with it, and we do not want your peculiar brand of whitewashing Israeli crimes.

An Open Letter to Jeff "The Snowman" Monson

2011-04-09T14:57:00.003-04:00

Jeff,

I've always had a prodigious amount of respect for you. As someone who has been engaged in Martial Arts for about half my life, I know how utterly militaristic and nationalistic the world of martial arts, especially MMA, can be. I was always so glad when I had the chance to see you fight, the chance to see someone representing political and economic ideals more similar to mine, and not just spewing nonsense, the sort of ideological hegemony that dominates much of the MMA world. You merged politics and sport in a way that was fascinating to me, and you gave me hope (as well as many others from the socialist/anarchist/leftist/radical tradition) that we did not have to reject things like MMA because it was often home to the most reactionary elements in our society.

When someone would ask who my favorite fighter was, there was never a doubt in my mind. I would, without hesitation, tell them the Snowman, simply because I felt like you represented so well what Pablo Picasso articulated many decades ago:

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness.

Your activism, your articulate and well-thought out critiques of capitalist society, your confronting the police at the mainstream political conventions, your handing out of anti-war leaflets at fights, all of it was so inspiring.

That is why I was so utterly disappointed and discouraged to hear that you openly broke with the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment Movement against Israel to fight at the Israel FC event in November of last year. The BDS movement rightly targets Israel for their dehumanizing and devastating occupation of Palestine, for their relentless strangle hold on Gaza, their apartheid style treatment of Palestinian Arabs, for the hostile and colonial-settler nature of the Israeli state.

As a fighter who is more than socially aware, you must have known about the massacres of Palestinians in 2008, about the flotilla raid in 2010, about the never ending encroachment and settlement upon Palestinian land. You must have also known that artists from around the world, whether they be musicians or writers, professors or activists, have participated in and helped expand the BDS movement against what is, at its core, a fundamentally unjust state, a state which, as an anarchist, you must know in your heart should be opposed. Everyone from the Pixies and Gil Scott-Heron, to Carlos Santana and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, to the famous Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano and the world-renowned Desmond Tuto the anti-apartheid activist, have signed their names to the list of BDS supporters.

You mentioned in the interview how “nice” everyone in

Israel

was. You almost seem to use this as a justification for Israeli state actions, implying that the misery and suffering of the Palestinian people is chocked up to “derogatory things” that really do not exist because you did not see them. I assume, from your short time there, you did not visit Palestine. I assume, as well, that you did not visit a Palestinian ghetto, you did not speak with Palestinian activists, you did not see their homes being bulldozed, the massive separation walls, the checkpoints, the dehumanizing searches, the lack of water for Palestinians to drink while Israeli homes sport beautiful green lawns. I suppose you did not speak with the mother or father whose son who has been detained, tortured, beaten, or killed by the Israeli IDF.

You are absolutely right to point out that this is not a religious “conflict,” itself a euphemistic term that conceals the nature of the aggressor and victim, citing the fact that you saw “Arab kids walking alongside Jewish kids next to a Christian church.” Again, your political dispositions should allow you, better than many, to understand the nature of this is not religious. The nature, instead, is one of state violence, of state-terrorism, of the forceful removal of Palestinians, a form of “slow genocide,” that secures what is, at its core, an essential and strategic centerpiece for

imperial policy in the Arab world. How can one separate

Iraq

and

Afghanistan

, and now

Libya

, from Isreal and Palestine? They are not separate issues, they are dynamically interwoven.

What is done is done, and the past cannot be changed. You took the fight, and you broke the BDS campaign in doing so. The question I and many other fans of yours have is why? Why would you break with a campaign, a strategy which has its roots in the anti-apartheid struggle against the old racist South African state? Why would a self-proclaimed anarchist, fighting to stomp out authoritarian hierarchy, economic injustice and inequality, and vicious and dehumanizing imperial wars, break with a campaign which holds similar aspirations for social justice and human dignity?

I can only hope in the future you join the BDS movement. Join with those of us across the world fighting for the rights of the Palestinian people and help put an end to one of the gravest of injustices occurring in our lifetime.

In solidarity,

Derek

Libya: Tainted Well and the Arab Spring

2011-04-06T11:00:00.007-04:00

Any discourse on the Libyan situation by non-Libyans, and particularly by non-Arabs, must first be prefaced. Undoubtedly more eloquent than myself is Rogayah Chamseddine, a commentator on Western intervention:

"[Libya] is a battle which connects me as...a human being but in the end the vents transpiring will mean far more to those engaged, those who are Libyan. In the end the choice is theirs, not mine and not anyone else's...it does not matter in respect to me as a person whether or not the events taking place suit my ideals, opinions etc. I will watch and make remarks knowing that my beliefs are my own. I speak on behalf of no one else."

In the days preceding the launching of half a million dollar Tomahawk missiles into Libya, I and many other socialists and leftists had argued with fellow progressive and leftist friends ambiguous or leaning towards support for US intervention as to why we ought to oppose the euphemistically phrased “No Fly Zone.” Arguments were posited along the following grounds:

1) Western intentions are not to help the Libyan people, they are imperial in nature. The primary motivation is not to save civilians. This is the same military institution, led by the same state apparatus, that was responsible for massacres unimaginable to even Gaddafi. Thus, the motivation from the

and other traditionally oppressive Western states was to blunt the revolution's social potential and restructure

Libya

not for the Libyan people but for a thin layer of elites, the same conservative defectors who have simply made a political calculation to join the uprising. Furthermore, while control over the oil rich west is another important incentive for the West, the often ignored aspect is geopolitical.

Libya

's proximity to the still tumultuous

Egypt

and

Tunisia

, two revolutions where the social and class structure and, subsequently, the neoliberal order, could be potentially upset, is far more vital. This factor is especially significant because the West fears the possibility of a “permanent” revolution in

Egypt

and, to a lesser extent,

Tunisia

. Up until this point the US/NATO have had very little control over the events in these two countries, and co-opting an uprising in Libya may provide the potential outlet for the US to secure itself in the region. Essentially, having a devout Libyan client state next door would help secure

Egypt

and the region as a whole.

2) A "no-fly" zone is not a say it, do it sort of deal. It is extremely extensive, requires a full-scale military bombardment of Libyan aircraft and anti-aircraft, and has significant potential for even more civilian casualties. Not only that, the history of the NATO bombing of Serbia proves that a "no-fly zone," which innately includes mass bombing as part of its strategy, causes extensive damage, both in terms of civilians and infrastructure that civilians rely upon. The potential for a protracted civil war remains a real possibility.

3) The revolutionaries have not called for it, at least not all of them. The revolutionary leadership, some of which consists of elements of the Libyan regime, is decisively split. The ad hoc Transitional National Council (TNC), drawing delegates from across

Libya

, but including significant personalities from the old regime, has already compromised with the West and claimed it would honor all international contracts signed by Gaddafi’s regime. A revolutionary leadership allying itself with Western imperialism and international neoliberalism will undoubtedly lose credibility among Libyans and the rest of the Arab world who, given recent Arab opinion polls, understand the imperial nature of the US/West.

4) Western intervention will do very little to bolster the spirit or the revolutionary process in

Libya

. In fact, it will do the exact opposite. It will provide Gaddafi with an actual, material basis for his "You must stand behind me to stop imperialism" rhetoric. In other words, Western intervention will not do much except bolster support for Gaddafi and demoralize the revolutionaries who could not conquer the dictator through their own might. How many more army officers or soldiers are going to defect under the threat of military intervention or interference? One of the key things here is winning over rank-and-file Libyan soldiers and low level officers to the revolution. Even militarily, a no-fly zone may not put the needed pressure on Gaddafi, and would likely end in a stalemate in which ground troops would have to be sent in. It will be yet another excuse for imperial intervention to restructure what could be a popular revolution from below.

5) The working class towns like Tripoli, Misrata, and Zawiya are the nexus points at which revolutionary organizing ought to occur. For the revolutionaries to secure victory, they cannot rely upon Western bombs and jets. There are not very many people in

Libya

, and these key industrial centers have overwhelming weight in terms of the resistance. A general strike would severely crush the Gaddafi regime, which could not survive without the economic exploitation of the Libyan workers it relies upon. This is their revolution, not the West’s chance to augment their neoliberal and geopolitical interests in the region.

Perhaps a sixth contention would have been that the

and its allies hoped to force an intervention, thereby discouraging other Arab revolutionaries from overthrowing US backed dictators. After all, two of their favorite clients had already fallen. But, if Gaddafi couldn't be brought down without foreign intervention, what about Saleh, Assad, the Saudi sheiks, etc. The

calculated and chose its least favorite dictator to backstab in hopes that it could blunt not only the Libyan revolution, but the entire Arab revolution.

Since posting those arguments, recent developments have only confirmed the validity of the original analysis. The West has intervened and, like clockwork, conservative hawks and cruise missile liberals, and even some sincere leftists like Gilbert Achar, are cheerleading this campaign and jeering those against it as heartless, placing abstract principles of anti-imperialism before the lives of Libyans. Some commentators even go so far as to claim anti-interventionists have insulted the Libyan people by accusing them of being ignorant of history and stooges of imperialism. Undoubtedly this has occurred in a sporadic manner, with non-Libyans accusing Libyans of capitulating and giving into imperialism, without seriously acknowledging the context in which they call for intervention. The call to save lives is a powerful and percussive one, undoubtedly. Yet, the crux of the anti-imperialist argument is not, and never has been, that the Libyan people are stupid. While I respect the position some Libyans like Tasnim, linked above, take (pro-revolution, pro-intervention but weary of Western interests), I have serious disagreements and believe, ultimately, even if the rebels succeed in removing Gaddafi, they will not win their freedom. Western intervention, undoubtedly, as Tasnim acknowledges, has nothing to do with saving lives. One question is, will it save lives in the long run?

Pro-interventionists accuse the left of promoting a callous disregard for Libyan life in order to preserve their sacred anti-imperialism. Perhaps, for some commentators, this is true. Yet, I think the words of Malcolm X are particularly poignant here:

Look at the American Revolution, in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence, and the only way they could get it, was bloodshed. The French Revolution, what was it based on — the landless against the landlord. What was it for? Land! How did they get it? Bloodshed! There was no love lost, was no compromise, was no negotiation. I'm telling you you don't know what a revolution is, because when you find out you'll get back in the alley, you'll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution. What was it based on? Land — the landless against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven't got a revolution that doesn't involve bloodshed...

Real revolution, almost universally, entails the loss of life. The death toll in Egypt is estimated at upwards of 700. In Libya it is potentially in the thousands. In Algeria, however, the cost of independence was in the millions. As Malcolm put it so brazenly, you haven't got a revolution that doesn't involve bloodshed. This is not to say the Libyans did not have the right, if indeed the call for intervention was a popular one and not the result of maneuvering generals, to determine from where they would receive help. Yet, it is undeniable that this choice would come at a cost.

Regardless, the Obama administration played the saving lives aspect up masterfully, crafting a narrative detailing the impending demise of Benghazi barring NATO intervention. White House advisor Dennis Ross conjured up the specter of Gaddafi slaughtering 100,000 people in the city. Presumably, the White House was operating on intelligence that none of the rest of us have. As Steve Chapman has pointed out, so far, the message to the American public has been “trust us.” The fact that Gaddafi did not massacre people on the scale of White House rhetoric in the city of Zawiya, in which Gaddafi captured, or in the cities of Misrata or Ajdabiya, which Gaddafi forces had virtual control over, did nothing to lesson the hysteric rhetoric. The truth is, we do not know what may have happened in Benghazi. Anti-imperialists may have to concede that in the short term some lives may have been saved in Benghazi, and saving lives is a good thing, but we cannot assume that in the aggregate, in the long run, that US intervention will "save lives." How many lives were saved when bombs started dropping? We will never know. However, rest assured it was not anywhere near the amount claimed by US officials. Even on a practical level, Benghazi is by far one of the most important industrial centers in

Libya

, and massacring the vast majority of the population would be an unthinkable price, even for a dictator attempting to grip onto power.

None of this is to defend Gaddafi, or pretend he’s really just a good guy that’s misunderstood. Undoubtedly deaths by Gaddafi forces have taken place. Undoubtedly the killing of civilians is real phenomenon, one which could be exacerbated. No, we ought to leave such hagiographic arguments to the neo-Stalinists who base their anti-imperialism on the warped conception that Gaddafi is somehow a leftist standing against a CIA inspired coup and imperialist aggression. Sure, imperialist aggression is a real thing, but the impetus for this uprising does not rest in the West, it rests with the oppressive nature of the regime in question.

Yet, the arguments for intervention are just as absurd and based on a variety of faulty assertions. First, interventionists imply in their case for military action that the US has the capability to act as the “good policeman” in the world, a fact which does not bode well with the history of Iran, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, etc. Case after case of

intervention has lead to the reversal of democracy, the reactionary forces sweeping the day.

Libya

appears no different. Commentators have pointed out the utter hypocrisy of

foreign policy, intervening in

Libya

but not in

Yemen

Bahrain

, not imposing a No Fly Zone over Gaza when

Israel

was massacring civilians there, collective punishment for simply continuing to exist. Yes, it is hypocritical if you look at

policy as humanistic, as life-affirming, as a rational way of pursuing human rights and preserving lives. Analyzing

imperial policy with an imperial framework, however, means recognizing that

policy is neither irrational nor hypocritical. Instead, it is a calculated, rational choice that aligns with imperial goals. For the sake of brevity, we will not delve into the prodigious research and run on the assumption that

policy is imperial and self-serving for the ruling class in nature.

The second idea, almost laughable, is the argument made that the “costs are too low to be generating a profit for the techno-industrial-military-complex.” The first problem, of course, is the assumption that the

state is primarily the hodgepodge result of lobbies and interest groups ina pluralistic society. This relatively narrow "lobbying for war" ideology is directly counter to the reality. Namely, the capitalist state and, by extension, the

imperialist state is intervening not simply to garner profit for weapons contractors, an ancillary benefit, but to accomplish its neoliberal and hegemonic goals in the regime. Furthermore, the idea that the “costs are too low” to make the weapon contractors smile is absurd in and of itself. The

ruling class is happy to spend $10, $20, $100 dollars of tax payer money to protect even $1 of private profit. There are no qualms with pumping public funds into war contractors, into protecting oil investments, etc. The empire bleeds the republic, and robbery is overt if you understand the class dynamic driving it. Finally, even if the costs are relatively low in comparison with, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, one cannot seriously argue that the military and weapons industries are not making a profit at $569,000 a pop for those tomahawk missiles with over 100 of them shot off in the first day.

The third fault in the liberal war propaganda lies in the idea that “there was already an active resistance there in the first place.” Sure, that’s true on the most superficial of levels. While it is true there was an active resistance against Gaddafi, galvanized by the revolutionary processes in

Egypt

and

Tunisia

, no one in the West has the intelligence capability to know how broad, how deep this movement was. Obviously, it was not strong enough to mobilize the working class majorities in Tripoli, for instance. Now, by all accounts, the armed rebels are not numerous, perhaps 1,000 with upwards of 15,000 non-armed volunteers. Likewise, they are uncoordinated, they lack weapons and training, etc. The working class in Tripoli, for instance, or Misrata or Zawiya, have not been able to coalesce the power of the working class as was done in

Tunisia

Egypt

. There exists no broad movement defying Gaddafi at every turn, like there was against Mubarak in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and every other Egyptian city. Yes, there was an uprising, a very legitimate one. Yes, there was resistance to his rule, but the strength of the working class was not yet enough to overcome, in full, the ideological (whether one of loyalty or fear, presumably the latter) nor military strength of the regime.

There is even some room for argument, although it strays dangerously close to the neo-Stalinism of the PSL or WW parties, that Gaddafi, despite the brutality of his dictatorship, maintains some sort of ideological hegemony given both the threat of imperialist intervention and the fact that economic conditions in Libya were not as bad as in Egypt or Tunisia and social policy subsidized education, housing, healthcare, etc. Whatever the reasons, the working class was not on the saddle. Instead, a hodgepodge team of armed rebels, led primarily by various conservative generals, the same generals who have whipped up anti-black racism aimed at sub-Saharan African workers to discourage a serious look at the class structure which has maintained them for so long, is kept alive under the auspices of Western planes and missiles.

Another argument presented is that “outside” commentators have no right to comment on intervention because the “Libyans” have asked for it. There is little talk, of course, of which Libyans asked for it. The conservative generals who have defected and hope to maintain their own position in Libyan society?

backing would maintain their own positions of power and, subsequently, it is perfectly rational for them to support it. Perhaps I missed when the Libyan people as a whole spoke on Western intervention.

Revolutionaries and activists from other Arab countries, like

Egypt

, have spoken out boldly against

intervention. In response, some leftists have pulled the “they are not Libyan” card, arguing that Egyptians simply do not have the right to speak on the behalf of the Libyan people. Fair enough, if they were “speaking on behalf” and not simply criticizing the decisions of conservative generals. It is not somehow oppressive to argue with brothers and sisters in the revolution, especially those who have just engaged in a revolution themselves, about how to go about the revolution. It is not oppressive to warn comrades about the mistake of relying upon Western intervention or, more accurately, allowing their conservative and military leaders to open themselves up to Western intervention because, after all, there is no serious and cohesive coalition that acts in unison in

Libya

. By no means has popular opinion been established and by no means can it given the circumstances. What we know is what we get from a relatively small group of individuals at the forefront, mostly conservative leaders of the old order who have jumped ship.

The Egyptians in no way are "speaking for the Libyans," they are speaking against Western intervention, understanding that the Libyan revolution is intricately bound up in the Egyptian revolution and the entire Arab revolution. Their fates are intertwined. There is far more of an organic link between Egyptians and Libyans, between their revolutions, than some who argue under the guise of “self-determination” wish to admit. We could also explore here the concept of Arab nationalism and Arab identity in relation to the Egyptian-Libyan connection, and how much of a right Egyptian socialists have to open up this topic of debate, but I will not pursue this digress at the moment.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that the Western intervention did NOT stop Gaddafi forces from killing people, a phenomenon which occurred in

Yugoslavia

as well. In

Libya

, atrocities are being reported from various places. Misrata, for instance, is under heavy siege and refugees have provided very disheartening stories. Instead of liberation, or pushing the rebels onto victory, the Western intervention has lead to a stalemate. The primary threat now is not air, but Gaddafi ground forces. Taking the liberal interventionism argument to the next logical step is, of course, advocating a ground invasion to protect civilian lives. Perhaps an occupation? Will the supporters of the No Fly Zone take this next logical jump, the only conceivable way without massive working class mobilization that Gaddafi will be put out? Time will tell, but what is clear is that only a full scale military mobilization would oust Gaddafi, and the experience of Iraq will, hopefully, deter any gung-ho proponents of a Libyan occupation.

All of this ignores the fundamental problem that Western intervention also costs civilian lives. As Richard Seymour explains:

What of the humanitarian remit? We shall skate lightly over civilian casualties that have been incurred by the bombing. Suffice to say that we are being exposed to the usual routines on that front. In one such routine, all claims of civilian deaths are attributed to the target regime, thus implying that they have no credibility. In another, they are caused by the regime using civilians as human shields, by refusing to camp out in a glow-in-the-dark tent in the middle of nowhere and thus make an easier target. In a third, slightly more baroque, Qadhafi is accused of digging up bodies and strategically arranging them to create the impression of a massacre. The truth is that we will not know, until some sort of retrospective excess mortality survey is carried out, what the human cost of the bombing is. And at any rate, one is reluctant to be drawn into the gruesome calculus of war - which, by implication, is that if 'they' kill more than 'we' do, then 'we' win the humanitarian argument.

Furthermore, Seymour continues, “even if Qadhafi were to be overthrown at this point, it would not have been by a popular revolution. It would not have been because the revolution broadened its base and spread into Tripoli or Sirte…Were Qadhafi to fall tomorrow, he would fall to a network of former regime elements and their external backers. The regime that replaced Qadhafi may well be more liberal, the sort that young Saif was to be entrusted to deliver at one point, but it would not be a popular or democratic one.”

These words must resonate. Even if the analysis presented above, of an uncoordinated and poorly trained army, of stalemate and the continuing potential for Gaddafi killings, turns out to be false, the Libyan “revolution” will be the furthest thing from the revolutions that have thus far occurred in the Arab world. It will be a revolution marred by imperialist intervention, lacking the democratic credentials, the broad popular base, and the vital experiences of humanization and liberation accompanying revolution that allows the oppressed to seize the time and control their own destiny.

Libya

may be lost, momentarily, and it may be the tainted well in the Arab Spring, but this does not mean the Arab revolution's fate is sealed. We can only hope the revolution carries forward.

Past and Potential: The Egyptian Peoples’ Struggle for Liberation

2011-02-02T19:58:00.000-05:00

Nearly two million people packed Tahrir square Tuesday in what must be one of the most popular, democratic, and collective struggles for liberation in human history. All over Egypt, in Alexandria, in Suez, and many other places, sister demonstrations complemented the primary rally in Cairo calling for systemic political change and end to Hosni Mubarak’s nearly thirty-year rule. Mubarak has become a hated symbol of authoritarianism and political corruption throughout Egyptian society.

This popular uprising does not exist in a vacuum, however. It was galvanized in part by the Tunisian revolution a week earlier and was organized, originally, through online social media networks before the regime shut down internet access. Yet, the roots of this popular movement are much deeper, coming after thirty years not only of undemocratic rule by Mubarak, but also three decades of neoliberal economic policies that have continuously deteriorated Egyptian living standards. Furthermore, criticisms from within the predominately Arab state have also revolved around Mubarak’s role as puppet for Western powers, particularly the

United States

and, reflexively,

Israel

. Hossam el-Hamalawy, a longtime Egyptian dissident, blogger, journalist, and socialist, makes this point clearly:

Revolutions don't happen out of the blue. It's not because of

Tunisia

yesterday that we have one in

Egypt

mechanically the next day. You can't isolate these protests from the last four years of labour strikes in

Egypt

, or from international events such as the al-Aqsa intifada and the

invasion of

Iraq

. The outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada was especially important because in the 1980s-90s, street activism had been effectively shut down by the government as part of the fight against Islamist insurgents. It only continued to exist inside university campuses or party headquarters. But when the 2000 intifada erupted and Al Jazeera started airing images of it, it inspired our youth to take to the streets, in the same way we've been inspired by Tunisia today.[1]

Egypt

’s democratic uprising, then, cannot be characterized solely as a political movement or as a “Twitter” revolution. Indeed, as one protestor put it, “this is not about the internet, this is about the needs and demands of the Egyptian people.”[2] It must be recognized that there exists a multiplicity of galvanizing factors that have sparked this nascent movement by the masses. Of these, the four most important are: (1) the undemocratic political institutions, (2) the increasing misery via declining economic conditions, (3) the capitulation to the U.S. and Israel, (4) and the revival of popular social and labor movements in recent years. Before analyzing these interrelated phenomena, however, it is vital that we confirm the popular, democratic, and collective attributes of this anti-Mubarak movement.

A Popular, Democratic, Collective Movement

It should be understood that this is, indeed, a popular, democratic movement. Despite the ambivalent and ambiguous statements provided by

U.S.

officials, and the outright attack on the uprising by Israeli pundits, every aspect of this movement points to the fact that it is a democratic, popular revolt against what is, at its core, an authoritarian, anti-democratic regime.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, senior producer of DemocracyNow! and currently in

Egypt

, painted a vibrant picture of the early days of this popular movement:

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.[3]

That report was from Friday evening. Saturday and Sunday also say hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets. After that, organizers began calling for a million person march on that Tuesday. The popular response far exceeded that. Although no one has exact numbers, all estimates place the number of anti-Mubarak demonstrators at over one million. Some Al Jazeera reporters have estimated these numbers at close to two million. This does not count the hundreds of thousands of people in Alexandria, or the tens of thousands of people in every other major city. The jubilance could be seen on the streets. One demonstrator, Walid Hegazy, proclaimed that “Finally I feel it’s my country. It’s not the country of the police. It’s not the country of the governing elites or the ruling elites. It’s my country. So I’m really proud to be an Egyptian today.”[4]

The “legal” oppositional leaders have been largely tailing the population during these uprisings rather than leading them. Instead, the movement has been wide in terms of ideological participation and not organized through the “legal” oppositional channels. The protests have, for the most part, not been directed or lead by the entrenched, older social movements. As one activist, Nazly Hussein, eloquently explains:

It’s really everyone’s revolution. And I think a lot of people have made it seem like it’s just for the radicals on either side or really a certain party, but that’s not true. If you look around, there’s everyone. Everyone, everyone, everyone, side by side, all with one cause. Women were treated with a lot of respect. I have never been treated with this much respect in

Egypt

, I must say. I was amazed, amazed at the Egyptian people. They have qualities that I thought they had lost. But no, they haven’t.[5]

Although the youth sparked this movement through social networks, it has drawn in people of all ages, including men, women, workers, peasants, journalists, lawyers, students, secular leftists, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. It is an extremely diverse, profoundly broad social movement that has, essentially, brought in all of civil society. Hossam el-Hamalawy also described the scene Tuesday:

The atmosphere here is a carnival, in every sense of the word. You find, you know, I mean, banners that are just hilarious. I mean, if you can read in Arabic, they are all denouncing Mubarak as a dictator, as an agent for

Israel

and

U.S.

imperialism, denouncing him for what he did to this country over the past 30 years. Of course, I mean, the activist community here is a tiny minority for a change. It’s a different picture from what we’ve been seeing over the past few years. It’s ordinary men and women from all sects, and from all the provinces, actually, they descended here. And today, I was also happy to know that there will be simultaneous protests happening, coinciding with the Tahrir occupation, in Suez, in Mahalla, in Alexandria and also in other provinces.[6]

Often, liberation struggles are couched in terms of male liberation and in the West is that Arabs tend to be anti-woman. The conditions on the ground shatter these illusions and falsifications. Thus, it should be recognized that women have played a key role in this revolutionary uprising:

[W]omen were protesting just the same way men were. Women were jumping on the cars of the police forces just the same—because we’re both very angry. It doesn’t really make a difference. Women are not less angry than men. But now that we’re actually here, you can see women distributing food, taking care of the first aid. I can’t really define roles, because we’re both doing the same thing. Roles are divided, but not according to gender at all. I thought maybe the people staying the night would be mostly men, but I was proven otherwise.[7]

What is even more significant is the fact that after enormous clashes with the police and their eventual withdrawal from the streets, regular people have taken up the duty of running society. In nearly every modern revolution, people have formed such committees. French workers, in 1968, formed and used workers’ councils to organize the largest general strike ever to shut down a modern industrial country. During 1972 and 1973, Chilean workers set up cordones to defend the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende and demand workers’ control over production. In 1979, workers created independent councils which they called the shoras, fundamental in overthrowing the ruthless Shah.

It is in this spirit that the Egyptian people have formed their “Peoples’ committees,” not only to organize protests, but to keep society functioning at some level as the state apparatus, especially the police, has collapsed. These committees have been vital in organizing demonstrations and dealing with logistical issues. One demonstrator describes the duties of these committees:

[W]e had to do everything ourselves. So, there was a couple days of anarchy, that we’re kind of still in, so people have to protect their buildings. We have communities, families organizing themselves to have like checkpoints on every corner. We have young people from every house or from every family protecting. But we’ve also gone out in the streets to clean up the garbage and to organize traffic… And so, they’re making sure that we keep this as clean as possible to show that we don’t need this government, we don’t need the minister of interior. We can do this on our own, and we can do it better. It’s safer, cleaner and a much more pleasant life for everyone.[8]

Another one of the important functions the peoples’ committees served was evident during Tuesday’s march of over one million people. Checkpoints were set up at the entrance of Tahrir square and citizens fervently checked the identity of people entering to ensure that none of the state security forces, pro-Mubarak thugs, could make their way in. Furthermore, they have been used to set up defense brigades and peoples’ checkpoints that have protected homes, hospitals, museums, and other important social institutions from looters. In the process, citizen defense committees have sometimes captured these looters and have found that many of them were members of the hated state police forces who had been forced out of the streets on Friday.[9] What is important is that that leaving the demonstrations to participate in these defense brigades does not signal that people are tiring or losing their revolutionary fervor. On the contrary, the defense brigades and committees to protect their homes, clean the streets, maintain vital services, etc. are a vital aspect, perhaps as important as the demonstrations themselves, of this revolution.

This popular movement cannot be removed from its political and economic context, however, both inside of

Egypt

and in the larger global community. There are limitations that have not yet been tested, and the full potential of this movement is still, at this time, unclear.

Undemocratic Political Institutions

Hosni Mubarak, as of Tuesday night, is still claiming that he will “die on Egyptian soil” and continue his presidency until his term is scheduled to finish in September. The Egyptian people are not having it, chanting for Mubarak to leave “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” There is no doubt that Mubarak now personifies the extreme political corruption and anti-democratic nature of the Egyptian state. Yet, Egyptian political institutions are larger than Mubarak, and as one woman so eloquently stated:

When we say we don’t want the regime, it does not mean we don’t want Hosni Mubarak as a person and be stuck with someone else who is imposed on us. We want to choose our president because we want to take this country into the future.[10]

In other words, Mubarak’s shuffling around of his cabinet or replacing himself with his hand-picked vice-president would not be good enough for the people. Furthermore, Mubarak never promised he would not run again, stated instead that he simply “had no intentions to.” Yet, as Egyptians are well aware, there is nothing stopping Mubarak from creating a “state of emergency” that would demand his firm hand in stabilizing the country. On top of this, Mubarak’s son and potential successor has not relinquished his leading position in the National Democratic Party, nor has Mubarak called for the illegitimate parliament to be replaced by free and fair elections.

Egyptians are fighting for a political revolution, fundamental institutional change that transcends Mubarak. Despite this, there is deep hatred for Mubarak and his rule, and it is absolutely necessary that Mubarak, as a person, is no longer president. However, simply removing the hated dictator is not enough, the people will not settle with superficial change.

Egypt

is, technically, a semi-presidential republic that has purportedly representative institutions. However, the country has been under a permanent state of emergency law since the 1967 war with

Israel

. Mubarak slid his way into power after President Sadat’s 1981 assassination, itself a manifestation of resistance by Islamist groups rejecting Sadat’s authoritarian smashing of Islamist organizations. Decades of political repression have meant that activists from various political parties, especially leftists and Islamists, have not been able to exercise basic political rights. Independent judges that have challenged the Mubarak regime have faced repression. Prison and police violence were often the result of political activism. Thus, Mubarak had essentially ruled unelected and unopposed for 24 years, not being put into the position of being elected until 2005.

This election, however, was marred by fraud, vote-rigging, police brutality, and violence from paid Mubarak supporters. One example of this was that the Muslim Brotherhood, arguably one of the most popular political parties in the country, was banned from the election. Aside from those problems, the election itself was completely illegitimate. In what was the first and only Presidential election in Egyptian history, only 16.4% of the population actually took the time to go to the polls, of whom an embarrassing 88.6% voted for Mubarak. In other words, out of a voting age population of 44.5 million people, Mubarak commanded the allegiance of, at most, a paltry 6.3 million.[11] Prior to this illegitimate election, equally illegitimate “referendums” were held to ideologically cement Mubarak’s regime.

The 2005 presidential election is not an anomaly. All elections in

Egypt

are largely recognized as shams by the population. As Tarek Osman explains:

...despite huge campaigning on the government's and opposition's sides for the package of constitutional changes, fewer than 22% of registered voters (who themselves are a minority) turned out to vote in the March 2007 referendum (and that figure includes swathes of government employees who are virtually shipped to the polling booths). Moreover, in June 2007 only 7% of Egyptians bothered to vote in the election to the shura (the Egyptian parliament's upper house).[12]

Egypt

’s political institutions, then, are simply illegitimate structures of power. There is no popular sovereignty, no accountability, and no serious democratic characteristics to speak of. These repressive political institutions exist in a symbiotic relationship with the growing wealth inequality and exploitative nature of the Egyptian ruling class.

Declining Economic Conditions

The 1952 military coup which overthrew the British-backed monarch King Forouq brought to power a group of so-called “Free Officers” and their leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, eventually, became the personal manifestation of pan-Arabism and a proponent of state capitalism as an economic model for development. This model was derided as “communism” by Western antagonists and real-world “socialism” by proponents. Nasser attempted to juggle support from the

United States

and the Soviet Union in an attempt to augment

Egypt

’s economic power as leader of the Arab world. Oil production, despite being relatively less than the gulf Arab states, was nationalized, providing a model for state control of production and the expansion of the public sector. Similarly, the Suez Canal was nationalized during this period. Profits were redirected, to large extent, into social services and infrastructure development for a period of time. Living standards did, indeed, increase in

Egypt

as people had access to jobs and services previously unavailable to them.

This phenomenon of Arab nationalism scared the West, who feared they may lose control of the oil-rich Arab world if this development continued. Nasser and

Egypt

, for a time, became hated enemies of the

United States

and

Britain

. The Sunday Herald reports that anti-Nasser mania became so thick among the Western elite that there were even absurd schemes to kill Nasser by poisoning his chocolates or inserting a poison dart in his cigarette.[13] In contrast, millions around the Arab world were drawn in to Nasser’s secular nationalism and he remained very popular within

Egypt

. Nasser, however, would go on to die in 1970 and, not long after, the economic model he championed would be dismantled.

The internal contradictions inherent in Nasser-style state capitalism meant that the model could not last forever. As Eric Ruder explains, Nasser’s “attempts to win support from the

U.S.

and the Soviet Union demonstrated” that the Arab leader “elevated pragmatism and realpolitik over a commitment to any particular economic or political program” and would pursue any policy which “served

Egypt

’s bid to become the undisputed leader of the Arab world.”[14] While the nationalist model of state development aimed at equality, democratic control over the means of production remained an elusive ideal. The political structures, likewise, reflected the centralized control by a bureaucratic elite and not the democratic control by the masses of Egyptian citizens. In other words, the state capitalist model eventually became its own inhibitor:

…the transformation of economic structures proceeded on the basis of a state capitalism which in no way altered the capitalist relations of production… However great the aspirations and initial steps towards equality, any further progress was rendered highly problematic by the essential incapacity of this social class [i.e., the bureaucrats in control of the state] to formulate a coherent project. Its very nationalism, which had been intended as a revolutionary force, later served to mystify the crucial socio-economic differentiation of the traditional classes and of the privileged layer emerging from the new state-capitalist class.[15]

As Ruder goes on to point out, “Nasser’s nationalism ultimately secured the rule of an Egyptian elite that used nationalist rhetoric to blunt the demands of the growing Egyptian working class.”[16] It was from this Egyptian elite that Sadat and, later, Mubarak instituted their authoritarian regime.

Subsequently, Sadat introduced the “intifah,” or open-door policy, in order to combat the debt, inflation, and high oil prices that came to represent the later stages of the Nasserite model. Intifah was, essentially, an all out embrace of the neoliberal model:

Infitah was a sweeping program to impose a neoliberal agenda on the economy, including the loosening of currency controls, the creation of tax-free enterprise investment zones, and the return of various public sector industries to private control (or at the minimum subjecting them to market pressures).

This process from 1970 onward meant that

Egypt

would move itself away from the Soviet Union and towards the West. This new open-door policy significantly decreased the standard of living for Egyptians. Wealth inequality increased dramatically, and the social services and public sector Egyptians had come to rely on were drastically slashed, either in the form of direct cuts or privatization. From 1961 to 1981,

Egypt

went from being one of the world’s largest food exporters to a nation dependent upon food imports to survive. The Egyptian elite, however, augmented their economic power during this period by extracting their wealth from the poor:

While the lowest 20 percent of the population held 6.6 per cent of national income in 1960 and had improved their share to 7.0 per cent in 1965, they dropped to 5.1 per cent by the late 1970s. By comparison, the income of the highest 5 percent dipped slightly to 17.4 per cent from 17.5 per cent between 1960 and 1965 but increased markedly to 22 per cent after several years of Sadat’s policies.[17]

These harsh economic policies continued for the next three decades under Mubarak’s regime. The wealth gap continued to increase, real wages declined, and Egyptians were forced to spiral into economic misery.

Today,

Egypt

is the most populous country in the region with over 80 million people. Gross Domestic Product per Capita has steadily increased an average of 2% every year from 1975 to 2000.[18] Yet, economic conditions for the mass of Egyptians have only worsened. Infant mortality rates remain high at 26 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with only 6 per 1,000 for the

United States

. Literacy remains just slightly above 71% for adults and is far lower for females at 59%.[19] As of 2003, 52.7% of Egyptians lived on less than $2 a day.[20] From 1995 to 2005, distribution of income for the lowest 10% of the population has decreased from 4.4% to 3.9% while for the wealthiest 10% it has increased from 25% to 27.6%.[21] In 1976 the official unemployment rate was 4.6%, increasing to 9% in 1996, and topping off at 13% in 2007[22] before the onset of the world economic crisis. Since then, it has remained in the double digits. The workweek remains high at 48 hours and the unionization rate is only around 7% of the workforce.[23] From 1987 to 1996, average real wages for Egyptian workers decreased from $58.3 per week to a paltry $45.[24] Attempts at unionization have been met with repression and demands to increase the national minimum wage from $6.30 a month[25] to $240 a month have fallen on deaf ears.

According to the 2005 Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey (HIECS) about 40.5% of the Egyptian population are in the range of extreme poor to near poor:

- 21% of the Egyptian population was near poor, meaning that about 14.6 million Egyptians can obtain their basic food requirements in addition to some basic services.

- 19.6% of the Egyptian population was poor, meaning that about 13.6 million Egyptians (one out of every five) had consumption expenditure below the poverty line and could not therefore obtain their basic food and non-food needs.

- 3.8% of the Egyptian population was extreme poor, meaning that about 2.6 million of the Egyptian poor could not obtain their basic food requirements even if they spent all their expenditure on food.

Statistics alone cannot show how this crushing poverty enervates such a prodigious segment of Egyptian society. As Tarek Osman points out, “Egypt's lower classes are deprived not only of employment opportunities, passable education, and any luxury whatsoever; they are lacking basic human needs such as decent shelter, clear water, and humane transportation systems.” This is exacerbated by the “gradual withdrawal of the state from its market-regulating and social-provision role.”[26]

Furthermore, the Egyptian middle classes have felt the economic decline as well. The diminishing of the public sector means that a failing education system has lead to a “general low levels of skills” plaguing even

Egypt

’s educated class. In terms of purchasing power,

Egypt

’s middle class is less powerful than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the “vast prominence and influence of a small group of businessmen and financiers,” along with the National Democratic Party’s new guard, “has left Egypt's middle class painfully aware of the hollowness and fragility of its traditional position in the society.”[27]

This has resulted in Mubarak dissolving any potential base of support. The Egyptian ruling class has isolated the poor, the working class, and the middle classes. Mubarak’s power now relies, internally, upon state security forces and party officials and, perhaps even more vitally, upon billions of dollars in external military aid from the

United States

Egypt

U.S.

Client State

With massive protests erupting all over

Egypt

and millions of people demonstrating all over

Egypt

, Obama still could not mutter the words that Mubarak ought to step down. As violent, pro-Mubarak thugs attacked pro-democracy demonstrators on Wednesday, the State Department urged both sides to show constraint. Many reports from Al Jazeera have claimed that the pro-Mubarak “activists” are state police forces or thugs paid by NDP officials, disproving the claim that Mubarak holds a vast allegiance of the Egyptian people. Numbers have been estimated at “several thousand” pro-Mubarak thugs in Cairo on Wednesday, compared with close to two million pro-democracy demonstrators the day before. Thus, with this influx of NDP supporters, Wednesday has proven to be the most violent day yet with clashes between two diametrically opposed sides. Conveniently, this violence comes one day after Mubarak threatened that violence would erupt in the streets without his iron fist and stabilizing presence. Even with this orchestrated violence by the NDP, the Obama administration did not out-rightly condemn Mubarak’s regime or call on him to step down, urging instead that he simply to enact reforms in a timely manner.

In this respect, as Noam Chomsky points out, Obama follows a long line of continuity:

The

United States

, so far, is essentially following the usual playbook. There have been many times when some favored dictator has lost control or is in danger of losing control. There is kind of a standard routine: Marcos [Phillipines], Duvalier [

Haiti

], Ceauşescu [

Romania

], strongly supported by the

United States

and

Britain

, Suharto [

Indonesia

], keep supporting them as long as possible. Then, when it becomes unsustainable, typically say if the army shifts sides, switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names.[28]

There is a reason for all of this, however. It is not that the Obama is simply a pacifist and his administration is committed to non-violence. This is proven false simply by the fact that Obama has waged violent war against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while promising Israel, one of the most militaristic and violent societies in the world, $30 billion dollars of military aid over the next decade.

Instead, Obama’s ambivalence comes from his

Egypt

’s primary role as

U.S.

client state in the Middle East.

U.S.

officials are trying to play their cards right, balancing international public support with the Egyptian struggle with their decades-long support for the corrupt, authoritarian dictatorship in

Egypt

is, aside from

Israel

, the largest recipient of

U.S.

military aid in the world.

Colombia

, another internally repressive society, comes in a close third. Yet, it is this prodigious

U.S.

military and economic aid has propped up an unpopular Mubarak regime for years:

The magnitude of

U.S.

aid to

Egypt

since the 1970s is staggering. “The

U.S.

has provided

Egypt

with $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told,

Egypt

has received over $50 billion in

U.S.

largesse since 1975.” Corruption has created a very thin layer of obscenely wealthy Egyptians at the top, starting with Mubarak’s own family that has amassed a fortune counted in tens of millions of dollars. Conditions for the rest of Egyptian society are desperate: unemployment that has remained in double digits for years, per capita income of less than $6,000 dollars annually, and periodic food crises.[29]

This support serves a dual purpose, however. Not only does it cement

U.S.

hegemony in the region, it also acts as a form of corporate welfare for powerful military interests. As William Hartung explains:

It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear gas canisters… Lockheed Martin has been the leader in deals worth $3.8 billion over that period of the last 10 years; General Dynamics, $2.5 billion for tanks; Boeing, $1.7 billion for missiles, for helicopters; Raytheon for all manner of missiles for the armed forces. So, basically, this is a key element in propping up the regime, but a lot of the money… is basically recycled. Taxpayers could just as easily be giving it directly to Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics.[30]

There have been numerous accounts of protestors finding tear gas canisters, used by police to disperse the popular movement, with the label “Made in the

U.S.A.

” printed across the bottom. On Sunday, F-16s flew dangerously low to protestors in an attempt to scare off the crowds. People, defiantly, roared back in a futile attempt to overcome the percussive sound blasts from the jets. The

United States

, then, has been a principal proponent of the Mubarak regime and, undoubtedly, has helped the regime stay in power through an influx of repressive military machinery.

Yet,

Egypt

is not supported simply because it happens to be a cruel, autocratic regime. Instead, it is supported because Mubarak has opened itself not only to neoliberal economic policies, but also has completely capitulated to

U.S.

military demands. For instance, as the imperial ambitions of the Bush regime manifested themselves in the

Iraq

invasion,

Egypt

opened up its airspace for

U.S.

use and allowed free passage for U.S. Navy ships through the Suez Canal. On top of this, Mubarak has provided support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, despite some rhetorical flares to the contrary. All of this is in contrast to the vast majority not only of Egyptian, but Arab opinion as a whole.

This phenomenon goes back many years. Beginning with Sadat, the Egyptian ruling class tried desperately to break with the Nasserite-style pan-Arabism. Solidarity among all Arabs, especially support for the Palestinian liberation struggles, was an object of scorn:

For example, as Sadat attempted to consolidate his power, he reacted by unleashing a vicious anti-Arab campaign reasserting that

Egypt

’s primary identity is “Pharaonic.” A whole period of rejecting Arabism and scapegoating the Palestinians for

Egypt

’s wars and poverty was led by the state-run media and permeated public culture.[31]

While

Egypt

remains rhetorically committed to “peace” for the Palestinians, this rhetoric has very little effect on their foreign policy. Israeli newspapers, at the onset of these demonstrations, urged that international criticism of the Mubarak regime be silenced. They feared that a popular, democratic uprising would mean more solidarity and support for the Palestinian struggle.

Egypt

’s ruling class understands that its position in society rests upon their imperial benefactors. Indeed, as with other corrupt Arab regimes, the Mubarak regime has attempted to balance pro-Palestinian rhetoric to calm its impoverished population with pro-imperialist policies to please its real constituencies, the

U.S.

and

Israel

Inherently, then, the millions of people taking to the streets to demand the overthrow of Mubarak are a direct threat to

U.S.

and Israeli interests. Imperialist “domination in the region cannot be shattered without overthrowing those junior partners [such as

Egypt

] of imperialist exploitation, the ruling classes in the Arab world.”[32] Already, the seeds of revolution are being sown across the Arab world. The Tunisian revolution was simply the first shot in what appears to be a much wider regional phenomenon. The Egyptian continuation of this process greatly threatens

U.S.

interests. Furthermore, the revolutionary fervor is spreading. Already the rumblings of discontent are being felt and reports of protest have come from other Arab states.

Jordan

has dismissed its government and in

Sudan

students have clashed with police.

Yemen

’s president for 32 years, a corrupt

U.S.

ally, has already publicly stated he will not seek re-election in 2013, while protestors are planning a large public rally against the government for Thursday.

This upsurge in popular resistance to corrupt regimes sweeping the Arab world comes as a welcome development. It is possible, although not guaranteed, that millions of people will, finally, throw off the yoke of Western hegemony. The final outcome, however, will rest largely upon the composition of the social movements propelling them forward.

Revival of Popular Movements

In recent years

Egypt

has witnessed a revival of mass struggle primarily in two areas. First, the Palestinian Intifada of 2000 galvanized large-scale political action. Second, labor battle beginning in 2006 saw the onset of enormous strikes that gripped the nation and sent shockwaves through the Mubarak regime. These two popular uprisings, in conjunction, both influenced and invigorated the Tunisian uprising. The Tunisian revolution, in turn, fueled the Egyptian struggle against Mubarak. Both the Egyptian and Tunisian revolution, then, cannot be separated from the recent history of struggle that had gripped

Egypt

the decade prior. The third factor in this is the increasingly civil relationship between leftists organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood. This phenomenon may have influenced the ability of various political parties to come together and take a united stand against the Mubarak regime.

The Second Palestinian Intifada of 2000 sparked widespread support among the Egyptian people. The Egyptian people, despite the propaganda campaigns to the contrary, recognized and rejected the anti-Palestinian policies of their leaders. University students eventually organized a demonstration supporting Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. Yet, it quickly spread to the high schools and, then, to the larger population. The people pushed for solidarity with Palestinian struggle and condemnation of Arab regimes that were actively capitulating to the

U.S.

and

Israel

. Likewise, and against the wishes of their pro-U.S. dictator, some fifty thousand people took to Tahrir square in 2003 at the onset of the

U.S.

invasion of

Iraq

. Despite the brutality of the police, protestors and demonstrators carried on. It was Mubarak’s compliance and subjugation to imperial powers, combined with the corrupt political system and declining economic conditions, that pushed Egyptians over the top. One Egyptian socialist details the movements next evolution:

In December 2004, the first public demonstration for the new movement for change happened, which we refer to as Kifaya, which means “enough.” The first slogan of the movement was, “Down, down [with] Mubarak!” Other slogans appeared against Mubarak’s plan to transfer power to his son, Gamal, to be the next president. The slogan of the movement was no to the continuation of the regime and no to the handing over of power to his son Gamal. This led to other demands, including an end to the emergency laws that were in place for more than twenty years, and another was to call for a free, democratic process for political parties and movements.[33]

Economic conditions for Egyptians, however, were not improving. Therefore, it was not simply political issues and foreign policy that concerned Egyptians. Conditions for the Egyptian masses were dire throughout the 1980s and 1990s and any moves by labor during this period to increase their standing in society were met brutally by police. In 1989, state police used live ammunition against strikers during strikes in the steel mills and again in the textile strikes of 1994. The state machinery was blatant in its defense of capital in these cases.

The sham election of 2005 escalated things in

Egypt

as well. After Mubarak’s façade of democracy in 2005, Egyptians understood the anti-worker policies of privatization and attacks on labor would continue. In late 2006, however, Egyptians fought back and organized the most enormous strike wave since the end of World War II. Malhalla, a Nile Delta town with around 27,000 workers, triggered the strike and it quickly spread like wildfire to nearly every sector of society. Even with the partial victory of these strikes, and the eventual recognition of a new union for thousands of workers, there remain serious differences between the revolution in

Egypt

and the union-led revolution in

Tunisia

One major distinction between us and

Tunisia

is that although it was a dictatorship,

Tunisia

had a semi-independent trade union federation. Even if the leadership was collaborating with the regime, the rank and file were militant trade unionists. So when time came for general strikes, the unions could pull it together. But here in

Egypt

we have a vacuum that we hope to fill soon. Independent trade unionists have already been subjected to witch hunts since they tried to be established; there are already lawsuits filed against them by state and state-backed unions, but they are getting stronger despite the continued attempts to silence them.[34]

Yet, within these developing political and class struggles, a new and previously unlikely civility began to develop between two previously bitter enemies. The radical left, especially newer organizations centered around the Revolutionary Socialist Tendency, began to form partial alliances with younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Prior to this, fistfights on university campuses were commonplace between the two groups:

Bad blood between the Egyptian left and the Brothers has a long history, from the Islamists’ coordination with King Farouq in breaking strikes in the 1940s to President Anwar al‑Sadat’s encouragement of violent Islamist assaults on leftist university students in the 1970s. Most independent leftist organizations in the 1980s and 1990s hewed to a line on political Islam similar to that of the Egyptian Communist Party…equating Islamist organizations, reformist or radical, with fascism.[35]

With the advent of the new political movements centered around the Palestinian intifada, often spearheaded by leftists, some of the younger Muslim Brotherhood members opened up to their socialist counterparts. Likewise, younger leftists began to reject the “fascist” label that was broadly applied to all Islamist organizers. A split began to emerge between the older, more conservative leadership and the younger, more military Muslim Brotherhood members willing to work side-by-side with socialists. Yet, as socialist activist Hossam El-Hamalaway points out:

Today, the majority of factions on the left still stand opposed to (or express caution about) joint actions with the Islamists, most notably the newly evolving Democratic Left (a reformist tendency centered aroundal‑Busla magazine), the Egyptian Communist Party, the People’s Socialist Party and a faction of the human rights community. But the Brothers and those comrades who will work with them remain engaged in mutual confidence building. The Muslim Brothers’ leadership is staunchly gradualist, and always on the lookout for compromises with the Egyptian regime. That stance will likely impede a further rapprochement with the radical left, unless the Brotherhood’s base of youth attains a greater say in when, and how, their powerful organization bestirs itself.

Still, these developments show that the potential for collective political action was developing prior to 2011. Mubarak’s capitulation to the

U.S.

and

Israel

, the increasingly desperate condition of working people, and the increased political activity and civil dialogue between opposition groups were all vital components in preparing the Egyptian people for the revolutionary uprising in 2011.

Conclusion

As of Wednesday evening, Mubarak has still refused to step down. Yet, the Egyptian people are adamant that they will not accept his rule, not superficial political changes. The atmosphere is one in which there will be no negotiations with this corrupt, brutal regime. Already, pamphlets circulated Wednesday afternoon and calls for another massive demonstration are being put forth for Friday, February 4th. Three major blocs, the Movement of the Youth for Liberation, the Socialist Bloc for Change, and the Voice of Revolution, are calling for this demonstration.[36]

The Western media, and even Al Jazeera, have been looking at El Baradei, a “non-aligned, secular” politician, as a possible alternative to the Mubarak regime. In spite of this, it is very likely that El Baradei, if he takes power as an interim leader, will, in the words of El-Hamalaway, “diffuse the revolution, not take it forward.”[37] The Egyptians are struggling, first and foremost, for democracy. However, without the sort of direct democracy, evidenced by the popular committees running society at the moment, that can control how the resources in society are distributed, it is likely that

Egypt

will remain subordinate to Western powers and their neoliberal economic policies. Collective decision making and a radical redistribution of wealth are desperately needed in Egyptian society. If, as has happened historically, wealthy reformers co-opt the popular, democratic cries from the poor and from workers, it is likely that Egypt’s revolution will produce little more than a superficial change in leaders. What Egyptians must demand is a fundamental restructuring of society, one that allows the institutions of society to be democratically constructed and the resources to be democratically distributed. Furthermore, the Egyptians must demand a government that truly represents them on the international scene, and stands firmly against U.S.-Israeli hegemony.

It is hard to say at this time what sort of society will come from the ashes of the Mubarak regime, or how long this protracted struggle with his crumbling dictatorship will continue. It is clear that the left is playing a vital role in this movement, but it is not clear whether or not the left is strong enough to win over the majority to its program or to protect against the co-opting of this popular movement against elite, superficial reformers. At this time, we can only celebrate the historical struggle of the Egyptian people, and hope desperately that they do not replace one form of oppression and exploitation with another.

[1] Interview with Hossam El-Hamalawy, Al Jazeera, 2011: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/01/201112792728200271.html

[2] Video interview of protester from Monday, Jan 31st: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtLJpzUp2Z8&sns=em

[3] Live from the Egyptian Revolution, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, DemocracyNow!, 2011: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/1/29/live_from_the_egyptian_revolution_by_sharif_abdel_kouddous

[4] Voices of the Egyptian Revolution, 2011, DemocracyNow!: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/2/voices_of_the_egyptian_revolution_democracy

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Rebellion Grows Stronger, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, DemocracyNow!, 2011: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/1/30/live_from_egypt_the_rebellion_grows_stronger_by_sharif_abdel_kouddous

[10] Video interview of protester from Monday, Jan 31st: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtLJpzUp2Z8&sns=em

[11] Egyptian Voter Turnout, IDEA: http://www.idea.int/vt/country_view.cfm?CountryCode=EG

[12] Egypt: A Diagnosis, Tarek Osman, OpenDemocracy, 2007: http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy_power/protest/modern_egypt

[13] Sunday Herald article detailing abscure plans to assassinate Nasser, 2000: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20000319/ai_n13945412/

[14] Egypt, Israel, and the U.S., From Nasserism to Collaboration, Eric Ruder, International Socialist Review, 2011: http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml

[15] Marie-Christine Aulas, “State and ideology in republican Egypt,” in Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi eds., State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), 137. Quoted in http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml.

[16] Ruder, ISR: http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml

[17] Marvin Weinbaum, “Egypt’s ‘Infitah’ and the politics of U.S. economic assistance,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 21 no. 2 (April 1985): 217. Quoted in http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml

[18] Economic Indicators - Egypt, 2003: http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_profiles/eco_cou_818.pdf

[19] CIA Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/eg.html

[20] Econmic Indicators - Egypt, 2003: http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_profiles/eco_cou_818.pdf

[21] Ironically, the wealth gap is smaller in Egypt than in the United States, which has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world.

[22] Challenging Neoliberalism, 2007: http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/egypt.shtml

[23] Global Policy Network, Egyptian Economic Indicators, 2003: http://www.gpn.org/data/egypt/egypt-data.pdf

[24] Nominal Wages: CAPMAS, Employment, Wages and Hours of Work (Ewhw), Several Issues AND El-Ehwany, N. & H. El-Laithy (2001) Poverty, Employment and Policy Making in

Egypt

. Quoted in http://www.gpn.org/data/egypt/egypt-data.pdf

[25] Al Jazeera article detailing protests over the ridiculously low minimum wage in Egypt: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201052161957263202.html

[26] Osman: http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy_power/protest/modern_egypt

[27] Ibid.

[28] Noam Chomsky interview on DemocracyNow: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/2/noam_chomsky_this_is_the_most

[29] Ruder: http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml

[30] Interview on DemocracyNow! detailing the level of U.S. military aid provided to Egypt: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/31/made_in_the_usa_tear_gas

[31] Ruder: http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-egypt.shtml

[32] Moshe Machover and A. Said (Jabra Nicola), “Arab revolution and national problems in the Arab East,” The International, Summer 1973, www.matzpen.org/index.asp?u=101&p=revolution.

[33] Class Struggle in Egypt, International Socialist Review, 2008: http://www.isreview.org/issues/59/feat-egyptstrikes.shtml

[34] Interview with Hossam El-Hamalawy: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/01/201112792728200271.html

[35] Comrades and Brothers, Interview with Hossam El-Hamalawy, 2007: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/hamalawy.html

[36] Interview on DemocracyNow: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/2/as_mubarak_pledges_to_finish_term

[37] Hossam El-Hamalawy answering readers' questions on Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2011/01/31/DI2011013102323.html

The Real Democratic Force in the Arab World

2011-01-29T14:50:00.001-05:00

It is apparent, given the revolutionary upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, along with the accompanying protests in Jordan, Yemen, and other places in the Arab world, that neither the United States nor Israel are the proponents of democracy. In fact, Israel's devout support for the corrupt Mubarak regime, alongside the United States' billions of dollars of yearly military aid for the corrupt state apparatus, shows that far from being progenitors of democracy, these states have shown themselves to be stalwart defends of oppression and exploitation.

Although the following post will not relate directly to Egypt (for a live stream, please visit Al Jazeera), it will deal with Morocco, another U.S. client state with a highly undemocratic regime that presents a facade of popular government. I wrote this reflection after having to attend a discussion on a civics program called Civitas. Some Moroccan government officials, as participants in the program alongside the U.S., were present. It is obvious, in my opinion, that the program is largely a front to propagandize the participants in the United States and, even more so, in Morocco, to buy into very superficial conceptions of democracy. In honor of the Tunisian revolution, and the valiant struggles of the Egyptian people still ongoing, I post this piece.

We can only imagine the prospects of these struggles for the future. Perhaps, the people of Morocco and the Western Sahara will be next.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The notion of how to students, and teachers, involved in civic education at a grassroots level is an intriguing and well-pursued area of study. It is vital for students to understand both the forms of civic participation narrowly confined under the legal and political scope of “public policy,” alongside the more broad and participatory forms of civic engagement which extend beyond the traditional institutions imposed from above. In other words, while students ought to be educated about the legal channels through which small-scale change may occur, it should never, for the sake of democracy, displace the emphasis on the form of activism that pushes the legal limits and, in many cases, fundamentally challenges the dominant structures of our society.

My experience with the Center of Civic Education representatives, along with the delegation from Morocco, has lead me to the conclusion that the Civitas program, headed by the Center for Civic Education, is not entirely conducive to the goal of democratizing society as I understand it. Instead, aside from the benevolent-sounding rhetoric, Civitas seems aimed primarily at enervating popular movements and forcing them to be subsumed into the current political system, rather than encouraging them to fundamentally alter what are, essentially, unjust social relations.

Furthermore, by completely ignoring the economic system, which is inherently undemocratic when organized under the auspices of capitalism, political democracy is little more than a sham. To paraphrase what John Dewey proclaimed a century ago, until we free ourselves from industrial feudalism, politics will remain the shadow cast over society by big business. Power in society will, as James Madison so exuberantly effused was the correct order of things, remain with the “minority of the opulent.” My largest complaint with Civitas, then, is that its understanding of “democracy” is limited to the most basic and low levels of democratic participation which, in large part, are the most unimportant and non-participatory forms of civic engagement that currently exist. It is narrow in scope and serves not as a gateway to more progressive forms of democratic participation, but as an ideological weapon to prove that the “system works” because students are able to get rid of plastic lunch trays or get a few truant classmates back into school (worthy goals, no doubt, but out on the periphery). In other words, while in its mission statement it claims to be “nonpartisan,” it is definitely not “non-ideological,” it is inextricably linked to a conception of democracy tied to capitalism as an economic system, and insofar as this is true, its commitment to democracy proves nothing more than rhetoric.

The next complaint is that, while it aims to show that “democracy works,” it is funded by a government, namely, the United States, which simply does NOT take democracy seriously around the world. In Vietnam it staged a brutal occupation and war to avoid democratic elections in which it feared Communists would win. In 1973, the United States materially supported the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile because it challenged corporate interests in the region and upset the hyper-exploitation of the people there. In the 1980’s it backed the vicious and brutal terrorist organization named the Contras in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas, who garnered mass popular support, in their overthrow of a U.S. backed dictator. There are various more instances that could be cited here. The U.S. supported the apartheid regime of South Africa until the very end against the democratic will of the majority black population there. When Huge Chavez won the democratic election in 1999, the U.S. leaders panicked and, in 2002, with the help of the CIA, supported a military coup against him. When Hamas was democratically elected by the people of Palestine, the U.S. placed them on the terrorist watch list and would not negotiate with them, despite being internationally observed as a free and fair election. Just last year, when President Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup, the U.S. backed the military government that brutally repressed civil dissent in the country. In other words, democracy is fine as long as the U.S. backed candidate is elected. Democracy is a threat, however, when it challenges U.S. corporate interests and the larger ideological capitalist hegemony. How then, can one of the most anti-democratic governments in the world construct and implement a program that claims to support democracy? Simply put, it cannot.

For instance, one of the countries in which the program takes place, Morocco, and also where the representatives in our meeting were from, is one of the most highly undemocratic, in fact, anti-democratic nations in the world. Morocco, a constitutional monarchy, has always been a pawn of the U.S., both as an anti-Communist buffer in North Africa and, more recently, as an “anti-terrorist” state who happily signed on with the U.S. wars of aggression to placate its own colonial holding in Western Sahara. While Morocco has a democratically elected parliament, the only democratically elected body, only 37% of the population actually voted in the last election, meaning that far less than half the population was represented. Furthermore, real power lies with the Moroccan monarch, who wields an enormous amount of executive power, enough to even disband parliament at will. The country hosts a brutal occupation of the Western Sahara, which it took over after Spain withdrew in the 1970’s. Since then, there has been a popular, grassroots movement in the Western Sahara for independence and democracy. Ironically, the Western Sahara, which is 99% Arab and Berber, has a female spokeswomen as the head of the democratic movement there, which is what the U.S. claims it wants to see in the Arab world in regards to womens’ rights and so on. Instead, it supports Morocco in its colonial exploits over the region, and as permanent member of the Security Council, has blocked United Nations resolutions promoting Western Saharan independence. We are to believe, then, that these two highly anti-democratic governments have formed a partnership through Civitas in which they are mutually exploring democracy. Orwell must be rolling in his grave.

When I attempted to engage the Moroccan delegation, who were, basically, government spokesmen, not educators, on their occupation of the Western Sahara, the English-speaking representative misleadingly attempted to sway the audience by claiming that the occupation was, essentially, just a “media misunderstanding” because one Spanish outlet had put a picture of Gaza up when talking about the Western Sahara. Then, I was instructed that I was not qualified to speak on Morocco, or its political institutions, because I was not from there nor had I been there, and “reading about Morocco is different than being there.” I suppose that reading about the enormous power that the Moroccan leader has, or listening to ground reports and first-person accounts of the Western Saharan occupation, or having read and listened to the foremost author of the Western Saharan occupation, means absolutely nothing to the Moroccan government officials. Indeed, this is what, presumably, passed for democratic discourse in Moroccan society. No wonder the United States leaders are pursuing such close ties, the ideological unanimity among the Moroccan rulers must inspire them.

Perhaps the most telling comment came from the big screen, where Civitas directors from another part of Ohio were trying to explain their program through the superb technological capabilities available at the University of Toledo. At one point, and this is when I truly understood for the first time the core component of what Civitas was, the male representative explained that the program was designed to get people to try and change public policy through the most basic channels and to get them to work without “protests, holding signs, or street demonstrations.” Those words were the most lucid, clearest articulation of what the program actually was meant to do. After I engaged that comment, some of the representatives backed off that claim, and attempted to back-peddle. One man, in particular, the gentleman I had a conversation with afterward, was open to dialogue, which I found refreshing concerning the ideological dogma manifested by the rest of the Civitas representatives.

Despite this, it remained apparent that Civitas was, primarily, a program meant to inculcate teachers and students with the idea that social change was best pursued through the lowest legal channels available, and that civic participation beyond that ought to be questioned and, sometimes, even ridiculed for ineffectiveness and, as they basically implied, its “non-democratic” nature. Regardless of the purported aims, it was clear to me upon leaving that meeting that Civitas is something that is meant to funnel our disgust with the inequality in society into safe channels, into outlets that make us feel good about doing something small but do not cultivate an idea or organizing for greater societal change. Civitas, for instance, would not support the work of WikiLeaks, an organization truly fighting for democracy and transparency, or the British students fighting back against budget cuts and austerity. The day that Civitas gets students to protest their schools for slashing their budgets, raising tuition, or cutting teachers, that is the day that I will get Civitas a second glance. Until then, I understand the program is little more than, despite the benevolent intentions of some individuals involved, a government-sponsored propaganda program meant to install what are, essentially, undemocratic values under the guise of democratic participation.

The Best and Worst of 2010

2011-01-05T17:03:00.001-05:00

This was supposed to be done on New Years, but life sidetracked me. A lot has happened in the past year, and since I have not posted anything in a minute, here’s a brief list of some of the most important, in my opinion, events of the year. I may have forgotten a few things, so if I have let me know and I’ll be sure to add it! Events are not organized chronologically or in terms of importance.

Our favorite peoples’ historian and teacher, Howard Zinn, passes away in early 2010, not long after releasing an excellent theatrical performance of The People Speak.

Venezuela passes a law, one which we ought to have had years ago in the United States, making banking a “public service,” putting some serious regulations on banks and requiring them to contribute more to social programs, housing construction, etc.

Vandana Shiva betrays any leftist credentials she has ever had by opening up a conference for the quasi-fascist, Hindu supremacist Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.

Lowkey drops FIVE of the hottest political hip-hop videos ever: Obama Nation, Cradle of Civilization, Terrorist, Million Man March, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears!

The University of Toledo’s president autocratically pushes through a massive restructuring of the university with, basically, absolutely no student, faculty, or staff input.

Some reactionary judge dismisses all charges against Blackwater mercenaries in the Nisoor Square massacre.

Obama has STILL kept Guantanamo open, despite campaign promises.

A bunch of us in the College of Education at UT make it through the hell that was our Methods!

The earthquake in

Haiti

, as well as the years of instability and economic deprivation due to foreign imperialism, causes countless misery and death for hundreds of thousands of Haitians.

In the midterm elections Republicans sweep the House while Democrats barely cling on for dear life as they struggle to maintain a majority in the Senate (although no Black people will be present in the Senate).

Dan La Botz, a socialist, gets 25,311 votes in heartland Ohio!

Akala releases what is probably THE best hip-hop, genre-crossing album of 2010 with DoubleThink.

Self-proclaimed contrarian, “neo-Marxist” Slavoj Žižek spews some racist, anti-Roma crap and defends what are, essentially, pogroms against them in Europe.

Sell-out Wyclef Jean, supporter of the anti-democratic coup against Aristide, attempts to run for the Presidency in

Haiti

, only to be shutdown because the bastard hasn’t even lived there for the years it requires.

Elton John sells his soul for $1 million by playing at the anti-gay bigot Rush Limbaugh’s wedding, and then turns around and plays a show in Tel Aviv, despite the Israeli boycott, and calls those protesting SB1070 a bunch of “fuck-wits.”

Kiev,

Ukraine

hosts the second annual International Anti-Fascist Mixed Martial Arts festival, something we cannot afford to not have here in the states!

A couple of fed-up black workers rise up and slay

South Africa

’s most prominent white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche.

After originally sporting some real percussive Free Palestine ads on their city buses, Seattle backs down from political ads and claims they will only show “commercial” ads, as if corporate speech is apolitical.

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rules corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates.

Boots Riley of The Coup and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine get together to form The Streetsweeper Social Club and drop a pretty good mixtape.

David Isom runs up to a right-wing crazy trying to burn a Qur’an, grabs it, then skates off, only to become a youtube sensation with a sweet auto-tune remix of his accomplishment.

Some brave Jimmy John’s workers get together and organize the first IWW union within the chain.

Coup government of

Honduras

is sworn in, while democratically elected leader Zelaya is forced to leave.

Some 50,000 British students protest and occupy university buildings to demand that the new Lib-Dem government go through on their promises not to raise tuition fees, which they do anyway.

The

U.S.

finally, after a bunch of dithering back and forth, repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a major victory of the LGBT community.

Eminem, once again, completely and utterly wastes his talents by releasing an album so self-absorbed and apolitical it is sickening, only slightly redeeming himself by sardonically comment that gays ought to be able to marry because everyone ought to have the opportunity to be miserable.

The M_Ahmadinejad (which I assume is NOT run by Ahmadinejad) responds to the Qur’an book burning by claiming that he would “like to retaliate by burning a book that you Americans hold dear, but the only book you care about is Facebook.”

Spain

takes the World Cup while the rest of the world leaves South Africans with debt and despair afterwards.

Athletes, including “Los Suns,” speak out against the vicious and vitriolic anti-immigrant law SB1070 in Arizona.

Rap News releases some of the most hilarious satirical commentary regarding WikiLeaks and government repression ever done through the hip-hop medium.

Nutjob Alex Jones condemns WikiLeaks for being an inside job to promote the global illuminati conspiracy theory after condemning Noam Chomsky for working for the CIA.

Arundhati Roy’s home gets attacked by right-wing thugs for claiming that the Kashmiri people deserve some respect and, perhaps, autonomy.

Eyedea, a rapper, dies at only age 28. R.I.P.

The show Glee really takes on the issue of gay rights when Kurt’s dad confronts Finn for spewing some homophobic crap in his home.

A barrage of suicides, attacks, and violence against LGBT youth takes place, promoting the “It Gets Better” campaign.

In a sweet move for us broke, politically-minded college students, Dead Prez releases their mixtape RBG Grillz for free, which flips Lloyd Bank’s vacuous Beamer, Benz, or Bentley into the more revolutionary Marcus, Garvey, Huey.

Rich Iott, trying to win a representative seat for Ohio, gets caught dressing up as a Nazi, and then gets rocked by Marcy Kaptur in the election.

Mark Coleman attempts what is, basically, one of the most disastrous comebacks in MMA history.

Israel

continues its illegal and immoral settlement of Palestinian land, perpetuating the suffering and misery of the already suffocated, starved, and enervated Palestinian people.

ACORN is essentially dismantled after one video surfaces of an organizer helping out a right-winger pretending to be a pimp.

For a few minutes the world watched as Shane Carwin pounds on the purportedly invincible Brock Lesnar, only to get choked out in the first part of the second round after gassing bad.

Congress passes what is, perhaps, the absolute worst version of healthcare “reform” that could ever take place, basically handing private insurers more “customers” and not doing much in the way of actually providing care.

Cain Velasquez, sporting his “Brown Pride” tattoo, sweeps through the heavyweight division culminating in his relentless whooping of Brock Lesnar, known for his conservative politics, in what was as powerful a political victory for Mexican-Americans as it was an individual victory for Cain.

Researcher exposes the fact that

U.S.

doctors secretly infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis in the 1940’s.

Rampage makes a terrible showing against Evans, but comes back a few months later and really shows his stuff against Machida, winning a decision, even if he did comment at the end that “Machida whooped my ass!”

Middleweight champ Anderson Silva plays with Damien Maia for five rounds and, then, gets beat up for five by racist, homophobic Shael Sonnen until Silva triangle chokes him with a minute left in the last round (serves him right for the homophobic trash he talked about Brazilian Ju-jitsu).

Attempted police coup in

Ecuador

almost ousts democratically elected President Correa.

Chuck Liddell gets knocked out HARD by Rich Franklin, despite showing some potential for the first minute or so of the fight.

TSA introduces highly invasive body scanners to protect us against all sorts of devils.

U.S. Social Forum brings thousands of activists together in Detroit.

WikiLeaks releases classified war documents in massive quantities relating to

Iraq

Afghanistan

, and

U.S.

diplomacy dating back decades.

Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, is accused of violating two women in

Sweden

and stirs an international debate on the left, especially the feminist left, of how to deal with such accusations.

A BP Gulf Coast oil rig blows up, killing eleven workers and resulting in the largest

U.S.

oil spill ever, devastating both the ecosystem and livelihoods of people in the region.

Frankie Edgar, in probably the biggest upset of the year, beats BJ Penn not once, but twice!

Hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, faculty, and staff take part in a day of action to defend California’s schools against austerity and budget cuts.

Jon Stewart leads the anti-climatic “Restore Sanity” rally to tell everyone to calm down and stop being so darn political.

MasterCard revokes the right for individuals to donate through them to WikiLeaks, while maintaining that service for the KKK.

FBI raids Palestinian activists homes in what is reminiscent of the COINTELPRO raids of the 1960’s, although slightly less violent.

A Massey Energy Mine, cited for hundred of safety violations, explodes and kills 25 workers while the CEO gets off clean.

Blue Scholars drops Coffee and Snow 2 and, although it is not as good as the original, it was superb!

Paul Daley sucker punches Josh Koscheck after the fight in which Kosheck fakes getting hit in the eye and refuses to stand up and box with him.

Striking truckers and other workers in

Greece

literally shut down the country to protest austerity measures.

Eleven activists are murdered in the Israeli siege of the humanitarian aid flotilla headed for Gaza.

The police officer who murdered Oscar Grant is convicted not of murder, but involuntary manslaughter and gets off easy.

Shirley Sherrod is the attack of a racist smear-campaign by the right, facilitated by the capitulating nature of the Obama administration, and removed from her post in the Agricultural Department.

U.S.

officially declares the “end of combat operations” in

Iraq

while maintaining 50,000 troops there for, we are to presume, laundry and daycare duty for Iraqi mothers.

Massive flooding in

Pakistan

, as well as the anti-Islamic sentiments restricting donations to the Muslim majority country, causes intense suffering and destruction for millions.

French students and workers show their disgust with the reactionary Skarkozy administration’s attempts to force people to work longer and hold a series of massive protests, occupations, and strikes.

Green Gone Wrong - A Book That Gets It Right!

2010-12-16T22:08:00.001-05:00

“This is a long process,” says Lely Khairnur, director of a social justice and sustainability organization in Indonesia, “It’s not fighting against one company, we are fighting a system.” This quote succinctly represents the essence of Heather Rogers’ Green Gone Wrong. Her book is a percussive blow to the “green capitalism” ideologues and consumer-oriented conceptions of environmental sustainability. The criticisms, and possible alternatives, she raises in her work are purposefully astonishing and suggestive of the radically broad structural changes that must be forced upon the ruling class if we wish to maintain Earth as a habitable and sustainable home for our species. Her scathing critique of the consumer-based approach to sustainability and the market-based approach to regulating the environment are presented within a framework which attempts to articulate the need for a systemic overhaul, not piecemeal reforms or slightly more expansive regulatory powers. She claims that our “toxic emissions” as individuals are not ours alone, but instead they are “linked to a larger socioeconomic system that actually depends on pollution to maintain its well-being.” She is correct in this assertion, and her criticism of the new ideological currents within the environmental movement are much needed breath of fresh air in a highly irrational and anti-human system.

Her first target is the highly marketed “organic” and “fair trade” labels that have recently flooded grocery stores and large chains all over the United States. Many within the progressive movement look to these as an alternative to the highly-processed, chemically tainted, and mono-cropped agricultural practices of big businesses. She dismantles the notion that these labels are really helping regular people (say peasants in Paraguay or truly organic farmers in the U.S.) and are more about projecting an image which helps sell commodities and promote the idea these problems can be fixed simply through market mechanisms. It is, in other words, an attempt by the dominant ideological elites to legitimize capitalism in a world where the population is becoming more and more critical of its environmental track record. To be certain, such desires on behalf of consumers who truly wish to help by buying organic and fair trade products is a progressive step within the framework we are operating in. And, while it is true that not all organic and fair trade sellers bend the rules and corrupt the process, it is apparent the entire certification system and regulation system are systemically flawed.

In the US, for example, monopolization and regulations that actually support large agribusiness has forced many small farmers out of business and made many others rely on outside income (wives working full time jobs as wage workers) to simply support the farm. The average small farm in the

, according to a USDA economic research study, earns 85-95% of its income from "off-farm sources." On top of that, most organic farms are simply "visually inspected," meaning that if an inspector comes out at all, they do not have to run any chemical tests or fertilizer tests.

Similarly, international organic standards are meant to mean a host of things, including crop rotation to protect the soil and non-chemical use, etc. However, with crops like sugar cane most small farmers in, say, Paraguay, cannot afford to take the chance (or hire the labor) to rotate crops every year and perennial crops like sugarcane remain in the same spot for years and years. And manure used to fertilize the ground, for instance, often comes from "non-organic" sources where they pump the animals with hormones and even lace the food with arsenic to increase growth. This manure is used in certified "organic" crops that we consumers eat. All the while, large agribusiness, who is quickly taking over the "organic" niche in the

market, is benefiting from the increased sale prices they can charge and cutting costs. In other words, consumers and small farmers are getting screwed.

Thus, organic certification in third world countries mean almost nothing. Since poor farmers cannot afford certification (it costs a lot, and the time involved in documenting their credentials takes away from valuable labor time, which they are very, very limited in) they are often bunched together under one large manufacturer. There certification, then, is often under the name of a large corporation, meaning they can only sell their organic crops through this producer, because it maintains the right to the seal. They can sell their crops for conventional prices but they get massively screwed if they choose to do so. Furthermore, any attempt at independent selling and they are cut off from their organic certification. Fair trade does essentially the same thing, and they are relegated to selling to a big producer. Basically, these labels are serving to confine small farmers and forcing them to subjugate themselves to large agribusiness, who control the market. And, since they are "group certified," there is no independent regulation. Regulators are hired by the large company who are certified, and they only have to "randomly select" farmers once in awhile to be checked. In many parts of Latin America, where the infrastructure for regulation barely exists, organic and fair trade mean almost nothing.

It is not just organic and fair trade products that are so distorted within the capitalist framework. Greener technology in, say, architecture are simply non-existent or barely existent in the

U.S.

for working class consumers because of the insanely high price, despite having the appropriate technology. Public transportation was decimated by the large oil and auto companies and, unsurprisingly, the state literally sanctioned this destruction by giving them little more than a slap on the wrist, a $5,000 fine, for literally dismantling public rail in most

U.S.

cities. Even greener and environmentally friendly cars are withheld because corporations function around the profit motive and gas-guzzlers are far more profitable than compact and eco-friendly automobiles. Carbon offsetting is more about the “bottom line” than actually offsetting carbon emissions. Even poor peasants in

India

are forced to chop down and sell wood to biomass energy plants to simply make enough cash to survive. Solar energy is haphazardly installed without the adequate support or voltage to make it functional due to price constraints. The horror tales concerning market solutions to our planet’s environmental problems are innumerable.

The moral of the story, then, is that capitalism as a socioeconomic system cannot, and will not, provide an Earth on which sustainability is a likely outcome or, even, a possibility. The market fundamentally distorts potential for environmentally sustainable technology to become the norm. Likewise, the inherent tendency towards expansion and production are also significant limitations to what the market can to do negate environmental damage. Roger’s provides an absolutely essential critique of the purported market “solutions” that many within and outside of the mainstream environmental movement are currently advocating. She provides 12 pages at the end of her book titled “Notes on the Possible,” in which she advocates cultivating biodiversity by looking backwards to the farming techniques of the past, developing an agroecology with the ability to feed the six billion people on the planet, accommodate small farmers, enforce stricter regulations, and subsidize technology that fosters environmental sustainability. Her call for huge government intervention to save our Earth from destruction is a welcome one, and money could easily be redirected from imperialistic wars and the wealthiest sectors of society to fund alternative technology and its implementation on a mass-scale. This is something that requires economic and political power that only the national and international agencies can harness. It cannot be done piecemeal by individual consumers, one at a time, or forward-looking businesses.

Rogers’ argues that a “more comprehensive regulation of industry and a major rethinking of our political and economic structures” are the key to a new ecology. She is correct. Her contribution to this dialogue is essential, and will help combat the market proponents who so eagerly defend the status quo or small reforms. However, we must also take her argument a bit further. She gives us an idea of how government policies and farming practices can be changed to support our environment, but she does not provide us with the vehicle through which we make those changes. They will not come through our leader’s benevolence, as gifts handed down to us. Indeed, as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without demand, it never has, and it never will.” Time still remains to save our planet and ourselves, but this cannot be done without marshalling our forces and constructing edifices that facilitate the growth of social movements. Broad-reaching, radical social movements are what can provide Douglass’s demand and force qualitative changes in our infrastructure, workplaces, economy, and environment. I highly recommend that this book be read alongside John Bellamy Foster’s book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and Chris William’s Ecology and Socialism.

It is apparent that throughout the world there is a serious augmentation of environmentally-aware people and ideas. The multi-faceted and piecemeal solutions put forth by market ideologues focus primarily upon individual lifestyle choices, but it is evident that the scale of the crisis we face requires a far more radical approach. Heather Rogers does well to further the discourse that needs to occur, but we need to push her, and others, to adopt an even broader and more radical approach to ecology. In other words, we need a socialist ecology, one that emphasis production for human and environmental need and not profit. We need an ecology, as George Orwell so brilliantly surmised, that goes beyond the “change of spirit” and instead focuses on the “change in structure.” Capitalism as an economic system needs to be replaced by a system where the vast majority democratically decide how to produce, distribute, and use Earth’s resources in a sustainable and liberating manner. Rogers' Green Gone Wrong is a powerful addition to this vision.

Care About Democracy? Defend Julian Assange!

2010-12-03T12:08:00.000-05:00

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and a man who a year ago was relatively unknown, is now the victim of a vicious, international attack. This attack is simultaneously occurring on the political, legal, and economic fronts. Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, claims that Assange ought to be "hunted down" and Tim Flanagan, a former aide to the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, claimed that he ought to be assassinated, perhaps by "a drone or something." Republican Mike Huckabee, often regarded as one of the main 2012 presidential candidates, recently stated that the leaker of U.S. classified documents, Bradley Manning, ought to be executed for treason. There is no telling what he would do, if it were up to him, to Julian Assange, the main transparency and democracy protagonist in this case.

Right-wing fantasies aside, Interpol, the international police agency, has just sent out an provisional arrest warrant for Assange who is currently in Britain. The charges rest tentatively on the grounds that, essentially, Assange did not use a condom during sexual intercourse with two women in Sweden. Obviously, international searches for such heinous criminals are warranted!

Perhaps we ought to be a little more than skeptical about the timing of such legal charges, especially considering they had previously been dropped, only to be picked back up again once Assange released more documents about U.S. foreign and diplomatic policy. There are, however, for more serious legal challenges ahead for Assange. Attorney General Eric Holder has recently claimed that U.S. officials are looking into prosecuting Assange under the Espionage act. These threats, if followed through on, could prove far more serious for Assange.

Furthermore, the government has, essentially, forced servers to simply drop WikiLeaks from their realms. Amazon.com and EveryDNS has removed WikiLeaks, caving to government pressure. As I am writing this I have tried to access WikiLeaks online, to no avail. As one commentator stated, “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books." Maybe they are right.

So, what exactly does the organization claim to do? Well, according their website:

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.

Why is all this being done? After all, so many within the government, and the pundits outside of it, claim that what WikiLeaks is doing is relatively unimportant. They argue it has no real effect, that the information presented was already known and nothing substantial has come from these reports. Aside from the right-wing rhetoric of treason and espionage, the main discourse has revolved around the idea that the work Assange, and those working with him, are carrying out is, simply, not that significant. This was the official government line after the first major leak of Iraq war documents, and has been echoed ever since then. Glenn Greenwald, legal writer for Salon.com, briefly summarized why this is an outright lie:

If there's Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to whereThe Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eyeto systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

That's just a sampling.

Obviously, the WikiLeaks has done nothing argument simply does not hold up to the evidence. Similarly, we can reject, out of hand, the right-wing notions of treason and espionage articulated by the most hyper-reactionary elements in our society. It should be noted that I include the Obama administration among that group, especially in relation to this particular issue. This vitriolic and super-patriotic rhetoric, as Noam Chomsky recently stated, displays little more than a "profound hatred for democracy" on behalf of our political leaders.

Arguments from more rational observers and left critics of WikiLeaks, however, are slightly more interesting to inspect. Arguments of this type against the organization revolve, fundamentally, around three primary ideas. First, WikiLeaks has made grave mistakes, threatens personal privacy, and has fallen to libel. Second, WikiLeaks endangers transparency activism by "taking it too far" and exciting a government backlash. Third, the actions taken by the organization have not fundamentally changed the way U.S. foreign policy functions.

The first charge is profoundly absurd. While it is true that within the four year existence of the organization they have made mistakes, it is also clear to anyone who cares at all for exposing human rights violations, war crimes, and the imperialist nature of U.S. foreign policy, the vast majority of the work WikiLeaks has done has provided the raw material we need to construct and supplement our arguments challenging U.S. hegemony around the world. While minor mistakes may have been made here or there in the organization's existence, such a prodigious amount of work has been done that is good in terms of exposing U.S. government policies and crimes, that it far outweighs any relatively small mistakes that some "transparency activists" have harped on.

Second, the idea that WikiLeaks endangers transparency activism by "taking it to far," a position articulated by Steven Aftergood on the DemocracyNow debate with Glenn Greenwald, is fundamentally incorrect and, worse, highly enervating for our movement. In fact, the same arguments were used by conservatives and moderates in every movement for social change and every struggle in our history. Whether it was civil rights, in which conservative leaders preached patience and legal means to achieve their ends, fearing a "white backlash," or Women's rights issues where activists were told to just wait for fear of "male backlash." Following this course of action, workers could have simply waited for bosses to increase their wages or decrease the work day. I have the strange feeling that, had our ancestors followed Aftergood's advice, we would still be working 12 hours a day for non-living wages.

The driving notion behind this critique is that activists and citizens are not the drivers of change, but the people at the top who currently hold political and economic power. Aftergood, someone who does do decent work within the confines of the system, has allowed himself to be consumed by the system. Simply trying to change the system from inside will corrupt you. Instead of relying on concrete activism and illegal, subversive activities to supplement the legal work going on, we ought to simply confine ourselves to the dominant institutions in society, the same institutions which perpetuate the oppression we are fighting against. This sort of logic is, at best, extremely naive and, at worst, purposefully misleading and debilitating.

Lastly, the idea that WikiLeaks, in and of itself, has not single-handily changed U.S. foreign policy or stopped the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an absurdly high standard to hold any organization, especially a media organization, to. Greenwald himself responded well to this critique, explaining that the critics of WikiLeaks, who advocate actions within the system, have obviously not stopped the wars, not won prosecution of officials for war crimes, not won the transparency we need to understand and analyze our government's actions, things required for a democratic society to function. Furthermore, it is not the responsibility, nor the intended aim, of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks stated goal is to bring disclosed information to the public, to promote the transparency needed for a democratic society to function properly. We cannot, therefore, blame WikiLeaks for not building the organizational infrastructure needed to sustain a large-scale anti-war movement. We cannot blame WikiLeaks for the failures of our anti-war movement. WikiLeaks has provided the raw materials for us to use in order to build our case, to supplement our movement, but it is NOT the movement itself. It is our duty, our job, our responsibility, to take action against unjust, illegal, immoral, and imperialistic policies perpetuated by our own government.

To paraphrase Julian Assange, transparency tends to produce just government. To the extent that this is true, WikiLeaks is doing their job. It should be our job to defend them, and defend Assange, against these attacks. For those you who cherish democracy, who think that we ought to be able to criticize our government, and have the information to do so, you should sign the petition below. We ought to do whatever we can to defend organizations and people fighting for us.

We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.

We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.

Sign the petition!

I'm Thankful For... the Zapatistas!

2010-11-25T22:36:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, enjoy the day off! Also, let's not forget what we're thankful for, like the indigenous resistance movements of the world and their struggle against exploitation. In their honor:

The January 1, 1994 uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), or Zapatistas, garnered worldwide attention for its apparent spontaneity and challenge to the ruling Partido Revolucinario Institucional. Its political program was vague but consisted of a call for “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, justice and peace.” They articulated a unique conception of developmental democracy which they hoped to introduce into the primarily indigenous state of Chiapas. American views concerning the Zapatistas, far from a monolithic bloc, range from mainstream, liberal denunciations to nearly hysteric support in some leftist circles. While slight disagreements may exist within particular currents, the prominent American analyses are associated with four historic political ideologies: mainstream capitalist (nearly unanimous in their hostility), non-aligned leftist (post-modern in its association), Marxist-Leninist (of the internationalist, Trotskyist variety), and Anarchist (anti-establishment and anti-statist). While mainstream commentators, writing for powerful, highly-disseminated organs of capitalist power, are able to more extensively promote their vacuous analyses and manufacture for the American public what is ostensibly objectivity, the various leftist tendencies do not hide themselves behind a veil of objectivity. Instead, the multifaceted analytical frameworks of the American left provide a much deeper, and more interesting, understanding of how serious American activists and organizations are approaching the Zapatistas.

Prior to surveying the various ideological commentaries concerning the Zapatistas, the origins of this movement must be lucidly understood. Chiapas, the southern state known for its enormous agricultural and resource wealth, maintains a population that constitutes one of the poorest, most abject sectors of Mexican society. While agrarian reform reached the state originally in the 1930’s, a significant portion of the land, especially the most arable, remained in the hands of wealthy ranchers and plantation owners. The onset of intense cattle ranching, along with petroleum drilling by the nationalized oil company PEMEX, further devastated the land peasants barely clung to. The government of Salinas destroyed the constitutional base upon which agrarian reform was based, Article 27, and rolled back the relatively nominal rights enjoyed by peasants to control communal ejidos upon which they depended for survival. Export incentives for the Mexican state fueled the growth of cash crops at the expense of peasant needs; Chiapas became what Roger Burbach dubbed an “internal colony.”[1] This contradiction, of great resource wealth and utter poverty, has only increased in the past two decades with the onslaught of neoliberal economic policy implemented in

Mexico

The Zapatistas were born within this context. Claiming no desire to take hold of state power, a blatant rejection of both legitimate electoral politics and traditional leftist goals, they claim instead the desire to open up communal, democratic space in which the indigenous can function and organize. Two important factors, for instance, are that leaders can neither own property nor take political office.[2] They are organized upon a fluid, rotating internal structure and have created thirty-two autonomous municipalities within Chiapas. These municipalities are composed of various indigenous communities who decide whether or not to participate. The local communities handle all local affairs, are separate from the state, and elect representatives to the Autonomous Municipal Council, which handles regional decisions. They rely upon a social basis composed primarily of indigenous populations and the leaders remain relatively secluded in order to elude government repression. Much of the leadership is derived from the now defunct Frente Liberacion Nacional (FLN), a militant guerrilla group based upon Che Guevara’s conception of the revolutionary vanguard. However, traditional Indian influences and the liberation theology associated with certain radical Catholic priests are also prominent within the Zapatista movement. Above all, the Zapatistas claim to represent a movement for democracy and plan, with or without the state, to take democratic control over their own lives.[3] Originally organizing as an armed uprising, the military unsuccessfully attempted to suppress them twice in 1994 and 1995; mass protests and resistance forced them to back down.[4] Since then the Zapatistas have operated on a relatively peaceful basis.

It is safe to assume that aside from perhaps having seen the extraordinarily hyped images in mainstream media of a masked Subcommandante Marcos with guns, most Americans probably know very little about the Zapatista uprising. Thus, the attitudes many Americans, if they have any predilection towards the situation at all, harbor of the EZLN most likely reflects the portrayal given to them by mainstream, corporate media outlets. These accounts are primarily hostile to the movement and, as is necessary to perpetuate their own cultural hegemony, reflect the dominant class interests of their owners. Even the brief instances where the Zapatistas are given room to speak in the corporate press, they are usually quotes removed from context and utilized in order to set up a caricature or straw-man they easily torn down of what the movement represents. Surveying six articles dating from 1994 to 2006 produced by the New York Times, one of the most influential and widely read mainstream newspapers, the unsympathetic attitude towards the events in Chiapas is particularly blatant.

The first three articles all date from the early stage, 1994, of the Zapatista uprising when the EZLN still articulated the idea that struggle through armed force would achieve liberation. The first article, entitled “Shadowy Origins of Rebel Movement,” the title itself presenting a rather ominous tone, attempts to piece together the relatively unknown origins of the Zapatistas. While the article itself is rather harmless, it does imply that instead of an organic uprising, the leaders of the movement were outside agitators who came into the villages to stir up rebellion.[5] The second article is openly hostile to the uprising and suggests that various “peasants” had warned the mayor in Chiapas that the Zapatistas were organizing in their communities, implying they were unwanted outsiders and ignoring the vast support they shared among the indigenous people. It goes on to explain, based upon an account by interviewees critical of the Zapatistas, how men with guns stormed the ejido hall and forced peasants to participate in the uprising.[6] The last article from this period is the first to give the Zapatistas any space at all to speak for themselves; one sentence. It tells the story of the EZLN taking over the second largest city in Chiapas, San Cristóbal, claims the government called a cease-fire which the guerrillas refused, invokes images of “thousands fleeing Zapatista strongholds,” and ends with a random commentator denouncing the movement.[7]

This treatment continues throughout nearly every other New York Times article. One, dated from 1999, claims around a thousand pro-Zapatista protestors began smashing rocks into police cars and fueling violence.[8] Another fear-mongering article from 2003 explicates upon the seizure of an eco-tourism lodge in a liberated area and warns tourists to avoid the area.[9] The latest article, dated 2006, calls Subcommandante Marcos a “Marxist guerrilla,” a label he has denied repeatedly, and details his anti-electoral political campaign; this article is, perhaps, the only semi-neutral article appearing in the New York Times.[10] The attitude taken by the rest of mainstream press is undoubtedly consistent, or even more pejorative, than this liberal outlet. Thus, the information disseminated to most Americans is that the Zapatistas represent a dangerous, hostile, Marxist threat to the Mexican government, the peasants, and American interests and tourists. It can only be expected that a capitalist press, which serves to maintain a cultural hegemony intended to facilitate the perpetuation of the existing state apparatus, would take such an approach to what is, more or less, an anti-capitalist rebellion. More serious and scholarly political analyses, from a variety of political traditions, give a much more multifaceted, pragmatic analysis of the situation.

A more sympathetic but rather ambiguous analysis of the movement comes from the New Left Review, a non-affiliated but radical leftist journal published in

Britain

and widely read by radical circles on the American left. Roger Burbach, in “Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas,” appearing in the New Left Review in May-June 1994, focuses more on understanding the historical context in which the EZLN arose. His account also articulates the idea that the Zapatistas desire neither state power nor socialism in the orthodox sense.[11] Burbach lacks any serious political analysis of the Zapatistas, aside from rendering them a “post-modern political movement” which, it seems, the author does not take issue with. The second article, appearing two years later in the July-August 1996 issue, is written by Régis Debray, a “one-time comrade of Che Guevara,” who travels to Chiapas to interview Marcos and details his experience. Furthering Burbach’s open-ended lead, his account gushes with uncritical support for the EZLN. Aside from extremely brief, vague accounts of unidentified “problems” which could arise, Debray explicates upon the Zapatistas from a post-modern political stance which romanticizes the movement. His account, perhaps correctly, utilizes the object-subject dichotomy of Paulo Freire and concludes that the Zapatistas have “transformed hundreds of thousands of people-objects into the subjects of history.” However, absolutely no critical analysis is given and, while this may serve as a useful propaganda piece to counter the harsh anti-Zapatista coverage in the mainstream press, it does little to clarify the Zapatista movement’s strengths and weaknesses.[12] Therefore, we find within the “post-Marxist” left a rather lackadaisical analysis of the actual political content of the Zapatista movement, filled instead with romantic imagery and what appears to be unconditional support.

The Marxist-Leninist critique, drawn from two articles dating from 1997 and 2005 by the same author, Lance Selfa, representative of the International Socialist Organization, the largest revolutionary socialist group in the United States, is much more critical of the Zapatista movement. The ideological approach to the Zapatistas is best summarized by this statement, “For socialists, the justice of the EZLN's demands is not in doubt. The question is whether their politics and strategy offer a way forward in

Mexico

.”[13] Selfa’s assessment in 1997 is that, while maintaining that the aspirations of democratic control for the indigenous are worthy ones, the EZLN has organized primarily upon a Guevarist guerrilla structure and failed to coalesce the demands of the peasantry with those of urban workers, thus alienating the majority of

Mexico

’s population. An example of this is when they refused to sanction the Mexico City bus drivers’ struggle in 1995.[14] This is the primarily complaint leveled against them, but Selfa furthers the critique suggesting that they fail to seriously challenge capitalism and function primarily upon the “revolutionary nationalist tradition of Zapata and Villa” which does not allow room for socialist ideas. While the 1997 article can seem slightly sectarian, the 2005 reappraisal is less so. The fundamental analysis remains the same, but the style and approach differ. Instead of simply rejecting the Zapatista movement, Selfa begins by explaining that the Chiapas situation has opened up a new debate on the left which begs the question “What kind of political strategy is needed to win the demands of social movements and ordinary people?”[15] The article is much more critical of the three mainstream political parties (PAN, PRI, PRD), and presents the Zapatistas as an alternative. Yet, a new criticism is added to the previous stance; the fact that Zapatistas refuse to participate in any electoral politics whatsoever Selfa proclaims is a mistaken tactic. He concludes that a “revolutionary socialist organization” must stand independent of “Zapatismo, Guevarism or Mexican nationalism” for all Mexicans to achieve liberation.[16]

The antithesis of the Marxist-Leninist critique is exemplified by the Anarchist conception of the Zapatista uprising. The article by Andrew Flood entitled “What is it that is Different About the Zapatistas?” originally published in the journal Chiapas Revealed[17] but adopted by Flag.Blackened.net, a California based website which has “provided free web space for anarchist thinkers since 1997,”[18] summarizes the Anarchist position. Flood’s basic premise is that, while not providing a model for all situations, the Zapatistas represent an organic, participatory, and democratic struggle from below that negates the need for the Leninist vanguard party. Ignoring the fact that the vanguard concept, being that the most class-conscious members lead the others of their respective class, basically applies to the Zapatista situation, the Anarchist account is highly sympathetic to the movement and its principles. It quotes heavily from Subcommandante Marcos and draws upon his refutation of Marxism as a liberating ideology. He defends the Zapatistas principled stand against seeking state power and criticizes Leninist critiques by questioning why they ignore the democratic structures and organization of the Zapatistas. The democratic methods of organization, the anarchist view contends, are the most fundamental aspect to understanding and sympathizing with the movement. Flood provides a fleeting criticism of the undemocratic internal structure of the military wing of the EZLN, but explains this contradiction away by claiming that the army command is actually democratically controlled. He also dislikes the fact that the Zapatistas, while refusing to participate in electoral politics, believe that their direct democracy and the indirect representative forms of democracy can coexist peacefully. Lastly, he gives a brief criticism that the movement correctly disassociated itself with neoliberal, but fails to argue that land should go to those who work it rather than those who simply have a right to it because of traditional claims. Flood’s conclusion maintains that “power of the Zapatistas is the power of example” and that they represent an infinitely more democratic “authority” than anything which can be achieved from established institutions.[19]

Therefore, while the mainstream accounts of the Zapatistas are almost unanimously opposed to the democratic movement, the wide range of debate within the American left provides a much more thorough analysis of how informed Americans view the events in Chiapas. Each one is useful for understanding the dynamics of not only Chiapas and

Mexico

, but of how both the American establishment and social justice activists and radicals respond to them. The mainstream accounts, exemplified by the New York Times articles, betray the class biases of their corporate owners. The various left-wing analyses provide the basis upon which mainstream accounts can be refuted; more importantly, however, each account, in a unique fashion, provide absolutely vital critiques of the Zapatista movement. The non-aligned leftists are perhaps the least useful for this but most useful as propaganda pieces to challenge corporate hegemony on this issue. The Marxist-Leninist critique transcends the romantic post-modernist view and attempts to articulate why a movement which seriously incorporates working-class politics is essential. The anarchist critique, while ostensibly in opposition to the other analyses, also details, in a more sympathetic manner, some problems within the Zapatista movement that are not necessarily in opposition to either of the above currents of thought. All of these, in one way or another, promote much needed dialogue and debate on the left of how to best achieve a democratic society. These critiques help less to point a way forward for the Mexican left and the Zapatistas than for how the American left can organize and struggle for a truly democratic alternative.

[1] Roger Burbach, “Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas,” New Left Review, Issue 205, (May-June 1994), accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://newleftreview.org/?view=1755; Internet.

[2] Burbach, “Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion.”

[3] “A Commune in Chiapas?” Aufheben, Issue 9, Autumn 2000, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://libcom.org/library/commune-chiapas-zapatista-mexico; Internet.

[4] Lance Selfa, “Zapatistas Reenter the Political Fray,” International Socialist Review, Issue 44, (Nov-Dec 2005) accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://www.isreview.org/issues/44/zapatistas.shtml; Internet.

[5] “Shadowy Origins of Rebel Movement,” New York Times, Jan 17 1994, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb?did=116632022&sid=2&Fmt=10&clientId= 3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP; Internet.

[6] “Guerrillas Summon Peasants to Battle,” New York Times, Jan 17 1994, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb?did=116632023&sid=2&Fmt=10&clientId= 3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP

[7] “Guerrillas Strike, Then Fall Back,” New York Times, Jan 17 1994, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb?did=116632017&sid=2&Fmt=10&clientId= 3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP

[8] Julia Preston, “Rebels in Mexico Take a Town Hall Seized by Police,” New York Times, Apr 9 1999, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb?did= 117102839&sid=3&Fmt=10&clientId=3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP

[9] Tim Weiner, “Mexican Rebels Confront Tourism in Chiapas,” New York Times, March 9 2003, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb? did=866861262&sid=1&Fmt=10&clientId= 3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP

[10] James C. McKinley Jr., “The Zapatistas Return: A Masked Marxist on the Stump,” New York Times, Jan 6 2006, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://0-proquest.umi.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/pqdweb?did =1631610052&sid=7&Fmt=10&clientId= 3963&RQT=309&VName=HNP

[11] Burbach, “Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion.”

[12] Régis Debray, “A Guerrilla With a Difference,” New Left Review, Issue 218, (July-August 1996), accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://newleftreview.org/?view=1866; Internet.

[13] Lance Selfa, “Mexico After the Zapatista Uprising,” International Socialistm, Issue 75, (1997), accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj75/selfa.htm; Internet.

[14] Selfa, “Mexico After the Zapatista Uprising.”

[15] Lance Selfa, “Zapatistas Reenter the Political Fray.”

[16] Ibid.

[17] Andrew Flood, “What is it that is Different About the Zapatistas?” Chiapas Revealed, Issue 1, accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/comment/andrew_diff_feb01.html; Internet.

[18] “About Flag,” accessed 30 July 2009; available from http://flag.blackened.net/about/; Internet.

[19] Andrew Flood, “What is it that is Different About the Zapatistas?”

Speth's Bridge At the End of the World: Possibilities and Limitations

2010-11-18T19:23:00.000-05:00

James Gustave Speth, in The Bridge at the End of the World, articulates a percussive condemnation of the existing form of capitalism, or what Noam Chomsky refers to as “really existing free-market theory.” He argues that while small improvements have been made in local situations, the global economic order and the concomitant drive towards growth or, the principle tenet guiding the “secular religion of the state,” has maintained a disastrous record on global environmental issues. The environmental degradation that plagues Earth literally threatens human existence on a mass scale. Climate disruption, including global warming, deforestation, desertification, the loss of freshwater, and other serious environmental damage in being done by the dominant economic mode of production. Thus, Speth asserts that fundamental changes in the way the world functions and is organized are required to reduce the enormity of and rectify this precarious situation.

Although Speth advocates for, and weights the positives and negatives of, a variety of different ways to reverse the damaging effect of the capitalist mode of production, his primary emphasis is on the fundamental restructuring of the system as we know it. He argues, as many have before, that capitalism is an economic system that requires constant growth. The drive towards capital accumulation constitutes the “secular religion” of any business and corporation and, subsequently, it is what directs the state. Constant expansion, then, is an inherent tendency in the capitalist mode of production. While Marx originally located this fundamental aspect, arguing that capital accumulation eventually led to exploitation, overproduction, and crashes in the system, Lenin argued that the need for expansion led to imperialism and war. Speth, although not the first, continues this tradition by showing how the desire to produce for growth, and not for human need or environmental concern, leads to environmental destruction.

However, Speth does not begin with broad and radical changes. First, he maintains that a mix of environmental regulations and standards, along with market mechanisms, will provide a more beneficial outcome than just regulation. Interesting, he claims that “documented economic savings from cap and trade approaches…have been real and substantial.” This is an interesting claim, considering the progress of cap and trade in both Europe and the United States concerning reducing CO2 emissions have been negligent at best. Despite this, while Speth takes time to address various market mechanisms and other machinations, such as cap and trade, within the mainstream establishment, he makes it clear that these are important, but ancillary tools for reducing the damaging aspects of capitalism.

Speth argues that the environmental movement has made some important gains, but provides a serious critique of that movement as well, arguing that a new and “real” environmental movement, located within grassroots communities and recognizing the solidarity that must exist on global issues, is the hope for change. He identifies the characteristics of the “old” environmental movement. First, the old movement believes everything “can be solved within the system, typically with new policies, and more recently, by engaging in the corporate sector.” Second, it tends to be “pragmatic and incrementalist.” Third, it tends to “deal with the effects rather than the underlying causes.” It also relies on economic indicators and the “right cost,” maintains a sectarian approach to policy solutions, and “entrusts major action to expert bureaucracies.” These assertions are, on the whole, accurate. Therefore, Speth articulates the need to drastically break from this corporate, bureaucratic, and elite mode of organization. The “old movement” must be replaced with a new one, where GDP is not the main driving factor and economic concerns are not the main considerations. Instead, this new environmental movement ought to strive for a “post-growth society” where raw economic growth is replaced with growth in green jobs, health services, environmentally friendly public transit, nonmilitary government spending, etc. Speth spends a great deal of time tearing down the idea that GDP represents material well-being or happiness in a society. In this instance, and many others, Speth continually ties environmental well-being with human well-being.

Another primary features of his strategy involves corporations. The very nature of corporations, he argues, ought to be fundamentally changed from entities which exist to increase shareholder returns to things which exist to serve humanity. This would entail a serious re-writing of the modern corporation and bring a new meaning to a corporate charter. While Speth does not go so far as to argue for the elimination of corporations as illegitimate power structures, he does construct and impressive list of way to limit corporate power. He argues that corporate charters ought to be revoked or countries ought to expel corporations if they threaten the environment. Similarly, he maintains that limited liability ought to be rolled back and corporate personhood should be eliminated. Lastly, he asserts that politics ought to be free of corporate influence through campaign finance reform and corporate lobbying ought to be drastically reduced. These are all extremely progressive steps that could, and should, be taken in any society with a vestige of democracy left.

The strongest aspect of Speth’s work is his argument that society needs to rid itself of the economic model and values it currently abides by. He quotes William Robinson who argues that global capitalism is headed for a crisis because of overproduction, polarization, the crisis of state legitimacy and sustainability. Robinson is correct to point out that when an “organic crisis” of both “structural (objective)” and “hegemony (subjective)” nature, that change is possible. Change, however, can also lead to authoritarian or fascism and not necessarily towards progressive social change. It is important here to note that the concept of hegemony cannot be abstracted from political control. Ideological hegemony, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued, is intricately tied to political and economic control. Therefore, the grassroots environmental movements that Speth advocates for need to be a direct force that counters the hegemony of the dominant state apparatus and the ruling class. If a strong, leftist, radical alternative is not present when these fissures erupt in the ruling class legitimacy, crisis could allow for the galvanization of political and economic forces even worse than today. Finally, Speth maintains that a synthesis of localism and direct democracy are the only viable solutions to the global environmental problem. Although he does not provide a particular model for how direct democracy would function, he provides a fervent defense for the concept.

Speth articulates both a dystopian and utopian vision of the world in this book. For instance, his vision of the world as it currently exists, and as it would exist if it continues on the same trajectory, is an extremely depressing one. The notion of serious environmental catastrophe, the huge polarization of wealth, the highly deteriorated democratic institutions, the growth of corporate power, all of these things are dystopian to the extreme. They present a sad state of affairs, but Speth correctly points out that we need to be reminded of these things, because until we are aware of the scope of the problem, we cannot fix it. Thus, dystopia serves a purpose, because it is reflective of reality and acts, in the same way that Orwell or Huxley act, to warn people of the possible ramifications that may arise if we do not take action.

In the reverse, however, he also presents a utopian vision. Now, I feel I must clarify what I mean by this. I do not believe his vision is utopian because it involved a fundamental reorganization of society. On the contrary, I argue that this is the only way to achieve both human liberation and environmental sustainability. Instead, I believe his vision is utopian because he seems to think that simply the presence of a strong, grassroots environmental movement can make these changes without the dismantling of the power structures that currently exist. He points out that the institutions in U.S. society are highly undemocratic and need to be restructured, but appears to argue that this can be done without the organized power of the working class aimed at a revolutionary upheaval. I just do not see how, without directly challenging capitalism and having a commitment to a system to replace, that these power structures can be toppled. The need for a grassroots environmental movement with a focus on social justice is obvious, but what are the limits of this movement? Is it to reform corporations? To reduce the power of undemocratic institutions? These would be important victories, but they cannot take us all the way. I argue that a revolutionary organization, which understands that power rests in who provides the labor and who controls the means of production. Thus, until working people control the oil rigs, the fisheries, the factories, democracy, and sustainability, cannot be achieved. Workers, democratically deciding upon what to do with the resources at hand, can redirect resources from harmful industries and towards renewable energy and protective environmental measures. Until the profit-motive, and capitalism, is done away with, environmental sustainability is utopian. And I do not think an environmental movement alone has the potential dismantle the entire system of corporate power.

Despite the plethora of progressive reforms toward corporate power, Speth never actually challenges the legitimacy of corporations by questioning their source. Corporations are, by nature, illegitimate power structures and private tyrannies. The debate should revolve around why we need them at all. I tend to agree with his assertion that there needs to be a “democratization of wealth” and that a blend of localism and direct democracy are vitally needed. I, however, reject the notion that socialism is incapable of providing this. For instance, he argues that neighborhood assemblies in every rural, suburban, and urban district need to be created. This is true, but why shouldn't such important democratic decisions also be rooted in the workplace? In every revolutionary situation, where a “democratization of wealth” was desired, workers created workers’ councils where they decided how to organize society. This was true of France in 1968, Chile in 1973, Iran in 1979, and Poland in the 1980s. Working people, once organized, how their hands on the levers of power.

He is correct to point out both that the global justice or anti-capitalist movement “is stronger than many imagine and will grow stronger” and “the end of the Cold War…creates the political space for the questioning of today’s capitalism.” The latter is absolutely true, but this does not mean we should reject socialism or the democratic governance over the economic by the masses of working people. What existed in the Soviet Union, Cuba, or China had little to do with socialism. Most socialists know that. However, this also does not mean that we can revert to vacuous social democratic positions and argue that social changes comes through incremental and piecemeal reforms. As the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg explained:

[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society, they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.

I believe this is true of the environmental movement. We cannot simply hope for small reforms of the current existing system. We cannot even rely purely on the ideas, however progressive they are, provided by Speth about limiting corporate power and making corporations work for human good. The “conquest of political power and social revolution” by working people, who have to live with the day-to-day effects of environmental degradation, are the ones who can reverse it. Until then, a “post-growth” society is unrealizable, and any reform can be averted, rolled back, or simply dismissed by illegitimate structures of power. Speth is right in arguing for a grassroots environmental movement, and he is right in linking that movement with social justice, but he is incorrect in assuming that a fundamental restructuring of society can be done with the “conquest of political power and social revolution” that we need to do it.

Support Our Veterans, Bring Them Home!

2010-11-11T19:23:00.002-05:00

For Veteran's day this year, instead of empty slogans, perhaps we ought to consider "Supporting our Troops" in other ways, like bringing them home to their families and not forcing them into situations where they must maim and kill innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the other places in the world where U.S. military force is employed.

I have compiled a brief list of resources that I think may help dispel the myth that support for veterans ought to be equated with supporting the imperialist ventures manifest in U.S. foreign policy. I hope these will be using in countering the dominant hegemony around ultra-jingiostic days like today, and help us see that it is not foreign citizens or critics of imperial policy that are the enemies of U.S. troops, but the leaders who will push them into war with callous regard for their safety, their lives, or their families.

First, here is succinct Noam Chomsky clip discussing the purpose of empty slogans like "Support Our Troops." I think he makes a compelling argument that, in reality, they simply do not mean anything:

Second, here is some audio and some written excerpts of Michael Parenti's "Superpatriotism," which provides a percussive blow to the Superpatriots who proclaim that all glory goes to the nation-state and should take the shape of uncritical support of that particular state's foreign policy aims:

"Superpatriots are those people who place national pride and American supremacy above every other public consideration, those who follow leaders uncritically, especially in their war policies abroad. Superpatriotism is the nationalistic hype propagated by officialdom, the media, and various flag-waving groups.

Michael Parenti demonstrates how superpatriotism attaches itself to religion, sports, the military, the schools, and big business. He questions whether its top politico-economic propagators are themselves really patriotic, given how they evade taxes, export our jobs, pollute our land, and plunder the public treasury.

With incisive probing, fine style, and humorous touch, Parenti treats such urgent questions as: What does it mean to love one’s country? Why is it so important to be Number One? What determines America’s “greatness?” And are we really God's gift to humanity? He examines how US leaders and the corporate media fan the flames of fear to win support for huge arms budgets, global aggrandizement, and the suppression of political dissent at home and abroad.

Finally, Parenti poses an alternative to superpatriotism, arguing that the real patriots are those who care enough to educate themselves about our country’s history and its present plight. He reminds us that it is not “anti-American” to criticize unjust social conditions at home or oppose global policies pursued by our rulers. Rather it is our democratic right and patriotic duty to do so."

Audio of Michael Parenti's Talk on Superpatriotism

Third, here is a fantastic, powerful documentary called "Sir, No Sir!" that shows Vietnam veterans speaking out against U.S. empire and dismantling the myth of "superpatriot" soldiers who mindlessly go into battle pursuing U.S. hegemony:

The full-length 2005 film "Sir, No Sir!"

Lastly, here is the page to Iraq Veterans Against the War. Here is a very brief outline of their program.

The mission of IVAW is to mobilize the military community to withdraw its support for the war and occupation in Iraq. To achieve its mission, IVAW emphasizes three distinct goals:

Immediate Withdrawal

Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq

Reparations

Reparations for the human and structural damages suffered in Iraq so that the peoples there might regain their right to self-determination.

Full Benefits

Full benefits, adequate healthcare (including mental health), and other supports for returning servicemen and women.

Iraq Veterans Against the War has also passed resolutions opposing the war in Afghanistan, in support of non-violence, and opposing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

Also, please go here to view a far more in-depth, articulate account of their opposition to U.S. wars.

The best way we can honor our soldiers is by bringing them home to their families and loved ones, supplying them with the adequate healthcare to combat the horrors of war and the resulting PTSD and increased depression, and by providing reparations to the countries that these young men and women were forced to go over and wreak havoc upon. Let's remember the veterans who have been pushed into fighting and dieing, but let us remember alongside them the innocent civilians, the mothers and daughters, the fathers and sons, who have been witnessed the cold hand of death take away their loved ones and family members.