See the Guardian's coverage here, which has included articles by Amy Goodman and others in support of the protesters. See also the Guardian's criticism of U.S. media, particularly the NY Times, for hardly noting the protests at all. See pictures here. There are, to be sure, plenty of things to quibble about re: the tactics of the protesters, but the general thrust of the phenomenon is right on: tax the rich, end the wars, no cuts to social programs.
Showing posts with label protest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label protest. Show all posts
Monday, September 26, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
De la indignación a la revolución
Esta revuelta tiene elementos de gran importancia. En primer lugar, ha roto con el pesimismo generalizado; ha creado, con su ejemplo, un nuevo ambiente que nos señala que la gente puede y tiene ganas de luchar. En segundo lugar, nos muestra la capacidad de involucración, creatividad y organización colectiva que tenemos aquellas personas a quienes más nos afecta la crisis. Al mismo tiempo las acampadas, con sus asambleas, están señalando lo que puede ser una democracia real, organizada desde abajo; muestran en la práctica que hay alternativas al parlamentarismo y al “votar cada cuatro años”. Por último, tiene un alto contenido de reclamaciones anticapitalistas, pidiendo alternativas concretas y globales al sistema actual. La palabra revolución ha pasado a formar parte del vocabulario cuotidiano de miles de activistas.(via En Lucha)
Thursday, January 27, 2011
US State Dept: Egypt Not Ready for Democracy
(Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for this video). Al Jazeera is great. Wow. How refreshing is it to see an anchor actually take a clear look at what's going on in the world.
Yes, doesn't this make it clear just how much of a beacon from "freedom" and "democracy" the US is all over the globe? Every time there has been a progressive uprising anywhere, they have tried to sabotage it or put on the brakes. To tell the Egyptian people that they should take it easy and put on the brakes is beyond offensive, particularly given Washington's relationship with the repressive, autocratic Mubarak regime.
Now, Washington isn't stupid. Of course, Obama will come out and say something vague about the need for reform and blah blah. But the facts are rather clear cut here:
"The U.S. does not want to see the Egyptian regime fall any time soon,’’ Hamid said in a telephone interview. “But people who are protesting, the tens of thousands, do want to see the regime fall some time soon. They are diametrically opposed interests."It hardly needs repeating that Mubarak has been propped up single-handedly by the US, from whom he receives the tidy sum of $1.3 billion each year (his regime received the annual aid every year since 1979, and he's been president since 1981... you do the math). The US doesn't do that for nothing- and it's not as though they don't already know that the $$ they give to Mubarak has been used to torture and repress the Egyptian people in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of military aid from the US behind Israel, and a close third is Colombia, the most right-wing and repressive government in all of South America by a large margin.
It will be interesting to watch how much longer the US foreign policy elite can successfully walk this delicate tight rope of sponsoring Mubarak's repression while appearing to take a "moderate" stance vis-a-vis the protesters who are demanding real democracy and freedom.
Obama has come out and patronizingly admonished the Egyptian protestors to be "peaceful". "Violence is not the answer" he said. It's interesting that someone who has authorized far more drone bombings than Bush is all of the sudden a fan of avoiding violence. It's interesting that someone who gladly has paid for and loaded the weapons being used against the protesters should have the audacity to tell the protesters to "calm down". It's interesting he's all of the sudden for "non violence" given that Obama, "winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has, ...in his first eleven months in office, ordered troop escalations in Afghanistan of 21,000 and 30,000, to effectively double the U.S. fighting force—while military contractors will continue to outnumber those in uniform." As unemployment tears through millions of lives accross the US, Obama still found it in his heart to increase war funding by $100 billion in 2010. That's a lot of money to spend on devices and training devoted to exterminating human beings in a foreign country. Funny that such a person can be taken seriously for suddenly coming out in support of "peace".
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Seymour on the "fear of democracy"
DEMOCRACY IS supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to.Read the rest at SW.org.
In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.
Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure--by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy.
Frances Fox Piven (along with her late partner Richard Cloward) has long argued that the electoral-representative system is most democratic when the working class and the poor are deliberately disruptive--when they are organized, but not institutionalized.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The Cavalry Attacks
(via Lenin's Tomb): The pigs ride in on horseback to attack and disperse students in the UK protesting the brutal cuts that are being made to education.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Black Bloc Follow Up
The Black Bloc, political tactics and resistance have all been on my mind a lot lately, and I'm beginning to think that my initial reaction to the G20 protests may have been a touch impulsive. I still stand by worries about political groups committed, in advance of a serious contextual analysis of the situation, to confrontational tactics (and I still stand by my worries with the folks who endorse "The Coming Insurrection" stuff). But, other things being equal, if the planners of the G20 summits have to worry about confrontations and mayhem everywhere they go, that's OK with me. But I still need to think more about where I stand on groups that embed themselves within larger protests and then spring into action to confront police without ever consulting the other members of the protest. I don't think, however, that responding to all criticisms with charges of "paternal scolding" is enough to help those on the fence come to a reasoned position on the matter. But I do think there are complex questions here and I'm not sure where I stand on all of them.
Having said all of this, I'd like to make clear that whatever one says about the BB'ers, any serious person on the Left stands with them against bullshit like this or this, not to speak of countless other attacks by police.
Monday, July 5, 2010
A Critique of the "Black Bloc"
From Louis Proyect's blog, here's an excerpt:
It should be clear that the actions of the black bloc reflect their politics. The actions in Toronto mirror those tactics used elsewhere. The tactics and politics regardless of their intent are inherently elitist and counter-productive. In fact they mirror the critique of reformism many on the left have. The NDP says vote for us and we’ll do it for you, the black bloc says in essence the same thing – we will make the revolution for you.At best the tactics of the black bloc are based on a mistaken idea that the attacks on property and the police will create a spark to encourage others to resist capitalism, at worst they are based on a rampant individualistic sense of rage and entitlement to express that rage regardless of the consequences to others. The anti-authoritarian politic they follow is imposed on others. Very rarely will you see a black bloc call its own rally, instead the tactic is to play hide and seek with the police under the cover of larger mobilizations.
Further as has been noted in many cases, the tactics and politics of the black bloc and some anarchists and some others on the left, leave them prone to being manipulated by the state. In almost every summit protest, police and others (in Genoa it was also fascists), infiltrate or form their own blocs to engage in provocations. The politics of secrecy and unannounced plans and a quasi-military (amateur at best) approach to demonstrations leave the door open to this.
The tactics also open the door for the justification of further police repression. This has been debated before, with some arguing that the state doesn’t need justification for repression. The idea that the state doesn’t need justification for further repression exposes the total lack of understanding of both the state and the consciousness of ordinary people.
Read the rest here.
I think this basically sums it up. Their politics are undialectical: they pretend as though the same tactics (smashing windows, etc.) are to be employed in every circumstance no matter the conditions or the consequences. This is fetishism of tactics, pure and simple, which cannot but be a mistake: tactics are always means to ends, not ends in themselves. The only way to know anything about tactics is to learn from history and experience and to assess the consequences and the conditions involved in a particular situation. None of this seems to figure into the provocations of the BB'ers.
Now I'm not convinced they've thought this far ahead, but if their view is that smashing windows and burning cars is the most effective way to win other people over to anti-capitalist politics, this just seems false.
Evidently, there are sophisticated defenses (I concede that these are secondhand- a thorough examination of the BB'ers would take a look at their own arguments) of Black Bloc-ism out there, e.g. that the BB makes clear what everyone else fails to see: that the state has a monopoly of violence with potent enforcement mechanisms. Then there's the argument that the BB exposes the implication of peaceful protesters with power by demonstrating how the former consent to co-exist with the latter. Both of the arguments fall flat. For starters, every school child knows that the state has a monopoly on violence. So the BB'ers are hardly showing anyone anything that they didn't already know. And what follows from realizing that the state has a monopoly on violence (it wouldn't be one if it didn't)? Does this help us to better understand power in contemporary capitalist societies? Not really. And since when was the point of recent protest efforts in the US supposed to be to challenge the state's monopoly on violence? Since when was this the goal of social movements on the ground? As far as I can tell, outside of genuine revolutionary situations, this is never the point of a protest. Were the massive 2006 MayDay mega-marches against xenophobia in the US directed toward breaking the state's monopoly of force? Were such protests therefore implicated in sustaining the legitimacy of the existing order of things?
The recent events at the G20 remind me of a similar situation at Hunter College in Manhattan a couple of months ago. Those jerks actually attacked other Left protesters fighting the budget cuts and they destroyed public property at CUNY!
I myself am not plugged into anarchist circles, but I would be curious to know what many of them, particularly the theoretically sophisticated and reasonably organized groups, think about the BB stuff. My sense is that it goes without saying that the diverse anarchist movement in the US alone is not necessarily on board with the provocateur tactics of the BB.
Finally, doesn't this whole Black Bloc thing reek of jock-strap machismo? I don't have anything else interesting to say about this, but it does seem to me that there's some testosterone-heavy stuff going on with the BB confrontations with Cops. There's certainly a gendered element to their uncompromising endorsement of violent provocations and the way in which they seem to like the "combat" with police for its own sake.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Excellent "Lenin" post on the Iranian elections and the protests
It's even-handed and thoughtful, which is not something I can say about almost everything else I've read recently on the topic. The most helpful point that he makes is to emphatically say that the demands of the protesters are not identical to those of Mousavi, on the contrary, they are more ambitious and radically democratic. Of course, although the post doesn't explicitly say much about this, some Leftists have taken the barrage of hysterical press in the big Western consensus media and merely negated it (i.e. they defend Ahmedinejad as an anti-imperialist). The result is every bit as vulgar (and, dare I say, worse) as the histrionics and facile analysis one finds in corporate news outlets. "Lenin's" post is refreshing.
Read it here.
Also there is a Zizek piece circulating on Iran, which you can read here. Again, it also makes the (poignant, in my view) point that anyone who fails to grasp the emancipatory potential of the present Iranian protest movement, whatever its limitations, is politically bankrupt. (Also -Zizek calls Ahmedinejad the "Iranian Berlusconi" which strikes me as probably true).
Thursday, January 29, 2009
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