Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow

By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

Nov 1, 2011 - It's a little hard to give a Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at an Occupy meeting. There are mixed feelings that go along with it. First of all, regret that Howard is not here to take part and invigorate it in his particular way, something that would have been the dream of his life, and secondly, excitement that the dream is actually being fulfilled. It’s a dream for which he laid a lot of the groundwork. It would have been the fulfillment of a dream for him to be here with you.

The Occupy movement really is an exciting development. In fact, it's spectacular. It's unprecedented; there's never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations that are being established at these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead -- because victories don't come quickly-- this could turn out to be a very significant moment in American history.

The fact that the demonstrations are unprecedented is quite appropriate. It is an unprecedented era -- not just this moment -- but actually since the 1970s. The 1970s began a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society with ups and downs. But the general progress was toward wealth and industrialization and development -- even in dark and hope -- there was a pretty constant expectation that it's going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I'm just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s, although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that we're going to get out of it, even among unemployed people. It'll get better. There was a militant labor movement organizing, CIO was organizing. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are very frightening to the business world. You could see it in the business press at the time. A sit-down strike was just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. Also, the New Deal legislations were beginning to come under popular pressure. There was just a sense that somehow we're going to get out of it.

It’s quite different now. Now there’s kind of a pervasive sense of hopeless, or, I think, despair. I think it’s quite new in American history and it has an objective basis. In the 1930s unemployed “working people” could anticipate realistically that the jobs are going to come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today -- and the unemployment level in manufacturing today is approximately like the Depression -- if current tendencies persist, then those jobs aren’t going to come back. The change took place in the '70s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying reasons, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Bernard, who has done a lot of work on it, is a falling rate of profit. That, with other factors, led to major changes in the economy -- a reversal of the 700 years of progress towards industrialization and development. We turned to a process of deindustrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued, but overseas (it’s very profitable, but no good for the workforce). Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise, producing things people need, to financial manipulation. Financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

Before the '70s, banks were banks. They did what banks are supposed to do in a capitalist economy: take unused funds, like, say, your bank account, and transfer them to some potentially useful purpose, like buying a home or sending your kid to college. There were no financial crises. It was a period of enormous growth; the largest period of growth in American history, or maybe in economic history. It was sustained growth in the '50s and '60s and it was egalitarian. So the lowest percentile did as well as the highest percentile. A lot of people moved into reasonable lifestyles -- what’s called here “middle class” (working class is what it’s called in other countries).

It was real. The '60s accelerated it. The activism of the '60s, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent. They’re not changing. The '70s came along and suddenly there’s sharp change to industrialization and the offshoring of production. The shifting to financial institutions, which grew enormously. Also in the '50s and '60s there was the development of what became several decades later the high-tech economy. Computers, Internet, the IT revolution was mostly developed in the '50 and the '60s, and substantially in the state sector. It took a couple of decades before it took off, but it was developed then.

The 1970s set off a kind of a vicious cycle that led to a concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector, which doesn’t benefit the economy. Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, which, in turn, arrives to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The physical policies such as tax changes, rules of corporate governance, deregulation were essentially bipartisan. Alongside of this began a very sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drives the political parties even deeper than before into the pockets of the corporate sector.

A couple years later started a different process. The parties dissolved, essentially. It used to be if you were a person in Congress and hoped for a position of committee chair or a position of responsibility, you got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, you started to have to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector and increasingly the financial sector--a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the literally top 1/10th of 1 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, for the general population it began an open period of pretty much stagnation, or decline for the majority. People got by through pretty artificial means -- like borrowing, so a lot of debt. Longer working hours for many. There was a period of stagnation and a higher concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve. There’s always been a gap between public policy and the public will, but it just grew kind of astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact.

Take a look at what’s happening right now. The big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on is the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not much of an issue. The issue is joblessness, not a deficit. Now there’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, if you want to pay attention to it, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls and the public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply during this stagnation period, this period of decline. The public wants higher taxes on the wealthy and to preserve the limited social benefits. The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. Either they’ll reach an agreement, which will be the opposite of what the public wants, or else it will go into kind of an automatic procedure which is going to have those effects. Actually that’s something that’s going to happen very quickly. The deficit commission is going to come up with its decision in a couple of weeks. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger in the heart of the country, and having negative effects.

Without going on with details, what’s being played out for the last 30 years is actually a kind of a nightmare that was anticipated by the classical economists. If you take an Adam Smith, and bother to read Wealth of Nations, you see that he considered the possibility that the merchants and manufacturers in England might decide to do their business abroad, invest abroad and import from abroad. He said they would profit but England would be harmed. He went on to say that the merchants and manufacturers would prefer to operate in their own country, what’s sometimes called a “home bias.” So, as if by an invisible hand, England would be saved the ravage of what’s called “neoliberal globalization.”

That’s a pretty hard passage to miss. In his classic Wealth of Nations, that’s the only occurrence of the phrase “invisible hand.” Maybe England would be saved from neoliberal globalization by an invisible hand. The other great classical economist David Ricardo recognized the same thing and hoped it wouldn’t happen. Kind of a sentimental hope. It didn’t happen for a long time, but it’s happening now. Over the last 30 years that’s exactly what’s underway. For the general population -- the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movement --it’s really harsh and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent, or furthermore 1/10th of 1 percent, it’s just fine. They’re at the top, richer and more powerful than ever in controlling the political system and disregarding the public, and if it can continue, then sure why not? This is just what Smith and Ricardo warned about.

So pick Citigroup, for decades one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations. It was repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer over and over again starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through all the corruption. You probably know it, and it’s astonishing. A couple of years ago they came out with a brochure for investors. They urged investors to put their money in what they call the “plutonomy index.” The world is dividing into a plutonomy, the rich and so on. That’s where the action is. They said their plutonomy index is way outperforming the stock market, so put your money into it. And as for the rest? We set them adrift. We don’t really care about them and we don’t need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state to protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but they essentially have no function. It’s sometimes called these days the “precariat,” people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. It’s not the periphery anymore; it’s becoming a very substantial part of the society in the United States and indeed elsewhere.

This is considered a good thing. For example, when Alan Greenspan was still “St. Alan,” hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this is before the crash for which he is substantially responsible for), he was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years explaining the wonders of the great economy. He said much of this economy was based on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re “precariat” and living precarious existences, then they’re not going to make demands, they won’t make wages, they won’t get benefits and we can kick them out if we don’t like them, and that’s good for the health of the economy. That’s what’s called a healthy economy technically and he was highly praised for this.

Well, now the world is indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat, again in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The plutonomy is where the action is. It could continue like this, and if it does, then this historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. The Occupy movements are the first major popular reaction which could avert this. It’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to go on and form structures that will be sustained through hard times and can win major victories. There are a lot of things that can be done.

I mentioned before that in the 1930s one of the most effective actions was a sit-down strike. The reason was very simple: it’s just a step below a takeover of the industry. Through the '70s, as the decline was setting in, there were some very important events that took place. One was in the late '70s. In 1977, US Steel decided to close one of its major facilities, Youngstown, Ohio, and instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from US Steel and hand it over to the workforce to run and turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win, but with enough popular support they could have won. It was a partial victory because even though they lost it set off other efforts now throughout Ohio and other places.

There’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of not-so-small worker owned or partially worker-owned industries which could become worker-managed. That’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place. It’s happening here, too. In one of the suburbs of Boston something similar happened. A multi-national decided to shut down a productive, functioning and profitable manufacturing company because it was not profitable enough for them. The workforce and union offered to buy it and take it over and run it themselves, but the multi-national decided to close it down instead probably for reasons of class consciousness. I think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like this movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

There are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them were major. Not long ago, Obama took over the auto industry. It’s basically owned by the public. There were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done. It could be reconstituted so it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership and continue on its traditional path. The other possibility was they could have handed it over to the workforce and turned it into worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a major part of the economy and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need. We all know or should know that the US is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation. That’s very serious. It affects people’s lives and it affects the economy. It’s a very serious business.

I have a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple months ago and ended up in southern France and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to the airport in Paris and it took two hours. That’s the same distance as Washington to Boston. It’s a scandal. It could be done; we have the capacity to do it, like a skilled workforce. It would have taken a little popular support. That could have been a major change in the economy. Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rails for the United States. This could have been done right in the Rust Belt, which is being closed down. There’s no economic reason this can’t happen. These are class reasons and the lack of political mobilization.

There are very dangerous developments in the international arena, including two of them which are kind of a shadow that hangs over almost everything we discuss. There are, for the first time to human history, real threats to peace and survival of the species. One has been hanging around since 1945 and it’s kind of a miracle we’ve escaped it and that’s the threat of nuclear weapons. That’s a threat that’s being escalated by the administration and its allies. Something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble. The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Every country in the world is taking at least halting steps toward trying to do something about it. The US is also taking steps, namely to accelerate the threat. The US is now the only country that’s not only not doing something constructive…it’s not climbing on the train. It’s pulling it backwards.

Congress is right now reversing legislation instituted by the Nixon administration. (Nixon was really the last liberal president of the United States, and literally, this shows you what’s been going on!) They’re dismantling the limited measures the Nixon administration took to try to do something about what’s a growing and emerging catastrophe. This is connected with a huge propaganda system, perfectly openly declared by the business world, that it’s all just a liberal hoax. Why pay attention to these scientists? We’re really regressing back to the Medieval period. It’s not a joke. If that’s happening to the most powerful and richest country in history then this crisis is not going to be averted and all of this we’re talking about won’t matter in a generation or two. All of that’s going on right now and something has to be done about it very soon and in a dedicated and sustained way. It’s not going to be easy to succeed. There are going to be barriers, hardships and failures along the way. Unless the process that’s taking place here and around the world, unless that continues to grow and kind of becomes a major social force in the world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Q&A

Q: What about corporate personhood and getting the money out of that stream of politics?

A: These are very good things to do, but you can’t do any of these things or anything else unless there’s a very large and active base. If the Occupy movement was the leading force in the country then you could move it forward. Most people don’t know that this is happening or they may know about it and not know what it is. Among those who do know, the polls show there’s a lot of support. But that assigns a task. It’s necessary to get out into the country and get people to understand what this is about and what they can do about and what the consequences are of not doing anything about it.

Corporate personhood is a good point, but pay attention to what it is. We’re supposed to worship the Constitution these days, but the 5th Amendment of the Constitution says no person shall be deprived of rights without due process of law. The founding fathers didn’t mean “person” when they said “person.” For example there were a lot of creatures of flesh and blood who were not persons. The entire indigenous population was not considered persons. They didn’t have any rights. There was a category of creatures called 3/5 human -- they weren’t persons and didn’t have rights. Women were not entirely persons, so they didn’t have full rights. A lot of this was somewhat rectified over the years. During the Civil War, the 14th amendment raised the 3/5 to full humans at least in principle, but that was only in principle.

Now over the following years the concept of person was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established by the courts and the state. These “persons” later became the management of corporations; the management of corporations became “persons.” Of course, that’s not what the 14th amendment says. It’s also narrowed to undocumented workers. They had to be excluded from the category of persons. That’s happening right now. So legislation like this goes two ways. They defined persons to include corporate persons, which by now have rights beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others. They exclude people who flee from Central America where the US devastated their homelands, flee from Mexico because they can’t compete with the US’s highly subsidized agro-business. When NAFTA was passed in 1994, the Clinton administration understood pretty well that it was going to devastate the Mexican economy, so they started militarizing the border. So we’re seeing the consequences. So these people have to be excluded from the category of persons.

So when you talk about personhood, that’s right, but there’s more than one aspect to it. It ought to be pushed forward and it ought to be understood, but that requires a mass base. It requires that the population understands this and is committed to it. It’s easy to think of a lot of things that should be done, but they all have a prerequisite – namely a mass popular base that’s there that’s committed to implementing them.

Q: What about the ruling class in America? How likely is it that they’ll have an open fascist system here?

A: I think it’s very unlikely frankly. They don’t have the force. About a century ago, in the freest countries in the world, Britain and the United Sates at the time, the dominant classes came to understand that they can’t control the population by force any longer. Too much freedom had been won by struggles like these, and they realized it. It’s discussed in their literature. They recognize that they’re going to have to shift their tactics to control of attitudes and beliefs instead of just the cudgel. It can’t do what it used to do. You have to control attitudes and beliefs. In fact that’s when the public relations industry began. It began in the United States and England. The free countries where you had to control beliefs and attitudes, to induce consumerism, to induce passivity, apathy and distraction. It’s a barrier, but it’s a lot easier to overcome than torture and the Gestapo. I don’t think the circumstances are any longer there to institute anything like what we call fascism.

Q: You mentioned earlier that sit-down protests are just a precursor to a takeover of industry. Would you advocate a general strike as a tactic moving forward? Would you ever if asked allow for your voice to relay the democratically chosen will of our nation?

A: You don’t want leaders; you want to do it yourself. We need representation and you should pick it yourselves. It should be recallable representation.

The question of a general strike is like the others. You can think of it as a possible idea at a time when the population is ready for it. We can’t sit here and declare a general strike, obviously. There has to be approval and a willingness to take the risks on the part of a large mass of the population. That takes organization, education and activism. Education doesn’t just mean telling people what to believe. It means learning yourself. There’s a Karl Marx quote: “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” There’s a variant of that which should be kept in mind, “If you want to change the world in a certain direction you better try to understand it first.”

Understanding it doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that is helpful. It comes through learning. Learning comes from participation. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. You have to gain the experience and understanding which will make it possible to maybe implement ideas as a tactic. There’s a long way to go. This doesn’t happen by the flick of a wrist. It happens from a long, dedicated work. I think in many ways the most exciting aspect of the Occupy movements is just the construction of these associations and bonds that are taking place all over. Out of that if they can be sustained can come expansion to a large part of the population that doesn’t know what’s going on. If that can happen, then you can raise questions about tactics like this, which could very well at some point be appropriate.

*This transcript has been edited slightly for clarity. To read the full address, click here.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152933/ [w1]

How to deal with the police is a point of dispute between Social Democratic Anarchists and Communist Anarchists (photo: Thomas Good/NLN, Creative Commons)

'Social Democratic Anarchists',

'Communist Anarchists' and the

Occupy Wall Street Movement

By Left Eye on Books

SolidarityEconomy.net via lefteyeonbooks.com

Oct 23, 2011 - A division exists within the leaderless communities at the heart of the Occupy protests. I would describe this as a split between Social Democratic Anarchists and Communist Anarchists.

I use these two terms provocatively, knowing that most of those I refer to would not describe themselves as either. Neither the terms Social Democrat or Communist are especially popular in the U.S., and the latter is often associated with small left-wing sects that those I describe as Communist Anarchists have a low opinion of.

It also lately seems that the term “anarchist” is becoming unfashionable again. The terms are meant to indicate both continuity and rupture with the historical left. Since 1917, Social Democracy and Communism referred to two different paths of change. Social Democrats believed in reforming capitalism, so that its benefits would be shared more equitably. Communists believed in overthrowing capitalism. Both created disciplined, bureaucratic organizations to achieve their goals. Both believed attaining state power was crucial, either through elections — usually the path of Social Democrats — or armed struggle — more associated with Communists. Although they often vituperatively denounced each other, they could sometimes work together, as was the case in the 1930s in the U.S., when New Deal reformers, who closely resembled Social Democrats, were strengthened by the organizing efforts of Communists.

Today, we see similar splits, in the U.S. and all over the world, in the context of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related movements.  Some — undoubtedly the majority of participants in the U.S. — wish to reform capitalism. Others would like to destroy capitalism.

However, in two crucial respects the participants in the movement–reformers and revolutionaries alike — differ from the old left. They all eschew bureaucratic forms of organization in favor of leaderless modes of organizing. And they all believe that building power from below is more important than strategizing about how to attain and exercise state power. That is why I describe them as “anarchists”, even if they might not adopt that label themselves. Over the next five to ten years, some of these movements may develop electoral wings, but it is difficult to imagine them attaching to these wings the same lofty hopes and dreams that characterized the old left.

So how do these divisions play out in the current movement?

Social Democratic Anarchists are associated with the General Assemblies, including a strong belief that assembly decisions are binding, endorsing practices like “consensus decision-making” and “non-violence”, and shouting slogans such as “oppose corporate greed”,”we are the 99%” and “the police are part of the 99%”. In practice, they have adopted anarchist tactics, such as leaderless assemblies and direct action (i.e. occupying parks) to advance a reformist agenda including re-regulation of the banks and jobs programs. Even as there is uneasiness about signing on to a single list of demands, and no real clue as to how such a leaderless, decentralized movement might endorse such a list, it seems apparent that most demands would be drawn from the left-liberal playbook. I should note that without a large movement out in the street pressuring the administration from the left, it is unlikely if not inconceivable that such reforms will be implemented in the U.S. It is a paradoxical movement, attempting to create a fairly disciplined force without leaders, but largely pursuing state oriented policies. Right wing columnist Charles Krauthammer was not far off when he described OWS, which is dominated by Social Democratic Anarchists, as “big government anarchists”.

The Communist Anarchists are much less visible, and many are ambivalent about OWS.  Some catchphrases associated with them include “autonomous action”, “diversity of tactics”, “anti-capitalism”, and “the police are the tools of the ruling class.” “Autonomous action” and “diversity of tactics” refer to principles that undermine the authority of the General Assembly and its frequent invocation of non-violence and even unease with violating laws. Even though OWS has successfully defied the mayor of New York City and remains in the park,the General Assembly continues to use the “human microphone”, which makes discussion slow and painful. Occupied Oakland, where Communist Anarchists are stronger, just ignores the rules against amplified sound. Rather than advocating a set of reformist laws, Communist Anarchists try to dissolve the system and socialize the wealth from the bottom up, through such actions as squatting abandoned buildings and ignoring copyright laws.  Nevertheless, they are not exactly dogmatically anti-state, inasmuch as they fight to maintain institutions like libraries, and demand free services including higher education and mass transit.

Perhaps predictably, there is not much love lost between Social Democratic Anarchists and Communist Anarchists. The former have been known to tell journalists that they regard the Communist Anarchists as paid provocateurs.  The Social Democratic Anarchists have shouted down those advocating no cooperation with the police at general assemblies. The Communist Anarchists often heap contempt on the phrase “We are the 99%”, which they see as obscuring class and racial differences except for those between the 1% and the 99%, and implicitly prioritizing the needs of the falling middle class over the more genuinely precarious at the bottom. They sometimes intimate that the social democratic anarchists are becoming, if they are not already, tools of the reformist ruling class which seeks to dampen, rather than spur, rebellion.

Yet, and this is not so apparent to either side, they have in some ways productively strengthened each other. Although it is rarely stated, a major inspiration for Occupy Wall Street was the Occupy Berkeley movement of 2009, where Communist Anarchists played a prominent role.  It is hard to see how the occupy practice could have gone national without being toned down, as the Social Democrat Anarchists proceeded to do with Occupy Wall Street, promoted by the magazine Adbusters.  But notwithstanding the seemingly marginal role that Communist Anarchists play in OWS, they have in fact been crucial to the movement’s growth. The unruly marches that produced over-responses from the police, and, as a result, massive publicity and sympathy for the movement, were unruly largely because anarchist communists ignored prescriptions to stay within legal boundaries, i.e. remain on the sidewalk. The swelling numbers attracted to the OWS are largely drawn to the Social Democrat Anarchists, but they’ve also increased the numbers of Communist Anarchists.

And this screw will probably turn yet again in the near future. OWS is about to run into something of a brick wall. No reform measures are likely in the near future in the U.S. The next election cycle will more likely weaken the prospects for reforms (with Republican gains in congress and, possibly, a Republican president) than strengthen them. It is not clear, to say the least, that the Social Democrat Anarchists have any strategy in mind besides calling for more demonstrations. This will start to wear down their supporters.

But in other countries, where this dynamic has already advanced a little further, the Communist Anarchists do have a response. The strategy devolves action away from the cumbersome General Assembly to neighborhood assemblies which take direct action against foreclosures, or hospital closings, or perhaps support striking workers. These “autonomous actions” may prove attractive to those tired of ineffectual demonstrations. We may see something like this in some cities in the U.S.

At one end, efforts to include more and more people in movements can collapse into “everyone ultimately shares the same values” platitudes. At the other, radicalism can plow into the “fight the people”, misanthropic cul-de-sac. Between those, there is some room to simultaneously stake one’s position about the best strategies and tactics for the moment, while recognizing that those who come to different conclusions may be allies, rather than police provocateurs or Trojan horses for the ruling class.

Ultimately, the fate of each wing of the movement will be decided in good part by the ability of the American state to reform itself. To the degree that reforms can be incorporated which dampen inequality and restore some sense of fairness for a substantial majority, the more radical, Communist Anarchist wing will find itself marginalized and isolated. Contrarily, if it is unable to do so, reformist Social Democratic Anarchists will likely find themselves losing the hearts and minds of activists to the more radical tendency. Just to get to this point, however, the movement will need to grow in both numbers and militancy.

Occupy Wall Street Protesters

Are Fed Up With Both Parties

SolidarityEconomy.net via AP

NEW YORK, Oct 6 2011 -- Their chief target is Wall Street, but many of the demonstrators in New York and across the U.S. also are thoroughly disgusted with Washington, blaming politicians of both major parties for policies they say protect corporate America at the expense of the middle class.

"At this point I don't see any difference between George Bush and Obama. The middle class is a lot worse than when Obama was elected," said John Penley, an unemployed legal worker from Brooklyn.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last month with a small number of young people pitching a tent in front of the New York Stock Exchange, has expanded nationally and drawn a wide variety of activists, including union members and laid-off workers. Demonstrators marched Thursday in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Anchorage, Alaska, carrying signs with slogans such as "Get money out of politics" and "I can't afford a lobbyist."

The protests are in some ways the liberal flip side of the tea party movement, which was launched in 2009 in a populist reaction against the bank and auto bailouts and the $787 billion economic stimulus plan.

But while tea party activists eventually became a crucial part of the Republican coalition, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are cutting President Barack Obama little slack. They say Obama failed to crack down on the banks after the 2008 mortgage meltdown and financial crisis.

"He could have taken a much more populist, aggressive stance at the beginning against Wall Street bonuses, and exacting certain change from bailing out the banks," said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and author of "American Dreamers," a history of the left. "But ultimately, the economy has not gotten much better, and that's underscored the frustration on both the right and the left."

Obama on Thursday acknowledged the economic insecurities fueling the nearly 3-week-old Wall Street protests. But he pinned responsibility on the financial industry and on congressional Republicans he says have blocked his efforts to kick-start job growth.

"I think people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works," he said at a nationally televised news conference. "The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules, that Wall Street is an example of that ... and that's going to express itself politically in 2012 and beyond."

The president has been pushing for a $443 billion jobs plan to be paid for in part through a tax on the wealthy. Republicans have resisted such tax increases.

GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have criticized the anti-Wall Street protests. All the Republican contenders have also pushed back against the demonization of Wall Street. They accuse the Obama administration of setting regulatory policies that have stifled job creation and say his health care overhaul will prevent many businesses from hiring new workers.

In Zuccotti Park, the center of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, activists expressed deep frustration with the political gridlock in Washington. While some blamed Republicans for blocking reform, others singled out Obama.

"His message is that he's sticking to the party line, which is `we are taking care of the situation.' But he's not proposing any solutions," said Thorin Caristo, an antiques store owner from Plainfield, Conn.

But Robert Arnow, a retired real estate worker, said the Republicans need to tell their congressional leaders, "You're standing in the way of change."

Quacy Cayasso, a Web designer, didn't watch Obama's news conference even though it was broadcast on TV monitors at the protest site in New York.

"He's a cool president, but he was given a hard task," Cayasso said. "He should get some gratitude for what he's done so far, but he's been overlooking jobs and not putting much effort into that until now."

Together Let Us Build Working

Class Power in our Communities:

The 2011 Launch of the

SACP Red October Campaign

We are in that time of the year when the SACP launches its popular Red October Campaign. Our Red October Campaign is inspired and seeks to take forward the spirit and the victories of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia - ushering in the first workers' government in the 20th century.

The Red October campaign has been an important platform in building and strengthening the SACP over the last 11 years. Through our Red October Campaign we have built an SACP that is closer to the workers and the poor of our country. Through this campaign we say to the workers and the poor of our country, take up struggles to change your lives for the better and be the masters of your own destinies. It is only the workers and the poor themselves, in struggle and in solidarity with all other progressive forces that will consolidate and deepen our national democratic revolution, and advance the struggle for socialism in our country.

Through these campaigns we have also exposed the failures of the capitalist system to address the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people, and particularly also the failures of the neo-liberal macro-economic policies pursued since 1996. Our Red October Campaign has also been an important organising tool to recruit more and more members to the SACP. The Red October Campaign has also been an important platform for the ideological development of SACP members, and generally to conscientise and mobilise the workers and the poor to be the makers of their own history.

Since its launch twelve years ago, the Red October Campaign has been an important campaigning platform led by the SACP, and has notched some important victories, including:

a. the roll out of banking services to the poor via Umzansi account

b. the transformation of the financial sector as a whole

c. The passage of the Co-operatives and Co-operative Banks legislation

d. the introduction of the National Credit Act to protect consumers against reckless lending

e. the convening of the Land Summit in 2005, direct as a result of the 2004 Red October Campaign - a summit that resolved that the ‘willing seller, willing buyer' model of land reform must be changed as it is an obstacle to access to land by our people

f. raised the plight of our public transport system and the fact that it needed much improvement and attention in 2006, including the convening of the national transport indaba

g. the introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in which our campaigning in 2007 and 2009 on health matters contributed significantly towards this advance

h. Our campaign against corruption through our Red October Campaign of 2009, and the increase focus by government on these matters including the call for the reform of the government tender system by also making it more transparent

The major lessons from our Red October Campaign include the fact that we must not just satisfy ourselves by becoming professional critics, permanent protestors and lamentors in the face of the many challenges facing our country. But that is essential for the working class to take the lead on concretely what is to be done, through concrete actions and campaigns!

Since 1994, and especially since Polokwane, our country has made some important advances. Today we have an industrial policy, a framework for a new growth path, a proposed NHI, amongst others, and our task should be on how we build on these, to continue to provide leadership in order to change the lives of millions of our people.

Through our Red October Campaign we have deepened our work with the progressive trade union movement, formed important alliances with community organisations, youth and women's groups, faith groups and many progressive NGOs and research initiatives to advance the struggle of ordinary workers and the poor.

The 2011 Red October Campaign is a very special one as it is launched during our 90th anniversary year. It is therefore a Red October also to celebrate the heroic role played by our Party in the national liberation strugggle, and the role we continue to play in the reconstruction and development of our country. It is a celebration done in the best way we do as communists, to continue being in the trenches with the workers and poor of our country.

In 2011 the SACP calls upon all our people to join us in campaigning on the following on the following issues:

1. People's education for people's power - Education with an emphasis on making our schools functional, and also the wider challenges of skills and training, with a particular focus on the girl child and the youth.

2. Building a solidarity economy - Through this to, amongst others, building and strengthenings a people's cooperative banks movement as part of taking forward our campaign to make banks and other financial institutions to serve our people

3. Building local people`s committees for comprehensive rural development - With a particular emphasis on building a women`s rural movement for land, food and infrastructure for rural development

4. Intensifying the struggle against corruption - Through all these struggles we must these to intensify the struggle against corruption and tenderpreneurs

The 2011 Red October Campaign, seeks to build on the many advances we have made in the past, taking these to higher We must use our voting district (VD) based branches to convene community red forums in all our localities around our key areas of focus, engage communities, as well as intensify our work with and inside the trade union movement.

5. People's education for people's power

Education and skills are the most important tools to empower the workers, the poor, our youth and women, our communities, and to lay a basis for a better life for all in our country. Let us mobilise our youth to take up all the opportunities for schooling and skills development. Let us say to them it is cool to be educated, as part of defeating all the attempts to mislead young people to think that their salvation is in tenders, and often ill-gotten monies as a short cut to riches. Education can never be taken away from anybody, unlike a tender that can be given or taken away the next day.

To this end the SACP is calling upon all our structures, including the alliance structures and communities to embark on the following:

Identifying and fixing dysfunctional schools - The Department of Basic Education has provided us with a list of all poorly performing or dysfunctional schools throughout the country. Let us go out and engage school governing bodies, parents, communities, learners and government departments to identify and mobilise for our schools to work. Let us make sure that there is teaching and learning taking place in all our schools, that teachers and learners are on time, teaching and learning. Let us expose all those teacher, principals and government officials who are not doing their work, and let us ensure that there are no shebeens next to our schools. Let us engage SADTU and other teacher organisations to make sure our schools work!

The SACP also says let us not only focus on secondary schools, but let us also make sure that our primary schools are functional, as foundation learning is very important for the rest of our education system.

Let us convene community forums to discuss, and decide on appropriate actions where we live, to make our schools work. Most of the dysfunctional schools are those attendend by the children of especially the black working class and the poor.

Let us form co-operatives and other community initiatives to ensure that it is these co-operatives that are used by government for the school feeding scheme. The school nutrition scheme is now reaching more that 8 million learners, and let us take this away from individual businesses and give them to co-operatives as part of genuine empowerment of ordinary people.

Why package everything into a tender? Why should the local state and local popular capacities not be harnessed jointly so that government and communities work together to build their own housing, their own schools, maintain their own roads and infrastructure?

It is time that the SACP tackles the many challenges facing the girl-child, for the naming and shaming of teachers who sexually abuse girl-pupils, and to conscientise our communities about the need to fight teenage pregnancy and youth suicide. To this end we must support the YCL call to end the publication of matric results in newspapers, so that we reduce the many stresses already placed on our young people at such a vulnerable age.

Infrastructure, books and stationery - Let us mobilise our communities to ensure that monies allocated to building schools and do away with mud schools. The SACP calls for the building of schools infrastructure, maintenance and repairs be part of the expanded or community public works programmes, and take them out of tenders to individuals. Let us also train our communities and use FET colleges to fix and repair school furniture, as part of creating job opportunities for ordinary people. Let us mobilise to ensure that required resources (books, stationery and teachers) are supplied timeously.

Community skills development and strengthening FET colleges - Let us get closer to making sure that our FET colleges are functional and for accessing government resources for community skills development initiatives. Let us make sure that poor youth in particular take up learning opportunities in FET colleges, now that poor student are no longer required to pay fees in these colleges.

Fighting corruption in all of our education system - It is important that our communities stand up to expose and fight all forms of corruption in our education system. Let us defeat the sometimes unholy alliance between some school or college managers, governing bodies and government officials to squander monies meant for education. Let us campaign to end all forms of corruption in the schooling and education systems

2. Building a solidarity economy

A national summit of the financial sector - This pillar of our campaign must be linked to laying the foundations for the revitalisation of our financial sector campaign. The SACP is calling upon the convening of the second national financial sector summit, incuding both the private and public financial sector to assess progress made since the signing of the financial sector charter in 2003. We want to know if banks are investing in low-cost houses; why the exorbitant charges they are still charging?; are they investing in a manner that is creating jobs through investment ninto infrastructure?

Building a co-operative banks movement - Much as private banks must still be pressurised to lend money to the workers and the poor for developmental activities, away from funding narrow BEE, this will not be enough to build the necessary finances to support co-operatives, the informal sector and SMEs. Therefore in the wake of the Co-operative Banks Act, let us engage our burial societies, stokvels and the trade union movement on creating a viable co-operative banks movement, as entities that will support development initiatives in our communities. These must just not be on the periphery but we must work towards mainstreaming them as an important component of a new growth path. This initiaitve is very crucial in building an alternative solidarity economy that is not based on capitalist greed and selfishness.

Our people's monies in burial societies and stokvels can support a lot of secondary initiatives that are owned and controlled by members of these societies themselves (eg micro banking services, coffin making, etc). Let us convene red forums to engage all our people's initiatives in burial societies, stokvels, and co-operatives for these resources to be pulled together in a manner that supports people's own development initiatives.

It is estimated that more than 60,000 people belong to 121 co-op banking institutions (Savings and Credit Co-ops (SACCO), Financial Services Co-ops (FSC); co-op banks.), with total assets of more than R100-million, employing around 100 people to run and manage these co-ops. Notwithstanding the above, the sector faces challenges ranging from inability to grow in membership, assets and services, lack of skills and effective leadership and governance.

3. Building rural motive forces for Land Reform, Food Production and rural development

The struggle for liberation will be incomplete and suffer major setbacks if there is no deliberate programme to restore back to the formerly oppressed people land taken from under colonialism and apartheid. Government alone, without a mobilised people, will not be able to achieve our land and rural development goals. Despite some progress made on this front, land in our country is still in the hands of a minority.

Rural development is more than just land and agriculture, important as these are, but is about rural infrastructure including access roads, the building of bridges, rural education infrastructure, rural clinics and police stations, and many other facilities that are readily available in many urban areas. Let us campaign for infrastructure as the foundation for sustainable rural economic development

In tackling these the SACP, acting together with the people in rural areas will embark in the following activities:

Conclusion of land restitution claims - Let us engage government and our communities for speedy settlement of all land restitution claims. Let us also ensure that all re-claimed land is used productively through support from government and through the mobilisation of financial and other resources in the hands of the communities. Let our co-operative banks support viable, productive agricultural activities in reclaimed land. Let reclaimed land be used for food production and food security.

The SACP calls for the intensification of the struggle against instances of corruption in the land restitution process. Land meant for the people must not be sold back to former owners because our people do not have the means to use it productively. Land meant for the people must be used by the people themselves and not be shared amongst tenderpreneurs or people in leadership or government positions!

Building People's Committees for rural development - Let the SACP convene people's red forums in all of our rural areas in order to form people's committees for rural development. Where various types of committees already exist to fight for access to land and agricultural activities or rural development, let us strengthen them in order to build motive forces for rural development. Let us pay particular attention to the organisation of women in the rural areas, as they are the ones who stand to benefit most

Transform the white agricultural countryside, with and for workers and poor - Working with FAWU and other progressive trade unions in the ‘white' countryside, let us intensify organisation of farm workers and for farm dwellers to have access to decent accommodation, pension funds, trade union rights, and intensify the struggle against evictions, and for access to education to all children of farm-workers and farm-dwellers.

Let us not allow white agricultural bosses to divide and exploit workers by seeking to replace South African workers with foreign, and vulnerable workers. Let us not fight amongst ourselves as workers, irrespective of our country of national origin, but must unite to defeat the white bosses' divide and rule tactics! We must accelerate the campaign for access to decent accommodation and pension funds for farmworkers, and fight against farm evictions.

Let us expose the racist agenda of organisations like the DA and Afri-forum, who never once raise the issue of abuse and the super-exploitation of black farmworkers, but instead oppose all actions of government to try and change our country for the better!

Let us fight to access to farms to organise farm-workers and address the conditions of farm-dwellers, and for farms to be declared workplaces and public residential areas, so that they are accessible. Let us remove the prison-type walls in farms that are seeking to make workers and their communities some kind of ‘prison labour'.

(The Evictions Toll Free Number: 0800 007095

Defend the moral and revolutionary integrity of our movement

In order to achieve many of these objectives outlined in our Red October Campaign it is important that we also intensify the struggle to defend all our organisations in the Alliance and the broader progressive movements from the corrupting influence of money and wealth. This requires amongst other that we intensify the struggle in the following areas:

Exposing, naming and shaming those peddling dirty money - Our movement is faced with a serious threat of attempts to buy our cadres with money, to influence decisions in our organisations through money, and to seek to sell our organisation to highest imperialist bidder through dirty money. Let us name and shame those who are trying to buy us. This is money meant to influence you, but once you accept such money, you will never, ever be part of those dishing out money, but will only use that power to steal our organisations, and to steal our government! Let us name and shame money peddlers, tenderpreneurs and those seeking to steal our organisations for their own personal interests of greed!

‘De-tenderise' the state as much as possible - Worse still, our state is being daily ‘tenderised' - bureaucrats in the state (some of them highly qualified professionals) don't actually DO anything, don't build anything - instead they spend their time writing up tenders and adjudicating on applications. Increasingly the state relates to its popular base by way of these tenders. Instead of uniting popular forces behind a common struggle for transformation, the state divides communities into competing factions all vying for a tender.

This is a source of a great deal of corruption in the state, but also of factionalism within our own organizations which get used as stepping stones to influence the allocation of tenders.

Let us also fight against the latest phenomenon of ‘professional tenderpreneurs', who do nothing but use their political influence to influence tender awards and get cuts from those corrupt proceeds. Let us not allow the relationship between government and political leadership, on the one hand, and our communities, on the other, to be mediated by the tender!

The SACP calls upon all our alliance to cement its unity by focusing on the key challenges facing our country (poverty, unemployment, disease), and UNITE against corruption and tenderpreneurs!

Expose the corrupting influence and failure of the capitalist system - The whole world is in a crisis today, retrenching millions of especially young workers, because of the greed and selfishness of the capitalist system. Let the workers and the poor of our country unite behind ‘Socialism is the Future, Build it Now' to roll back the capitalist system and its corrupting influence.

Let all communists go out in their numbers to mobilise our communities behind our Red October Campaign! We call upon all our communities, the workers and the poor to join us in this 2011 Red October Campaign!

Issued by the SACP, October 2 2011

A Sleep-In Protest in the Shadow of Power

By Manny Jalonschi
SolidarityEconomy.net via NYC Indypendent

Sept 19, 2011 - Surrounded by the headquarters of some of the world’s most powerful financial players, over two thousand protesters converged on Wall Street this Saturday. By the end of the second day, those occupying Liberty Park, formerly known as Zuccotti Park on Broadway and Liberty St., had settled in, partially helped by pizza, hot chocolate and blankets paid for and delivered by their supporters in New York City and across the country.

The Wall Street occupation began on Sept. 17 after months of planning and encouragement by Adbusters, who originally called for the occupation in response to a corporate-controlled political system that is no longer serving the needs of the majority of its people. They were soon joined by the hacktivist organization Anonymous in calling for a general people’s assembly. While the meetings leading up to the protest focused on dozens of smaller goals, Saturday morning, in the dozen or so people’s assemblies that broke down in Zuccotti Park now renamed Liberty Square, the protesters identified their key goals as liberating America from the death-grip of finance and creating a sustainable, just future for every member of the country. Specifics ranged from a progressive tax system, ending the wars and creating universal healthcare to more localized solutions like supporting and participating in a variety of worker owned cooperatives.

The protest began around noon in Bowling Green Park with approximately 3,000 people filing in from various ad hoc rallies across the Financial District — including a crowd that swarmed around the Wall Street Bull earlier in the day. The crowd then began marching towards 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. While the group’s original goal had been to occupy the sidewalk in front of the building, the area was cordoned off and surrounded by more than 40 police cars and 80 police officers. Instead, the crowd, which had decreased to less than 2,000 by 3 p.m., marched to Zuccotti Park on the Corner of Liberty St. and Broadway.

Once they were assembled, dozens of organizers stood on park benches and tables urging the general assembly, now numbering around 2,000, to break down into smaller assemblies. Within about ten minutes, a dozen or so general assemblies had broken out — but not without the drowning sound of a brass band, hired by an unknown group to disrupt the protesters. The brass band ended its performance within a half-hour, by which time most of the general assemblies had already progressed with their agenda.

The general assemblies, who began their meetings in circles, sitting on the concrete, broke down discussions into three general areas — problems, solutions and strategies. Most discussions began with an open session for assembly participants to vocalize what they viewed as the biggest challenges the country faces in freeing itself from the power of finance. While much discussion focused on the corruption and collusion between Wall Street and Washington, many assembly members also noted that general apathy was also a problem of education.

The second part of the general assemblies focused on developing general solutions for the problems just identified. Regulation, transparency and again education became the hot talking points for this session. By the third session, assemblies were working on exchanging strategies for local, national and international action.

And in fact, those occupying Wall Street were not alone. News flooded in throughout the weekend of sister-rallies across the United States, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The international presence was heavy at the rally itself. Not only had protesters driven in from across the country, but activists we spoke to also arrived from as far as Mexico and Tunisia.

“This is my first protest, my first movement,” explained Kyle from Buffalo, New York, donning the Guy Fawkes mask symbolic of the Anon hacktivist collective. “A system that’s only focuses on rewarding greed should be challenged,” he said on Saturday, echoing the feelings of many protesters at the occupation who confessed the enormity of the problem requires an equally enormous series of solutions.

The open mic on the North side of the park gave air to many of the ideas. Sidney, a 50-year-old office worker from Connecticut, grabbed the microphone on Saturday and demanded an end to what he described as a “permanent tax holiday for the banks.”

While Saturday saw the most activity in terms of rallies, assemblies and marches, Sunday became a day of support for the occupation. Thousands of New Yorkers stopped in to either see or support the growing city of sleeping bags, signs and popular assemblies. The highlight of the day was when over $2,000 in pizza was ordered in less than an hour by supporters from around the world for the protesters in Zuccotti Plaza. By the second evening, the call went out for blankets as temperatures dipped into the 50’s.

By Monday afternoon reports of police interference were growing, as officers began arresting people who were using chalk to write goals and slogans on the concrete they occupied. But even with a heavy police presence, which included over 200 officers in the immediate area by Monday afternoon, protesters remained unmoved in their demands for a fairer political system. @Anon_support, a leading Twitter organizer of the event, even began organizing after-work parties in the vicinity to draw out more supporters from the New York City area.

By DAVID HARVEY
SolidarityEconomy.Net via Counterpunch

Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.

One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. This would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people, and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger.

What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else.

Many on Wall Street are thriving right now. Lazard’s, because it specialises in mergers and acquisitions, is making megabucks. Some people are going to be burned, but overall it’s a massive consolidation of financial power. There’s a great line from Andrew Mellon (US banker, Secretary of the Treasury 1921-32), who said that in a crisis, assets return to their rightful owners. A financial crisis is a way of rationalising what is irrational – for example the immense crash in Asia in 1997-8 resulted in a new model of capitalist development. Disruptions lead to a reconfiguration, a new form of class power. It could go wrong, politically. The bank bailout has been fought over in the US Senate and elsewhere, so the political class may not easily go along – they can put up roadblocks but so far they have caved in and not nationalised the banks.

But this can lead to a deeper political struggle: there is a strong sense of questioning why are we empowering all the people who got us into this mess. Questions are being asked about Obama’s choice of economic advisers – for example Larry Summers who was Secretary of the Treasury at the key moment when a lot of things started to go really wrong, at the end of the Clinton administration. Why would you now bring in so many of the characters who are pro-Wall Street, pro-finance capital, who did the bidding of finance capital back then? Which is not to say that they aren’t going to redesign the financial architecture because I think they know it’s got to be redesigned, but who are they going to redesign it for? People are really discontented about Obama’s economic team, even in the mainstream press.

A new state financial architecture is required. I don’t think that all existing institutions like the Bank of International Settlements and even the IMF should be abolished; I think we will need them but they have to be revolutionarily transformed. The big question is who will control them and what their architecture will be. We will need people, experts with some sort of understanding of how those institutions do work and can work. And this is very dangerous because, as we can see right now, when the state looks to see who can understand what is going on in Wall Street, they think only insiders can.

Disempowerment of labor: enough is enough

Whether we can get out of this crisis in a different way depends very much upon the balance of class forces. It depends upon the degree to which the entire population says ‘enough is enough, let’s change this system’. Right now, when you look at what’s been happening to workers over the last 50 years, they have got almost nothing out of this system. But they haven’t risen up in revolt. In the US over the last 7 or 8 years, the condition of the working classes in general has deteriorated, and there has been no mass movement against this. Finance capitalism can survive the crisis, but it depends entirely upon the degree in which there is going to be popular revolt against what is happening, and a real push to try and reconfigure how the economy works.

One of the major barriers to continuous capital accumulation back in the 1960s and early 70s was the labor question. There were scarcities of labor both in Europe and the US and labor was well organised, with political clout. So one of the big barriers to capital accumulation during that period was; how can capital get access to cheaper and more docile labor supplies? There were a number of answers. One was to encourage more immigration. In the United States there was a major revision of the immigration laws in 1965 that in effect allowed the US access to the global surplus population (before that only Europeans and Caucasians were privileged). In the late 1960s the French government was subsidising the import of Maghrebian labor, the Germans were bringing in the Turks, the Swedes were bringing in the Yugoslavs, the British were drawing upon their empire. So a pro-immigration policy emerged which was one attempt to deal with the labor problem.

The second thing you go for is rapid technological change which throws people out of work and if that failed then there were people like Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet to crush organized labor. And finally capital goes to where the surplus labor is by off-shoring, and this was facilitated by two things. Firstly technical reorganisation of the transport systems: one of the biggest revolutions that happened during this period is containerisation which allowed you to make auto parts in Brazil and ship them for very low cost to Detroit or wherever. Secondly the new communications systems allowed the tight organization of commodity chain production across the global space.

All of these solved the labor problem for capital, so by 1985 capital has no labor problem any more. It may have specific problems in particular areas but globally it has plenty of labor available to it; the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of much of China added something like 2 billion people to the global proletariat in 20 years. So labor availability is no problem now and the result of that is that labor has been disempowered for the last 30 years. But when labor is disempowered it gets low wages, and if you engage in wage repression this limits markets. So capital was beginning to face problems with its market, and there were two things which happened.

The first was the gap between what labor was earning and what it was spending was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness of households. So in the US in 1980 you would find that the average household would owe around $40,000 in debts now it’s about $130,000 for every household, including mortgages. So household debt sky-rockets and that brings you to financialisation, and that was about getting the financial institutions to support the household debts of working class people whose earnings are not increasing. And you start with the respectable working class, but by the time you get to the year 2000 you start to find these sub-prime mortgages circulating. You are looking to create a market. And so finance starts to support the debt-financing of people who have almost no income. But if you hadn’t done that what would have happened to the property developers who are building the houses? So you try and stabilize the market by funding that indebtedness.

Crises of asset values

The second thing which happened was that from the 1980s onwards the rich are getting far richer because of that wage repression. The story we are told is that they will invest in new activity but they don’t; most of them start to invest in assets, i.e. they put money in the stock market, the stock market goes up so they think it is a good investment so they put more money in the stock market, so you get these stock market bubbles. It is a ponzi-like system without the Madoff’s organizing it. The rich bid up asset values, including stocks, property, and leisure property as well as the art market. These investments involve financialisation. But as you bid up asset values this carries over to the whole economy, so to live in Manhattan became all but impossible unless you went incredibly into debt, and everyone is caught in this inflation of asset values, including the working classes whose incomes are not rising. And now we’ve got a collapse of asset values; the housing market is down, the stock market is down.

There has always been the problem of the relationship between representation and reality. Debt is about the assumed future value of goods and services, so it assumes the economy is going to continue to grow over the next 20 or 30 years. It always involves a guess, which is then set by the interest rate, discounting into the future. This growth of the financial area after the 1970s has a lot to do with what I think is another key problem: what I would call the capitalist surplus absorption problem. As surplus theory tells us, capitalists produce a surplus, which they then have to take a part of, recapitalise it, and reinvest it in expansion. Which means they always have to find somewhere else to expand into. In an article I wrote for the New Left Review called ‘Right to the City’ I pointed out that in the last 30 years an immense amount of the capital surplus has been absorbed into urbanisation: urban restructuring, expansion and speculation. Every city I go to is a huge building site for capitalist surplus absorption. Now, of course, many of these projects stand unfinished.

This way of absorbing capital surpluses has got more and more problematic over time. In 1750 the value of the total output of goods and services was around $135 billion, in constant values. By 1950, it’s $4 trillion. By 2000, it’s $40 trillion. It’s now around $50 trillion. And if Gordon Brown is right it’s going to double over the next 20 years, to $100 trillion by 2030.

Throughout the history of capitalism, the general rate of growth has been close to 2.5% per annum, compound basis. That would mean that in 2030 you’d need to find profitable outlets for $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s a very tall order. I think there has been a serious problem, particularly since 1970, about how to absorb greater and greater amounts of surplus in real production. Less and less of it is going into real production, and more and more into speculation on asset values, which accounts for the increasing frequency and depth of the financial crises we’ve been having since 1975 or so; they are all crises of asset value.

My argument would be that if we come out of this crisis right now, and there’s going to be capital accumulation at 3% rate of growth, we’ve got a hell of a lot of problems on our hands. Capitalism is running into serious environmental constraints, as well as market constraints, profitability constraints. The recent turn to financialisation is a turn of necessity, as a way of dealing with the surplus absorption problem; but one that cannot possibly work without periodic devaluations. That’s what’s happening now, with the losses of several trillion dollars of asset value.

The term ‘national bailout’ is therefore inaccurate, because they’re not bailing out the whole of the existing financial system – they’re bailing out the banks, the capitalist class, forgiving them their debts, their transgressions, and only theirs. The money goes to the banks but not to the homeowners who’ve been foreclosed on, which is beginning to create anger. And the banks are using the money not to lend to anybody but to buy other banks. They are consolidating their class power.

The collapse of credit

The collapse of credit for the working class spells the end of financialisation as the solution for the crisis of the market. As a consequence of this we will see a major crisis of unemployment and the collapse of many industries unless there is effective action to change that. Now this is where you get the current discussion about returning to a Keynesian economic model, and Obama’s plan is to invest in a vast public works and investment in green technologies, in a sense going back to a New Deal type of solution. I am skeptical of his ability to do this.

To understand the current situation we need to go beyond what goes on in the labor process and production to the complex of relationships around the state and finance . We need to understand how the national debt and credit system have from the beginning been major vehicles for primitive accumulation, or what I now call accumulation by dispossession – as you can see from the building industry. In my ‘Right to the City’ article I looked at how capitalism was revived in second empire Paris because the state along with the bankers put together a new nexus of state-finance capital, to rebuild Paris. That provided full employment and the boulevards, the water systems and sewage systems, new transport systems, and it was through those types of mechanisms that the Suez Canal was built. A lot of this was debt financed. Now that state-finance nexus has undergone a massive transformation since the 1970s; it’s become far more international, it’s opened itself to all types of financial innovations including derivative markets and speculative markets etc. A new financial architecture has been designed.

What I think is happening at the moment is that they are now looking for a new financial set-up which can solve the problem not for working people but for the capitalist class. I think they are going to find a solution for the capitalist class and if the rest of us get screwed, too bad. The only thing they would care about is if we rose up in revolt. And until we rise up in revolt they are going to redesign the system according to their own class interests. I don’t know what this new financial architecture will look like. If we look closely at what happened during the New York fiscal crisis I don’t think the bankers or the financiers knew what to do at all, now what they did was bit by bit arrive at a ‘bricolage’; they pieced it together in a new way and eventually they come up with a new construction. But whatever solution they may arrive at, it will suit them unless we get in there and start saying that we want something that is suitable for us. There’s a crucial role for people like us to raise the questions and challenge the legitimacy of the decisions being made at present, and to have very clear analyses of what the nature of the problem has been, and what the possible exits are.

Alternatives

We need in fact to begin to exercise our right to the city. We have to ask the question which is more important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity. The banking system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only way in which we are really going to be able to exert the right to the city is to take command of the capitalist surplus absorption problem. We have to socialize the capital surplus, and to get out of the problem of 3% accumulation forever. We are now at a point where 3% growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs, and such tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one financial crisis to another.

The core problem is how you are going to absorb capitalist surpluses in a productive and profitable way. My view is that social movement must coalesce around the idea that they want more control over the surplus product. And while I don’t support a return to the Keynesian model of the sort we had in the 1960s, I do think there was much greater social and political control over the production, utilisation and distribution of the surplus then. The circulating surplus was put into building schools, hospitals and infrastructure. This was what upset the capitalist class and caused a counter movement toward the end of the 1960s – that they were not getting enough control over the surplus. However, if you look at the data the proportion of the surplus which is being absorbed by the state has not shifted very much since 1970, so what the capitalist class did was to stop the further socialisation of the surplus. They also managed to transform the word government into the word ‘governance’, making governmental and corporate activities porous, which enables the situation we have in Iraq where private contractors milked the possibilities ruthlessly for easy profit..

I think we are headed into a legitimation crisis. Over the past thirty years we have been told, to quote Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to a neo-liberal free market, privatised world, and that if we didn’t succeed in that world it’s our own fault. I think it’s very difficult to say that when faced with a foreclosure crisis you support the banks but not the people who are being foreclosed upon. You can accuse the people being foreclosed upon of irresponsibility, and in the US there is a strong racist element in this argument. When the first wave of foreclosures hit places like Cleveland and Ohio they were devastating to the black communities there but some peoples’ response was ‘well what do you expect, black people are irresponsible. We are seeing right-wing explanations of the crisis which explain it in terms of personal greed, both in Wall Street and those who borrowed money to buy houses. So they attempt to blame the crisis on the victims. One of our tasks must be to say ‘no, you absolutely cannot do that’ and to try and create a consolidated explanation of this crisis as a class event in which a certain structure of exploitation broke down and is about to be displaced by an even deeper structure of exploitation. It’s very important this alternative explanation of the crisis is discussed and conveyed publicly.

One of the big ideological configurations we are going to have is what is going to be the role of home ownership in the future once we start saying things like you’ve got to socialize much more of the housing stock, as since the 1930s we have had huge pressures towards individualised home ownership as in a way of securing people’s rights and position.. We’ve got to socialize and recapitalise public education and health care long with housing provision. These sectors of the economy have to be socialized along with the banks.

Radical politics beyond class divides

There is another point we have to consider, which is that labor, and particularly organised labor, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to Marx’s shortcomings in how he set up the problem. If you say to that the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism (which it obviously is), and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting or setting it up these institutional arrangements, labor has never been at the forefront of that struggle. Labor has been at the forefront in the labor market and over the labor process and these are vital moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles which have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles in which labor has only been partially present.

For example in the US in the 1930s there were a lot of populists who supported the Bonnie and Clyde bank robbers. And currently many of the struggles going on in Latin America are more populist than labor led. Labor always has a very important role to play but I don’t think we are in a position right now where the conventional view of the proletariat being the vanguard of the struggle is very helpful when it is the architecture of the state-finance nexus (the central nervous system of capital accumulation) that is the fundamental issue. There may be times and places where proletarian movements may be highly significant, for example in China where I envisage them playing a critical part which I do not see them having in this country. What is interesting is that the car workers and automobile companies are in alliance right now in relation to the state-finance nexus, so in a way the grand dividing line of class struggle which has always been there in Detroit isn’t there anymore or at least not in the same way. We have a completely different kind of class politics going on and some of the conventional Marxist ways of viewing these things get in the way of a real radical politics.

There is also a big problem on the left that many think the capturing of state power has no role to play in political transformations and I think they’re crazy. Incredible power is located there and you can’t walk away from it as though it doesn’t matter. I am profoundly skeptical of the belief that NGOs and civil society organisations are going to change the world, not because NGOs can’t do anything at all, but it takes a different kind of political movement and conception if we are going to do anything about the main crisis which is going on. In the United States the political instinct is very anarchist, and while I am very sympathetic to a lot of anarchist views their perpetual complaints about and refusal to command the state also gets in the way.

I don’t think we are in a position to define who the agents of change will be in the present conjuncture and it plainly will vary from one part of the world to another. In the United States right now there are signs that elements of the managerial class, which has lived off the earnings of finance capital all these years, is getting annoyed and may turn a bit radical. A lot of people have been laid off in the financial services, in some instances they have even had their mortgages foreclosed. Cultural producers are waking up to the nature of the problems we face and in the same way that the 1960s art schools were centers of political radicalism, you might find something like that re-emerging. We may see the rise of cross-border organisations as the reductions in remittances spread the crisis to places like rural Mexico or Kerala.

Social movements have to define what strategies and policies they want to adopt. We academics should never view ourselves as having some missionary role in relation to social movements; what we should do is get into conversation and talk about how we see the nature of the problem.

Having said that I would want us to propose ideas. An interesting idea in the US right now is to get municipal governments to pass anti-eviction ordinances. I think there are a couple of places in France which have done that. Then we could set up a municipal housing corporation which would assume the mortgages, pay off the bank at so much on the dollar because the banks have been given a lot of money to supposedly deal with this, but they’re not.

Another key question is that of citizenship and rights. I think that rights to the city should be guaranteed by residency no matter what your citizenship is. Currently people are denied any political rights to the city unless they happen to be citizens. So if you’re an immigrant you don’t have any rights. I think there are struggles to be launched around the rights to the city. In the Brazilian constitution they have a ‘rights to the city’ clause which is about the right to consultation, participation and budgetary procedures. Again I think there is a politics which can come out of that.

A reconfiguration of urbanisation

In the US there is the capacity to act at a local level, with a lot going on about environmental questions, and over the past fifteen to twenty years municipal governments have often been more progressive than the federal government. There’s a crisis in municipal finance right now and there is likely to be significant agitation and pressure upon Obama to recapitalise a lot of municipal government (which is proposed in the stimulus package). He has said this is one of the things he is concerned about, especially since a lot of the issues which are happening are local ones, for instance the sub-prime mortgage crisis. As I have been arguing the foreclosure stuff must be understood as an urban crisis not just a financial crisis; it is a financial crisis of urbanisation.

Another important question is to think strategically about how the social economy in some alliance with labor and the municipal-based movements such as Right to the City could also be a component in a strategy. This relates to the question of technological development – for example I see no reason why you couldn’t have a municipal-based support system for the development of productive systems such as solar power, to create more decentralised employment apparatuses and possibilities.

If I could develop an idealised system now I would say in the US we should create a national redevelopment bank and take $500 billion out of that $700 billion they voted and the bank should work with municipalities to deal with neighbourhoods which have been hit by the foreclosure wave, because the foreclosure wave has been like a financial Katrina in many ways; it has wiped out whole communities, usually poor black or Hispanic communities. You go into those neighbourhoods and bring back the people who used to live in those communities and re-house them on a different basis of tenure, residency rights, and with a different kind of financing. And green those neighbourhoods, creating local employment opportunities in those fields.

So I could imagine a reconfiguration of urbanisation. To do anything on global warming we need to totally reconfigure how American cities work; to think about a completely new pattern of urbanisation, with new patterns of living and working. There are a lot of possibilities the left should be paying attention to – this is a real opportunity. But it is where I have a problem with some Marxists who seem to think, ‘yes! It’s a crisis; the contradictions of capitalism will now be solved somehow!’ This is not a moment for triumphalism, this is a moment for problematising. First of all I think there are problems with the way Marx set up those problems. Marxists are not very good at understanding the state financial complex or urbanisation – they are terrific at understanding some other things. But now we have to rethink our theoretical posture and political possibilities.

So there is a lot of theoretical re-thinking that is needed as well as practical action.

Transcribed by Kate Ferguson. Edited by Mary Livingstone.

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years. He can be reached through his website, http://davidharvey.org

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February 21, 2011

By Peter Monaghan

SolidarityEconomy.net via Chronicle of Higher Education

In the 15th to 19th centuries, when Europeans rebelled against their rulers, they frequently heaped up barrels, paving stones, and any other handy objects to create immovable masses in city streets.

Such defensive and tactical structures went together so readily, so cooperatively, that it seemed the insurrectionists were acting on instinct.

In a new book, The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press), Mark Traugott relates the history of “the most striking embodiment” of the revolutionary spirit of the times. And it is the dissemination of “barricade consciousness” that most interests the scholar, a professor of history and sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The barricades show, he writes, how people choose and symbolize the way they voice their discontent and collective hopes.

A touchstone of his research, he says, has been a 1970s concept from the historian, sociologist, and political scientist Charles Tilly, the “repertoire of collective action,” referring to the range of protest techniques available at any particular place and time.

So, writes Traugott, in France and then throughout Europe when the cry went up—“To the barricades”—protesters often unknown to one another “knew just what to do, and managed to concert their actions with great efficiency, even without benefit of the most rudimentary of command structures.”

On the phone from Lyon, where he continues to investigate the phenomenon, Traugott said his interest dates from his research for his 1985 book, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton University Press). He found the barricade to be “a much bigger story, much more complicated dynamic than I had at first imagined.”

The building technique generally involved barrels—barriques, from which the term “barricades” was coined during the 16th century. Those could easily be rolled into place and filled with earth and rocks, then reinforced by whatever could be scrounged —wagons, planks and beams from construction sites, paving stones, balustrades torn from buildings. Students, exiles, and itinerant workers sustained the practice for centuries, disseminating knowledge of it throughout Europe.

Whether glorious, heroic, or foolhardy, barricades were rarely suicidal, Traugott says. Think gaming theory, he suggests: A bravura pretense of total commitment was necessary to achieve desired outcomes, and meanwhile the tactic bought protesters time to make a realistic assessment of their chances of success; they could always hightail it when the firing and military charges began.

Often, he argues, fraternization, socialization, and solidarity building—with like-minded protesters, past and present—were the only benefits that insurrectionists could hope for.

As much as heavy death tolls and failed political aspirations, the symbolic aspect of barricades inspired artists and authors—for example, Victor Hugo featured the structures when he described a June 1832 revolt in Paris in Les Misérables, while Gustave Flaubert wrote of a similar event in L’Éducation sentimentale.

For historians, barricades pose a challenge: generally unplanned, or organized in secret, they generated little documentation, particularly because key participants often ended up dead. So, rather than count on records of any one barricade event for a full sense of their nature, purpose, and accomplishments, Traugott surveyed 150 such events in France and elsewhere in Europe, large and small, successful and unsuccessful, to garner a broad-based picture of barricade combat. “Some really celebrated cases that are great success stories and that make for the legend of the barricade aren’t terribly typical,” he says.

Given events in the Middle East, in recent weeks, Traugott says yes, he has indeed paused to ask how the barricade relates. “The events are still in progress,” he notes. “We don’t know how big they are, or how far they’re going to go. The overthrow of a dictator is one thing, but whether there’ll be a set of liberal reforms, which some of the insurgents think there’ll be, or want, or the opposite, we can’t yet know.”

“So, the historian in me says not to leap ahead too quickly in making parallels.” Still, he adds, “the sociological side of me searches for patterns and generalizations,” and those abound.

The coldheartedness with which insurrections have been put down—in the past, and now—is one pattern, he says, a response that demonstrates authorities’ recognition of how dangerous their symbolism can be.

The role of media is another pattern. Just as Facebook, Twitter, and other tools have been instrumental in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, “the propagation of barrier consciousness was prominently increased in the 1840s by a couple of important changes, including the rise of the so-called illustrated press,” he says. The Illustrated London News was founded in 1842, L’illustration one year later, and then German and Italian equivalents soon after. Drawings of the barricades of Paris and other European cities galvanized their large readerships.

“For the first time, people could see actual pictures of current events,” says Traugott. “This created an enormously increased capacity to disseminate information across national and linguistic dividing lines.”

“The parallels are pretty clear to what is now a completely global, completely instantaneous form of transmission.”—Peter Monaghan

How Social Media Accelerated the Uprising in Egypt

By E.B. Boyd

SolidarityEconomy.net via Fast Company

There’s been some backlash in the last few days against the idea that either Tunisia or Egypt were brought on by Twitter or a “Facebook Revolution.” And certainly, it takes a lot more than the 21st century version of a communication system to persuade people to take to the streets and risk harm, imprisonment, or death.

But that doesn’t mean social media didn’t play a role. It did. Given the magnitude of grievances in each country, revolt would almost certainly have come eventually. But social media simply made it come faster. It did so by playing a role in three main dynamics:

Organizing protests

Before Egypt shut off the Internet and mobile phones, before it even started blocking Twitter and Facebook, those tools were used to coordinate and spread the word about the demonstrations that were scheduled for January 25. Without these mass organizing tools, it’s likely that fewer people would have known about the protests, or summoned the kind of courage that’s made possible by knowing you’re not the only one sticking your neck out. Without them, fewer people might have shown up, and the Egyptian authorities might have more easily dispatched them. Chances are, we'd be waking up to today with last Tuesday’s skirmishes nothing more than a fading headline from a week long gone.

Shaping the narrative

In situations of chaos, the upper hand goes to the group that can shape a narrative and get it to stick. History is written by the victors, after all--now, even in real time. When looting began over the weekend, the narrative could easily have shifted in favor of the government: Hooligans were turning the city upside down. Order needed to be restored. Clamp down.

But word started getting out via Twitter that hastily arranged neighborhood watch groups were apprehending looters who, it turned out, had police IDs on them. This might or might not have been true—it wasn’t possible to confirm the statements—but it certainly shed a different light on the looting. Certainly, other regimes have been known to hire young men to go out and toss a city, to make it look like protestors have turned ugly, giving them an excuse to clamp down.

But the tweets belied that narrative. And indeed, on Saturday, a New York-based Egyptian blogger interviewed by CNN, suggested as much. She “appealed to the media to not fall for what she described as a Mubarak regime plot to make the protests in Egypt seem like dangerous anarchy,” according to the New York Times’ blog The Lede [1]. “I urge you to use the words ‘revolt’ and ‘uprising’ and ‘revolution’ and not ‘chaos’ and not ‘unrest," she said. "We are talking about a historic moment.” The narrative was reset. Soon thereafter, CNN changed its on-screen headlines from “CHAOS IN EGYPT” to “UPRISING IN EGYPT.”

Putting pressure on Washington

Washington presumably found itself between a rock and a hard place last week. The U.S. prefers to fall on the side of freedom and self-determination whenever possible. But Egypt is one of this country’s closest allies in the Middle East. And there certainly must be concern about a domino effect leading to even more instability in the region, should Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak fall. When faced with those kinds of tensions in the past, Washington has not infrequently found it more convenient to spin the narrative in favor of the authority in power, in the interest of maintaining stability—and an ally.

But that wasn’t possible this time. Too much information was escaping the country. Through the media, in part. But also on YouTube. And particularly via Twitter. An seemingly endless flood of details flowed out, skewing, rightly or wrongly, in favor of the protesters, giving the impression that a genuine uprising was taking place. With that deluge, Washington lost any ability to downplay events on the ground and maintain a distanced posture. It began subtly shifting its stance.

As a result, we witnessed a subtle, but incontrovertible, shifting of the U.S. position as the days wore on. Officials began speaking of a “transition.” They declined to articulate explicit support for Mubarak. Defense Secretary Robert Gates put out a call to his counterpart in Israel, presumbaly to reassure the country, which was getting skittish about the prospect of chaos on its borders should Mubarak fall. President Obama placed calls to other leaders in the region, presumably to offer similar reassurances. By last night, as the New York Times put it [2] in a piece posted that evening, “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton… [stopped] short of telling its embattled president, Hosni Mubarak, to step down but clearly laying the groundwork for his departure.”

Did social media make all this happen? No, of course not. Did it bring everything to a head much sooner than it would have, had Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube not existed? Absolutely.

Image courtesy of Al Jazeera English [3]]

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Follow me on Twitter [4]. Or email [5].

Links:
[1] http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/latest-updates-on-protests-in-egypt-2/
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/world/middleeast/31diplo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/5390339165/
[4] http://twitter.com/ebboyd
[5] mailto:ebboyd@fastcompany.com

Get Internet Access When

Your Government Shuts It Down

Does your government have an Internet kill-switch? Read our guide to Guerrilla Networking and be prepared for when the lines get cut.

By Patrick Miller, David Daw

SolidarityEconomy.net via PC World -Jan 28

These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it's organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we've seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you're trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can't rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections.

Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi   

Even if you've managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it won't be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they can't get online to find you.

If you're trying to coordinate a group of people in your area and can't rely on an Internet connection, cell phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network of sorts--essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices that can all find each other and communicate with each other. Even if none of those devices have a working Internet connection, they can still find each other, which, if your network covers the city you're in, might be all you need. At the moment, wireless mesh networking isn't really anywhere close to market-ready, though we have seen an implementation of the 802.11s draft standard, which extends the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to include wireless mesh networking, in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop.

However, a prepared guerrilla networker with a handful of PCs could make good use of Daihinia ($25, 30-day free trial), an app that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi adapter driver to turn your normal ad-hoc Wi-Fi network into a multihop ad-hoc network (disclaimer: we haven't tried this ourselves yet), meaning that instead of requiring each device on the network to be within range of the original access point, you simply need to be within range of a device on the network that has Daihinia installed, effectively allowing you to add a wireless mesh layer to your ad-hoc network.

Advanced freedom fighters can set up a portal Web page on their network that explains the way the setup works, with Daihinia instructions and a local download link so they can spread the network even further. Lastly, just add a Bonjour-compatible chat client like Pidgin or iChat, and you'll be able to talk to your neighbors across the city without needing an Internet connection. Back to Basics

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout--as we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even ham radio, could still work, since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't being policed nearly as hard.

In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet--a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending only simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to take its place.

You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create an ad-hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using Ham Radio, since the signals are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of these efforts are still getting off the ground, but hackers are already cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into and out of the country. Always Be Prepared

In the land of no Internet connection, the man with dial-up is king. Here are a few gadgets that you could use to prepare for the day they cut the lines.

Given enough time and preparation, your ham radio networks could even be adapted into your own ad-hoc network using Packet Radio, a radio communications protocol that you can use to create simple long-distance wireless networks to transfer text and other messages between computers. Packet Radio is rather slow and not particularly popular (don't try to stream any videos with this, now), but it's exactly the kind of networking device that would fly under the radar.

In response to the crisis in Egypt, nerds everywhere have risen to call for new and exciting tools for use in the next government-mandated shutdown. Bre Pettis, founder of the hackerspace NYC Resistor and creator of the Makerbot 3D printer, has called for "Apps for the Appocalypse," including a quick and easy way to set up chats on a local network so you can talk with your friends and neighbors in an emergency even without access to the Internet. If his comments are any indication, Appocalypse apps may be headed your way soon.

Tons of cool tech are also just waiting to be retrofitted for these purposes. David Dart's Pirate Box is a one-step local network in a box originally conceived for file sharing and local P2P purposes, but it wouldn't take much work to adapt the Pirate Box as a local networking tool able to communicate with other pirate boxes to form a compact, mobile set of local networks in the event of an Internet shutdown.

Whether you're in Egypt or Eagle Rock, you rely on your Internet access to stay in touch with friends and family, get your news, and find information you need. (And read PCWorld, of course.) Hopefully with these apps, tools, and techniques, you won't have to worry about anyone--even your government--keeping you from doing just that.

Patrick Miller hopes he isn't first against the wall when the revolution comes. Find him on Twitter or Facebook--if you have a working Internet connection, anyway.

David Daw is an accidental expert in ad-hoc networks since his apartment gets no cell reception. Find him on Twitter or send him a ham radio signal.

Tweeting Tyrants Out of Tunisia:

The Global Internet at Its Best

• By Nate Anderson Ars Technica
• January 14, 2011  | 

Solidarityeconomy.net via Wired Magazine

Even yesterday, it would have been too much to say that blogger, tweeters, Facebook users, Anonymous and Wikileaks had “brought down” the Tunisian government, but with today’s news that the country’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has fled the country, it becomes a more plausible claim to make.

Of course there was more to such demonstrations than some new technology. An individual act of desperation set off the last month of rioting, as a college-educated young man set himself on fire after police confiscated his unlicensed fruit and vegetable cart. Tunisia’s high unemployment rate, rampant corruption and rising food prices added to the anger at Ben Ali’s 20-plus-year rule.

People risked their lives in the street, with some getting a bullet for their troubles, but the internet played a significant role in organizing these protests and in disseminating news and pictures of them to the world.

After the worst unrest in his reign, Ben Ali this week promised not to run for “election” again and to give the country a free press and the right to assemble. He fired his cabinet. It wasn’t enough. Protestors sensed weakness, and today they forced Ben Ali from Tunisia. He fled ignominiously with his family for any state that would have him.

Here’s a guide to the part of this battle fought in cyberspace over the last month.

Web blocking: Soon after the protests began, Tunisia ramped up its attempts at controlling the internet. These started simply enough, with straight-up site blocking. In an open letter to the Tunisian government, the Committee to Protect Journalists outlined the online repression:

We are troubled to learn that your government’s practice of blocking websites — including CPJ Web pages on Tunisia — has recently intensified. Local journalists told CPJ that additional news websites, as well as numerous Facebook pages carrying critical content, blogs, and journalists’ e-mail accounts have been blocked by the state-run Tunisian Internet Agency since protests erupted on December 17. Regional and international media have reported that numerous local and international news websites covering the street protests were blocked in Tunisia. One report placed your country, along with Saudi Arabia, as the worst in the region regarding Internet censorship. A 2009 CPJ study found Tunisia to be one of the 10 worst countries worldwide to be a blogger, in part for the same reasons.

We’ll take that Facebook password, please: It soon got much worse. The Committee to Protect Journalists said its own research found that “the [state-run] Tunisian Internet Agency is harvesting passwords and usernames of bloggers, reporters, political activists and protesters by injecting hidden JavaScript” into many popular site login pages.

This extended to sites like Facebook, where the main login page mysteriously had 10 additional lines of code inserted when it arrived at Tunisian computers. (Such code injection is technically simple using various pieces of deep-packet inspection gear, and it was made easier by the fact that the Tunisian government would periodically block secure HTTPS connections.)

That code grabbed the username and password, embedded them into a bogus Facebook URL, and then attempted to load the nonexistent page. It’s unclear why this was done, though speculation is that the hack was a simple way to grab passwords. The Tunisian Internet Agency could simply log all attempts to hit the bogus Facebook link without the liability of listing one of its servers in the code itself.

CPJ noted in a separate report that “unknown parties have subsequently logged onto these sites using these stolen credentials, and used them to delete Facebook groups, pages and accounts, including Facebook pages administrated by Sofiene Chourabi, a reporter with Al-Tariq al-Jadid, and the account of local online video journalist Haythem El Mekki. Local bloggers have told CPJ that their accounts and pictures of recent protests have been deleted or otherwise compromised.”

Al-Jazeera interviewed an anonymous source who had crafted a Greasemonkey script that could strip this additional code from login pages. On January 6, it had already been installed over 1,500 times.

On January 11, the Electronic Frontier Foundation publicized the Greasemonkey script but also asked Facebook in particular to consider a few technical changes:

Make Facebook logins default to HTTPS, if only in Tunisia, where accounts are especially vulnerable at this time. Google and Yahoo logins already default to HTTPS.

Consider allowing pseudonymous accounts for users in authoritarian regimes, where political speech under your real name is dangerous and potentially deadly. Many Tunisian activists are unable to reinstate Facebook accounts that have been erased by the Tunisian government because they were not using their real names.

Finding bloggers, pirates: The Tunisian government, not content to simply grab account information and delete the offending material, also began hauling bloggers into police custody.

On January 7, Reporters Without Borders had at least five confirmed cases of bloggers and online activists being arrested. Here’s one:

Four or five police plainclothes officers arrested the blogger and activist Hamadi Kaloutcha at his home at around 6 am, seizing a computer and a central processing unit. They told his wife they were taking him to the nearest police station and “just have a few questions for him,” and “that will only take a few hours.” There has been no news of him since.

Several of those arrested, including Kaloutcha, were members of the Pirate Party of Tunisia; the Pirate Party U.K. later issued several statements deploring the disappearances.

“Pirate Parties around the world condemn these acts against freedom of expression, human rights and democracy, and call upon governments take firm action against Tunisia for these recent events,” one said. A later note said that one detainee had been beaten, and it said that several of the bloggers were accused of “degradation of state property on account of anonymous DDoS attacks.”

And who specializes in anonymous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against unfriendly websites? That’s right, it’s …

Anonymous: The internet’s many-headed hydra, Anonymous, launched “Operation Tunisia,” trying to attack the Tunisian government instead of the copyright holders which have been its targets for the last few months.

Al-Jazeera checked in with some of the activists, one of whom explained that Anonymous first got involved when the Tunisian government tried to block access to Wikileaks.

“We did initially take an interest in Tunisia because of WikiLeaks, but as more Tunisians have joined they care more about the general internet censorship there, so that’s what it has become,” another Anon said.

It is hard to generalize the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identified by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behavior from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Wikileaks and pet tigers: Why would the Wikileaks revelations of recent months matter to a country like Tunisia? Because of some exceptionally frank dispatches from Robert Godec, the U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia.

In one of the cables, Godec reports on a private dinner he had with Mohammad Sakher El-Materi, the president’s son-in-law and a very wealthy man. Given the public dissatisfaction with a regime built on cronyism and suffused with corruption, Godec’s report fueled public anger at the regime when it appeared late in 2010.

The report was stuffed with candid details like these:

El-Materi’s house is spacious, and directly above and along the Hammamet public beach. The compound is large and well guarded by government security. It is close to the center of Hammamet, with a view of the fort and the southern part of the town. The house was recently renovated and includes an infinity pool and a terrace of perhaps 50 meters. While the house is done in a modern style (and largely white), there are ancient artifacts everywhere: Roman columns, frescoes and even a lion’s head from which water pours into the pool. El Materi insisted the pieces are real. He hopes to move into his new (and palatial) house in Sidi Bou Said in eight to ten months.

The dinner included perhaps a dozen dishes, including fish, steak, turkey, octopus, fish couscous and much more. The quantity was sufficient for a very large number of guests. Before dinner a wide array of small dishes were served, along with three different juices (including Kiwi juice, not normally available here). After dinner, he served ice cream and frozen yoghurt he brought in by plane from Saint Tropez, along with blueberries and raspberries and fresh fruit and chocolate cake…

El Materi has a large tiger (“Pasha”) on his compound, living in a cage. He acquired it when it was a few weeks old. The tiger consumes four chickens a day. (Comment: The situation reminded the Ambassador of Uday Hussein’s lion cage in Baghdad.) El Materi had staff everywhere. There were at least a dozen people, including a butler from Bangladesh and a nanny from South Africa. (NB This is extraordinarily rare in Tunisia, and very expensive.)…

The family’s favorite vacation destination spot is the Maldives Islands…

Nesrine said she loves Disney World, but had put off a trip this year because of H1N1 flu. Nesrine has, for sometime, had Tamiflu nearby (even taking it on trips). Originally it was out of fear of bird flu. She packs it for El Materi too when he travels. Nesrine said she has visited several US cities. El Materi had only been to Illinois recently in connection with the purchase of a plane…

Throughout the evening, El Materi often struck the Ambassador as demanding, vain and difficult. He is clearly aware of his wealth and power, and his actions reflected little finesse.

Godec also wasn’t afraid to pass on blunt reports of corruption among Tunisia’s leaders:

According to Transparency International’s annual survey and Embassy contacts’ observations, corruption in Tunisia is getting worse. Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of “the Family” is enough to
indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.

One member of the family apparently even stole a French yacht, painting over it and having it delivered to Tunisia, where it was spotted and finally returned.

Writing at Foreign Policy, Christopher Alexander noted that this leak, and several other cables, did more than just stoke anger at the regime; they gave people a sense that the United States might share their concerns.

“Given Ben Ali’s reputation as a stalwart U.S. ally,” Alexander wrote, “it mattered greatly to many Tunisians — particularly to politically engaged Tunisians who are plugged into social media — that American officials are saying the same things about Ben Ali that they themselves say about him. These revelations contributed to an environment that was ripe for a wave of protest that gathered broad support.”

Tweeting the news: For those craving up-to-the minute news, Twitter has become a terrific source. Writers like Dima Khatib of Al-Jazeera and columnist Sultan Al-Qassemi are providing aggregation and opinion on a moment-to-moment basis.

“Take a breath people,” Khatib wrote today as Ben Ali fled his country. “We are living history. Tunisians have given us the best gift ever. I am happy to be living today.”

And, as The New York Times notes, bloggers across the Arab world have been cheering on the Tunisian demonstrations.

Oh, the irony: Tunisia, never a friend to openness and freedom of speech, was nevertheless a backer of the “internet.” Indeed, Tunis was the location for a U.N. meeting in 2005 that produced the “Tunis Agenda,” a document that called for the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

IGF is largely toothless, but in the last five years its annual meetings have been an important place for dialog about the future of the very tool that helped drive the Tunisian government from power.

New beginnings: Tunisia has a chance for a change of direction, though at this early date it is of course impossible to predict much about the country’s future. For the formerly well-connected “Family” in Tunisia, though, the good times appear to be over. On Twitter, commenters have obsessively followed the movements of his private plane, which has apparently been denied access to France and is now heading to one of the Gulf States.

As for El-Materi, the son-in-law with the private tiger, Al-Jazeera says that he too has made it out of the country and is heading for Dubai.

Bloggers, Internet activists, and Facebook users may have helped push a regime out of power, but it doesn’t look even they have enough power to force Ben Ali and his family into a real-life reckoning.