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Communiqués

Labour protests heat up a week after president steps down

Last week, on Thursday, 10 February 2011, bus drivers and public transport workers in Cairo joined thousands of downtrodden public sector workers on strike. Days before, factory workers in Helwan, estimated to have reached 10,000, undertook a series of sit-ins in cement, coal and wheat factories – amongst others. The impact these strikes had on the regime cannot be diminished. Within days of the strikes, Mubarak finally stepped down.

When transportation workers joined in spreading labour unrest, they effectively invigorated Egypt’s wave of anti-government protests.

On Monday, 14 February 2011, these transit authority workers gathered en masse in front of the State TV station (Maspiro) waving pay stubs and chanting the very same slogans used in Tahrir Square, though not seeking the same political demands: they had come for the basic right to live and support their families.

Bus drivers, ticket-takers, mechanics and other transport workers showed every and any reporter or interested party their pay stubs as they highlighted their shockingly low pay, ranging from 300-600 at the most, and the insurance deductions which according to enraged demonstrators went into the pockets of their employers. Health care was not being provided to any of these labourers. Many of the transportation workers stressed that a few hundred pounds was not enough to pay rent, feed their children and take care of ageing parents let alone provide for the cost of education and cover health care and hospital charges.

At 4:00pm on Tuesday, union workers belonging to Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions began gathering around the union’s headquarters on Galaa Street. Using the same slogans and chants that galvanised millions around Egypt since 25 January. They union workers were asking for the head of the federation to step down and for the 53 year old federation to detach itself from the arms of the regime and become an autonomous and independent union which could better represent Egypt’s work force.

Not long after the protest began peacefully, violence broke out as protests attempted to march into their workplace.  Those who had made their way into the building were met with belts, chairs and other projectiles. Soon a full-scale struggle began as both sides began to throw rocks and objects, shattering the glass doors. Security guards and thugs used fire extinguishers at least two times to push protesters back from the entrance.

Then, shortly after, glass bottles began raining down from above as men, standing on the fifth or sixth floor hurled Pepsi-cola and 7-Up bottles at the protesters and anyone holding a camera. At least four people were injured by these volleys.

The military police eventually arrived, but soon left without giving any indication of whether they would return and whether they intended to restore calm. Protesters on the ground yelled and cursed at those inside the entrance and those peering down from the windows, but were soon reunited and resumed their peaceful chants. The day ended with the arrival of the military who requested that three protesters make their way up to the official management of the union in order to set out demands.

Strikes had also erupted in a range of sectors, including railway workers, state electricity staff, Suez Canal service technicians and hospitals. The banking sector also saw a series of strikes on Sunday, 13 February. Banks have since been closed as the Central Bank of Egypt seeks to create avenues for dialogue and conflict resolution. Nevertheless bank staff have expressed their distrust and disdain towards the CBE as it puts off decision making.

A source within a prominent agricultural bank which offers micro-loans to farmers among other services, confirmed that the CBE had asked all banks to form committees of 20 persons and send them to meet with them at given times to discuss grievances, requests and possible resolutions. If demands are not met, bank staff have threatened more drastic measures. Among their demands are higher pay and the resignation of bank managers who are accused of incompetence, abusive policies towards bank staff and bank customers and unlawful appropriation and use of bank funds.

Today, Wednesday, 16 February 2011 has seen thousands gather after yesterday’s lull in protests. According to a prominent Egyptian blogger, 20,000 protesters have gathered at Ghazl el-Mahalla on strike. Teachers are also gathered around the education ministry.

Telecommunications workers, postal staff and state electricity staff have all been on strike and continue their protests, though none have lifted their services. It seems clear that strikers are holding back, hoping that the government will get the message and respond with haste. They are not trying to jeopardise the stability of their country as they have shown restraint in the past weeks. Though the interim government and military council are visibly shaken, they have not announced any steps or plans to  bring the necessary justice these workers require.

Protests can and will only continue with many cards as yet left unplayed. The importance of labour in coming days cannot be overestimated, it is incumbent on all those concerned with the future and present of this revolution to recognise this and support workers’ rights as workers and their right to protest generally. Connecting workers’ movements with the claims of other participants in this revolution may not be immediately easy, but in the current climate it seems possible just as it is necessary.

source: Labour protests heat up a week after president steps down | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=345

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Features

Operational Aesthetics: Briefing Script

As an alternative way out of dominant strictures of thought, Art, as reframed historicism, may yet have some of the answers where the methodology of Science is silent.
– MAJ Irvin Lim Fang Jau (Pointer – A Journal of the Singapore Armed Forces. V27 N4)

Operational aesthetic frameworks can be provisionally defined as re-imagined contexts or systems enacting transformative scripts. Such contexts may either be found, deliberately constructed or both. In the case of the found context (necessity often dictates operation within an existing system or environment – infiltration is another possibility), the operative may attempt to transform the given parameters and purpose of a job, routine, service or profession. “Operational design is not new. Joint doctrine defines operational design as ‘the key considerations used as a framework in the course of planning for a campaign or major operation. Doctrine also lists ‘elements of operational design,’ but nowhere does doctrine describe the design process or how to perform it. ‘”1

An operational process mediates between high-level or strategic process and the tactical. In the military context, the operational reconciles strategy and tactics (Strategic, Operational, Tactical) involved with actual delivery and execution of processes and procedures. Tactics alone cannot accomplish strategic objectives in a theater and the results of tactical actions are useful only when linked together as a part of some larger design orchestrated by operational concerns.

Operational art requires broad vision, the ability to anticipate, a careful understanding of the relationship of means to ends, an understanding of the inherent risks that are under them, and effective joint and combined cooperation.2

The human involved in purely operational processes undertakes unskilled, semi-skilled or trades-based tasks. The object is considered “operational” when fit for use or service. As such, the person or object is a servant – presumably of those strategies and tactics delivered from above. Yet it is precisely the operational concern that is invoked when an official entity seeks to evade difficult questions or maintain secrecy (eg. ‘this is an operational matter on which we will not comment’. In refusing to comment on such base procedures, the dominant order reveals them to be the hidden kernel of concern.

An operational aesthetic is perceptual capacity in movement. Rather than seeking the productive end (communism), it seeks the procedural dynamic (communization). In doing so, it moves its focus to systemic functionality without fetishizing design. This dynamic is, by necessity, located within a system of exchange. When the operative threatens the circulation of existing goods, services and/or values, (s)he risks losing a position within that system. Although such operations are sisyphean gestures, they do perform the function of dynamic critique – potentially destabilizing dominant systems. A deliberately constructed context or system has a more sustainable potential for generative operations.

It’s important to understand the phrase “operational aesthetic” as a deadpan invocation of the extraordinary – or armed hope through embedded infiltration. It attempts to design, organize, integrate, and conduct strategies, campaigns and major operations. Operational art translates the joint force’s strategy into operational design and, ultimately, tactical action, by integrating the key activities at all levels of engagement.

The way to deal with a complex operational situation is to carry out a heuristic operational design to provide a logical foundation for all planning and execution, and continuously to assess and revise the design over time in response to changes in the situation.3

In the future, information will increasingly affect the factors of space, time and force deployment. new technological advances will continue to compress the very space and time separating the various levels and forms of operation. New methods of “joint force” deployment will emerge. Insurrections will replace engagements, while major operations will become the main method to accomplish objectives in a given part of the theater.

1 Schmitt, John F., A Systemic Concept for Operational Design. p2
2 Department of the Army, Field Manual 100-5, Washington, DC, 14 June 1993, p64
3 Schmitt, John F., A Systemic Concept for Operational Design. p15
Categories
Communiqués

Antonio Negri: Letter to a Tunisian Friend

January 24, 2011

Dear A,

It’s true — twenty years ago when you were my student at Paris 8 — we couldn’t have imagined that the Tunisian revolution would have taken this shape and would have stirred up constitutional problems analogous to those of a social uprising in central Europe. Together we studied the expulsion of the working class from the phosphate mines in southern Tunisia, a prodrome [early symptom] of the great waves of internal and external migration, and the slow transformation that the relocation of the European textile industry has caused in your country. You worked hard to show me the productive potentialities of your country, beyond the textile, tourism and petroleum industries (which have only recently started expanding). Everything happened so quickly. Twenty years ago we were just beginning to stammer about globalization, but today it’s gotten to the point that Tunisia has become a European province, and with it, the world. Twenty years ago we could barely comprehend the transformation from industrial work into immaterial/cognitive work, and today Tunisia has an overabundance of this cutting edge labor power. For twenty years we’ve exposed the terrifying transformation that neoliberalism has imposed on and across the changing shape of the market and labor: the end of the traditional salary system, and with it came mass unemployment and unbearable precarisation: 35% of the young are cognitive workers, but only 10% are employed. Moreover, Tunisia has endured endless attacks on welfare, terrible regional inequality, the disastrous effects of migration, a freeze on foreign investment, etc… And, after all, these last twenty years have been an affirmation of a mafia-esque dictatorship, an affirmation of limitless corruption and of a repressive system that is deceitful and cruel — deceitful because it depends upon and legitimizes itself through Western fears of some Islamic menace and cruel because it is purely and simply a force of class domination and oppression by a corrupt dictator against workers and honest people.

…The insurrection has created new strengths, but how to use them, how to put them in motion against old and new enemies (that will emerge at any moment)? Dear professor, do you remember when we spoke ironically about those Enlightenment men who challenged each other over the best constitution for Corsica, Poland, or even the Caroline Islands? Why aren’t we discussing (without laughing this time) the contents of a new Tunisian constitution? It’s not that there isn’t anyone here able to do it — immersed in solitary thoughts of conspiracy, in a still-circulating global political culture (even more than in Italy), in fears of uprising, and in the joys of victory — it’s because to talk about Tunisia today (and to talk about these new rights to construct and these guarantees to define) is to also talk about Europe. You never know, maybe Europeans will have their turn to liberate themselves from their own despotic regimes.

…Nonetheless, it is true that your problem is from now on a general problem, that a new constitution of liberty [constitution de la liberté] is not only a problem for Tunisians, but a problem for all free people. I’ll try to offer a few reflections to start a discussion, a forum to which everyone can contribute. To begin, I’d like to insist on a couple of points which seem to me to be more important than all the others, because in order to qualify as being a true democracy, this should be an absolute democracy, like we had hoped for twenty years ago.

1.) We’ve got to purge the old branches of power (legislative, executive, judiciary) and forcibly restore permanent control to a strengthened legislature, then we must add at least two other government agencies, one which will work in the media sector and one which will work on the banks and in finance.

First of all, it is no longer possible to imagine a democratic regime which is not bound by information, communication, and the construction of public opinion with respect to the truth, or to liberty, or the filtering of the multitude [au filtre de la multitude]. The extreme importance online initiatives have had during the insurrection would have to be safeguarded as a practice of permanent possibility. These practices should be rescued from the state of exception in character and should become a permanently and democratically control practice. But this isn’t enough: the old media to submit itself to social control which will free up activity blocked by the executive branch and political parties. There is only one way to affirm this democratic shape: free speech [le droit d’expression] ought to be liberated from the power of money. The plurality of information should not represent the means of its own capitalization, but ought to be guaranteed by popular sovereignty so as to increase discussion, the clash of opinions and decisions. The right to free speech shouldn’t just be an individual right, but is meant to be a collective practice, excluding all capitalist pretensions to suspend this right and all attempts to subjugate it. The right to free speech should be affirmed as a constitutent power [constituante puissance] open to the legitimation of the common.

2.) The banks, the financial system, have become, over the course of capitalist development, separately controlled by the industrial and political elite. Under neoliberalism, even this control has come to an end and the financial system has been rendered completely independent, legitimizing its intervention on the global level. In Tunisia, as you’ve said, in the transition to democracy one also acts out a progression of the forms of capitalist control over civil life. Finance capital already taken a more aggressive stance regarding communication and even while censorship is in the process of vanishing for good, new forms of control are being put into place.

Thus, the problem is how to stop this development, how to transform the banks into a public service, and to do it in such a way that the allotment of financial funds and the development of investment policy is decided in common. The tools of finance should be put into service of the multitude. It’s clear that this entails the construction of democratic powers of financial programming, coordinated with the activity of the legislature and the executive, and thus monetary power is striped of the deceitful and hypocritical independence of the central bank which has been an instrument of global capital. It’s a difficult path to travel down. We not only find ourselves coming up against national bankers, but against the interests of global capital.

But it’s a path we must travel with great determination — with prudence, but with great determination. And so we lay the first stone of a global uprising against neoliberalism and finance capital. Will that uprising ever finally come to a head?


The New York Times realized immediately that “one small revolution” like Tunisia’s could inflame not only Maghreb but all of the Arab world. Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that an autocrat can more easily make concessions (to the people, but above all to banks and multinational corporations) than a democratic leader, however weak, who Tunisians will end up electing. That’s the American prediction. And so here’s our prediction: today it is not possible to imagine a democratic revolution that does not fulfill (above all else) a nationalization of the banks and rent reappropriation, which will follow, step by step, the establishment of the law of the common. This is the only way the multitude can establish its power. The mission of this democratically managed financial agency is to guarantee the welfare of the Tunisian populous, against precarity, to provide a guaranteed income, to offer a complete education and medical assistance tailored to the needs of each citizen.

Today, there is no liberty that does not rests on the common. It’s no accident that the dictatorship privatized everything in Tunisia that could be privatized — it all needs to be reappropriated. My friend A, the future of your generation and your children rests upon the common and joint management [gestion commune]. Without a doubt, the disaster which you are inheriting won’t fade overnight — once the clouds of insurrection dissipate your priorities will be to reflect and to make decisions. But the dispositif of a constitutional government can only concern itself with the common. Do not lose the project of the common to the Islamists (then that will be your concern, dear A) . They expand and develop under the cover of a false propaganda of the common.

3.) The third point concerning the government. As you’ve said, the Tunisian revolt has been a social revolt that was born out of a society of workers. Ben Ali understood that, above all, he couldn’t allow this social revolt to express itself politically, and every politician knew that the unemployed youth were a time bomb ready to explode. Why?

The young — cognitive labor — are, today, the real working class of the post-industrial era. Since they are cognitive laborers, these youth are certainly not powerless, on the contrary they have the means to transcend the frustration which has suppressed the poorer and older strata of the population. The culture of powerlessness was dealt a devastating blow in the streets of Tunis.

But the young must ensure that the revolutionary process remains open as they transform the insurrection into a machine of constitutional government. They can’t leave the transformation of the country’s constitution in the hands of the old elite (not the socialists, the democrats, nor the Islamists). Tunisians don’t so much need a new constitution as a constitutional system encompassing the entire country — including the armed forces, the magistrate and the universities. The legislative and governing power need to put the country back on its feet ought to be exercised directly by the young and by revolutionary groups and should be organized in all those places where it will be possible to do it. But all of this will be possible only if they avoid as long as they can setting up static forms of political representation (even the Enlightenment-era constitutional projects, which we just spoke of, couldn’t have taken less than ten years). The flexibility of global power, of its banks, of its central institutions, is truly great: these gentlemen would have no difficulty finding (and paying) a second-rate socialist or an Islamist to tip the balance in their favor!  The insurrection has demonstrated its skills and it must be just as adept against global power and its Mediterranean emanations, which are already converging against the extreme danger of the Tunisian insurrection and its extension in Maghreb. We remember (this isn’t just your preoccupation, comrade A?): if we don’t put together constituent action committees, there are Islamists (whether they are extremists or moderates) who will take politics into the mosques. As more people become political democrats and constituents, more will become secular.

Ciao, let’s continue to exchange updates. We’ve been breathing a new air for some time now. Now we await Algeria!

Toni Negri

PS : If you open up the Western business papers, those on the right, are talking a lot about how ratings agencies have cut Tunisia’s sovereign bond rating. Moody’s has already lowered the sovereign bond rating and downgraded it from “stable” to “negative.” [See here for more] On the same topic, the left is bemoaning the decision because they insist that, on the contrary, the insurrection is equally…productive, since the end of the mafia’s deductions from Tunisia’s industry should allow for an increase in confidence. But what confidence? In poverty? In precarity?

As for the political press, on the right they increase the threats: Be careful citizens of Tunisia, because the army is ready for repression if you go too far. This same army which has helped you liberate yourselves from Ben Ali… And on the left, after experiencing a brief moment of joy, they ask, “now what?” Since Ben Ali has now left, will the country rebuild its state apparatus and head into a peaceful transition toward democracy?

In reality, for the left like the right, the anxiety is as big as the surprise. Will Tunisia’s transition towards democracy will be an example, a laboratory for entire Muslim world? But if this is all they want, then it’s really not anything new. In fact, it’s rather old: quite simply, it is a new colonialism.

Dear A., don’t worry about this new constitution, or this new constitutional system, or the new instruments of citizens’ democratic power. In Maghreb, in Algeria, in Tunisia and then also in Egypt, there have been profound and important moments in the development of a democracy built from the bottom.  We are refuting the narrow minded and repressive vision of American and European commentators.

PPS : I reread this letter before sending it to you and now it’s January 28th. Egypt is burning.


The original letter, in Italian, was first published at UniNomadE 2.0.
This version is based on the French translation by Alain Huppé published by the Journal Multitudes and was translated by Nate Lavey.

Categories
Communiqués

Latecomers crash the party

The readers of this blog, what few may remain, have surely longed for an update on events in Occupied Cairo. Because, yes, it’s still quite occupied. Even from the beginnings of celebrations of Mubarak’s resignation, groups were chanting “this isn’t an end, this is just the beginning.” The myriad labor actions in the past week give this chant credence, if nothing else. We now find ourselves in the midst of a strange occupation by the Egyptian military and military police, and the demands of those who went out in the streets are now caught between the military’s paternalistic calls to go home and keep quiet and the murmuring of others who seem to just want things to go “back to normal.”

A lot has been written on the Egyptian military recently, and as far as this post goes it should suffice to say that they’re not to be trusted as benevolent protectors. The other danger though, is more peculiar, not marked by any uniform and not even as confrontational or identifiable as the Baltagiya that we saw roaming the streets with weapons and posters of Mubarak a couple weeks ago.

It seems now that you’ll inevitably find at least one troublemaker milling about Tahrir and any given Labor strikes/demonstrations, all basically the same type. These troublemakers generally seem to be on last week’s news cycle courtesy of State TV, and from their words and accusations you can tell they’ve not spent a day in Tahrir. In the middle of a group of people all calling for the same thing (better wages, a change in government structure, etc.) you’ll find one of these types pick on someone in the crowd–sometimes a journalist, a foreigner, but not necessarily–and start making wild accusations about foreign agents, journalism ruining Egypt’s reputation abroad, or whatever. It’s as if they were paid provocateurs how effectively they distract and rile up a crowd, but the fear is that these are autonomous cretins who sat out the past three weeks and now feel like it’s time for them to get their say in. I’ve had several friends (all of them Egyptians) targeted in these sorts of situations, and while they’re generally resolved without violence they’re an absolutely disgusting spectacle, preventing participation by some and the transmission of the exact sorts of images that have given the Egyptian people the admiration of the world in past weeks.

It’s uncertain how these types are best dealt with, one suggestion has been just to fight fire with fire and accuse them of being National Security or Intelligence (they are, after all, doing the same work gratis). Solidarity and shared understanding amongst those protesting and demonstrating will also be a primary mechanism of fighting this sickness, preventing it from getting a foothold within the crowds. While these may work to diffuse an immediate confrontation, the bigger question still points back to the culpability of the Egyptian state media in propagating these lies and suspicions, and their failure–even after their apparent change of heart–to actively rehabilitate all the propaganda they put out. State media still needs to either be shut up, taken over by revolutionary forces or effectively countered by distribution of alternative information, etc. The latter is currently being attempted by many fronts with some efficacy (this could be seen when protestors outside the state TV building shouted “Where’s Al Jazeera? The Liars are right there!”) but stronger remedies may still be needed.

The second group, called only half-jokingly “the cleanup thugs” or “the chic thugs” are the groups of youth cleaning up downtown and Tahrir. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to see the city sparkle (excepting the dust) but this isn’t just some apolitical adopt-a-midan program. We saw this first as almost all the anti Mubarak and anti-regime graffiti was painted over, washed out or otherwise erased. Also the stones that people had pulled from the pavement to defend the midan were suddenly carted off, where others had plans to make a monument of them. As symptomatic of the rest of their work, these groups basically sought the disappearance of all traces of the revolution, its battles and its calls for liberty and dignity. To so carelessly push aside this recent history because it somehow violates Egyptian middle class propriety (keep quiet, eyes forward) is dispiriting. A revolution was born in the square just as people were dying in it, and it’s not hardly the time to say “yalla let’s get back to cairo traffic.”

Apologies for the scattered quality of these thoughts, gentle readers, but the post-Mubarak scene and reorganization is still a work in progress, making writing a bit confusing.

source: Latecomers crash the party | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=339

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Communiqués

autonomia reading group Birmingham University

Discussion Notes on Let’s Spit on Hegel 2/9/2011

The question that both guided and helped to clarify points in our discussion was ‘What is the specific autonomist gesture in Let’s Spit on Hegel?’ Here, much of our discussion focused on the master-slave dialectic and the rejection of subsumption. The following paragraph, taken from page six, clearly maps outs this rejection:

Two positions coexist in Hegel: one interprets woman’s destiny in terms of the principle of femininity, while the other sees in the slave not an unchanging principle of essence, but rather a human condition, the historical realization of the gospel maxim that “the last shall be first.” Had Hegel recognized the human origin of woman’s oppression, as he did in the case of the slave’s, he would have had to apply the master-slave dialectic in her case as well. But in doing so he would have encountered a serious obstacle. For, while the revolutionary method can capture the movement of the social dynamics, it is clear that woman’s liberation could never be included in the same historical schemes. On the level of the woman-man relationship, there is no solution which eliminates the other; thus the goal of seizing power is emptied of meaning. Emptying of meaning the goal of seizing power is the distinctive feature of the struggle against the patriarchal system as a concurrent and successive stage to the master-slave dialectic. (6)

What renders the master-slave dialectic inoperative? For Rivolta Femminile it is the irreducible difference between woman and man—this relation evacuates the master-slave dialectic of any reductive or subsumptive power. On the one hand, this irreducible difference calls for a radical critique of equality. Here, women cannot simply be included with the realm patriarchal power or equated with the privileged male subject position. Therefore, equality as a process of inclusion can only manifest as “what is offered as legal rights to colonized people” and/or the “world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality” (4).  There was some debate and admittedly some confusion as to the status and use of the term humankind. It is used throughout the text and would seem to present the very problem that is being critiqued in master-slave dialectic. Humankind could very well provide the fundamental category to which the man-woman relation is reduced or subsumed. However, we ultimately rejected this reading. On the other hand, this irreducible difference positions women as a revolutionary class. For, this rejection of the master-slave dialectic extends to what the collective refers to as Marxist-Leninist ideology. Where Marx and Lenin did not include women in class composition or integral to a revolutionary schema women are understood to both comprise the working class and open up its revolutionary possibilities.

Our discussion of selected chapters from Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven was brief. One movement that did present itself as necessary to situating the Autonomia movement was the simultaneous generalization of the proletariat and the localization of politics. With the formation of the Autonomia movement came the inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the proletariat as well as an intense focus on the factory floor.