Alliances and obfuscations

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, pages 49-50:

Ultimately, this mounting class conflict [in the 13th to 15th centuries] brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated. It is difficult, in fact, to accept the claim, often made by historians, according to which these struggles had no chance of success due to the narrowness of their political horizons and the "confused nature of their demands." In reality, the objectives of the peasants and artisans were quite transparent. They demanded that "every man should have as much as another" (Pirenne 1937: 202) and, in order to achieve this goal, they joined with all those "who had nothing to lose," acting in concert, in different regions, not afraid to confront the well-trained armies of the nobility, despite their lack of military skills.

If they were defeated, it was because all the forces of feudal power--the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie--moved against them, united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England the the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes. For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers of its cities, the bourgeoisie recognized an enemy far more dangerous than the nobility--one that made it worthwhile for the burghers even to sacrifice their cherished political autonomy. Thus, it was the urban bourgeoisie, after two centuries of struggles waged in order to gain full sovereignty within the walls of its communes, who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.

[Citation references Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.]

This passage describes a phenomenon I think most of us are familiar with, but perhaps in a historical context some of us (me, for one) might not have placed it in before. Anyway, it's always useful to be reminded of it. We're always told (with varying levels of directness) that we should point ourselves "upward" in our aspirations and allegiances, and "downward" in our hatred, blaming, and (again with varying levels of directness) our violence. And in some ways, it makes pragmatic sense to go along with this--as Federici points out, if the bourgeoisie hadn't aligned itself with the nobility, there's a very good chance that the lower-class revolutionaries would have been successful--i.e., that there wouldn't be a bourgeoisie anymore.

Of course, this pragmatism is a false one; if the revolutionaries had actually been able to enact a world where "every man [sic] should have as much as another," which they may have been able to with genuine bourgeois assistance (which would have also been, by its nature, anti-bourgeois assistance), I can't help thinking that not just the revolutionaries but everyone, bourgeoisie included, might be living better, fuller lives now. In Federici's account, the bourgeoisie's (and the Church's) alliance with the nobility abetted the creation of the absolute state; what might it do now?

Federici is talking about classes of people, but how do we learn from this and apply those lessons to our behavior as individuals? I don't for a minute fool myself that I, and most people who will read this, don't fall into any reasonable definition of "the bourgeoisie," but as individuals we can behave counter to the pattern of our class. Our actions determine whether we're the bourgeoisie in this case. When push comes to shove, you and me and others like us need to remember that our allegiance should always be to those with less power than us, not those with more, despite what short-term pragmatism might seem to indicate.

The first paragraph, by the way, describes one very powerful technique frequently used to mystify and dismiss opposition to the status quo, which is to call that opposition "muddled" or "narrow-minded." "Those silly peasants think that everyone can live like the King, how confused they are!" "Those feminists are only concerned with problems that affect women, not problems that affect everyone!" Sometimes these accusations can be accurate--for instance, I don't think it would be wrong to say that the bourgeoisie's allegiance to the nobility was and is narrow-minded--but whenever people start slinging these attacks, it's probably going to be useful to step back and really think about it, because they are a very effective way of confusing people into exactly the kind of wrong allegiances I was discussing above. With the two (cartoonish, but no less common for their cartoonishness) examples I gave, a moment's thought reveals the problems, i.e., surely no peasant thinks that everyone can or should live just like the King does, maybe I should try to see what they're actually arguing; obviously, any problem that affects half of the population cannot help but affect the rest--and even if it didn't, it's still a problem for a huge number of people!

(A reminder--I found Federici's book extremely important, so I'm going slowly through the quotes I copied onto my Commonplace blog and discussing each of them one by one. None of these posts is comprehensive in any way, nor is it intended to be--none of them will be comprehensive on the larger topic involved, on the subset of that topic that I choose to discuss, or even on the implications of the particular Federici passage discussed. Obviously. And if you want to see all of the quotes I copied before I discuss them, they're here.)

Stolen context

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, page 10:

By the end of 1986...I left Nigeria, in body if not in spirit. But the thought of the attacks launched on the Nigerian people never left me. Thus, the desire to restudy "the transition to capitalism" has been with me since my return. I had read the Nigerian events through the prism of 16th-century Europe. In the United States, it was the Nigerian proletariat that brought me back to the struggles over the commons and the capitalist disciplining of women, in and out of Europe. Upon my return, I also began to teach in an interdisciplinary program for undergraduates where I confronted a different type of "enclosure": the enclosure of knowledge, that is, the increasing loss, among the new generations, of the historical sense of our common past. This is why in Caliban and the Witch I reconstruct the anti-feudal struggles of the Middle Ages and the struggles by which the European proletariat resisted the advent of capitalism. My goal in doing so is not only to make available to non-specialists the evidence on which my analysis relies, but to revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that today is in danger of being erased. Saving this historical memory is crucial if we are to find an alternative to capitalism. For this possibility will depend on our capacity to hear the voices of those who have walked similar paths.

I quote this little bit of Federici's introduction because it brings up an extremely important point, what she refers to here as "the enclosure of knowledge," what I described a few hours ago in conversation with the Baronette and my parents as "our hidden shared history" and as "stolen context."

Most Americans, I imagine, if they think about capitalism at all, think of it as a pretty good thing--we've been trained pretty well to associate it with "freedom," whatever that is. In the even unlikelier, rarer situation where we think about it in relation to feudalism, the system that preceded it, we're most likely to think of it as an improvement. Feudalism, we feel, became untenable, its cruelties unbearable, and it was replaced by the more enlightened system of capitalism. We think this because the more accurate history, that capitalism was developed by the powerful in response to (for a time very successful) anti-feudal struggles on the part of the powerless--i.e., that capitalism was in fact created as a bloody, intercontinental counter-revolution--this history has been concealed from us.* Our knowledge of where today came from has been stolen. Without this context, most of us are utterly unable to figure out what the hell is happening.

*Not to mention that the counter-revolution is of course still actively ongoing today, part of which is what Federici is referring to when she talks about Nigeria. Without the context of our own past, it is harder to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world, and harder not just to feel but to recognize the urgency of solidarity.

The Baronette told me about an article she read (I don't have a link, but I'm sure if you throw a brick you'll hit an article like it) criticizing the rioters in England for looting "the commons." That businesses of any kind--and chain stores, no less!--can be referred to as "the commons" with a straight face is a sure sign of how completely they have disconnected us from our history. To me, "stealing" from a corporation is one of the most noble, not to mention pragmatic, acts available to us in our circumscribed lives. But I am only able to think this because I have been made aware that once upon a time--not that long ago, relatively--things were different. Once you're aware of that, you can realize that it is the corporations who have been stealing and continue to steal from us, not vice versa.

More on this, and on Federici, hopefully to come.

Thoughts inspired by recent reading

The widespread, largely unexamined*, notion that witch trials were (and continue to be) the products of "mass hysteria" is both a convenient bit of patriarchal propaganda and an utterly perverse choice of words.

The notion, again unexamined*, that at least I had about medieval and later religious persecution (the Inquisitions, etc.), i.e. that it was solely related to dogmatic issues, is another convenient piece of propaganda. The heretics didn't just differ over religious dogma; they were political and social radicals, and were persecuted as such.

The idea of "progress" is even more fucked than I thought it was. There might be more on this in upcoming posts, but if you look at the state of any political, social, and/or economic struggle at, say, two hundred year intervals for the past thousand years, the nature and site of the struggle will change, to be sure, but there is no sign whatsoever of anything approaching linear progress; some things will be "better," some "worse," for whatever definition of those words from whatever perspective, but the overall narrative is not one of progression; rather, it is one of oppression, revolution, and counterrevolution.

Power is very good at sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but I sure wish it was better at reaping that particular crop.

*By I think most people, myself included.

Also

The repressed cultural critic in me loves Aaron Bady's essay on "The Twitter Can't Topple Dictators article" as a genre. One of many money quotes:

the Western generalist (Gladwell) gets to retain Serious Authority. The man who knows nothing about Egypt still gets to Seriously Know, precisely because it‘s only a dialogue between two Western speakers. And this, I think, is the real key. It isn’t just that really “hard” questions get skirted; it’s the fact that Egyptians are driving this narrative — and that if we want to understand it, we have to know something about Egypt in its particularity – that makes these people nervous.

What do you think a revolution is?

Look. I love IOZ, but these two posts on Egypt are just awful. I know he's going dangerously off-brand by treating concrete efforts by anyone to improve their situations with anything other than withering contempt, so, you know, I guess I should be happy that he's not writing posts about what unenlightened fools the revolutionaries are and why don't they just stay inside and post recipes on Fridays, but...

Who, exactly, thinks that now that Mubarak is gone the revolution is over? The revolutionaries sure don't. At about the same time as IOZ was prepping his second startling revelation, the people I follow in Egypt were tweeting (whatever) about striking workers, mass protests, and clashes with military police (and meanwhile others in Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran--and I think Algeria but my news out of there is hazy--were engaging in their own, frequently violent, struggles). Yes, when Mubarak left Egypt turned into a huge party. That was because Mubarak left, not because anyone thought the fight was over. Even in the midst of the celebration, every person Al Jazeera spoke with and every person online was saying "Tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we get to work. If we don't get what we want, we're not going anywhere."

When I, at least, as IOZ would have it, "rush to lionize the Egyptian revolution," it's this I'm lionizing.

And, Christ:

Well, anyway, now the question remains, will there be revolution in Egypt?

I'm sorry, but this has to be the single stupidest thing the otherwise very smart IOZ has written since that time he thought he was cleverly debunking climate change science by pointing out, much to everyone's surprise I'm sure he thought, that climates change all the time.

"Will there be revolution in Egypt?" Come on now. There already has been, and there is now. Revolution isn't an end point. Even if the military stays in control and the revolution fails, there still will have been revolution during this time. I've said it before, but the revolutionaries in Midan Tahrir made their own revolutionary culture, their own revolutionary society, their own revolutionary world in less than three weeks. That is revolution.

And, once more: they're not stopping. "As to what will become of those people and their country, it's a question whose answer will be measured in years at least," IOZ comes down from the mountain to tell us, and I say no shit. But what's happening right now, that is revolution and nothing else.

IN OTHER WORDS: No, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen in a minute when I go pour the water for my coffee. And for all I know, it's all going to end horribly. Maybe the US and Israel are as we speak collaborating on a plan to wipe Egypt off the map. Who knows? But right now what is going on is beautiful, and smarty-pantsing about "will there be revolution" is just being a douchebag to the bravest people on Earth right now.

A perfect symbol of how hard the fight is

I've got Al Jazeera English on. In general, their coverage is fantastic. The reporters are ecstatic. At one point, the anchor asked correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin to drop his journalistic remove for a moment and talk about his personal feelings at the moment as an Egyptian himself, and it was all he could do to keep himself from crying. Another correspondent, whose name I haven't caught, just said as I type that she keeps feeling like she's missing the party being a few floors up from Midan Tahrir, and all but said that she can't wait until she's off duty and can go down and join it.

And about half an hour ago, the anchor was on the phone interviewing a revolutionary who was down in Tahrir (I think it was Hossam el-Hamalawy ). He had just said "We got rid of Mubarak; now we have to get rid of the Mubarak dictatorship," and, emotionally, was halfway through another sentence when the anchor interrupted him because Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, was available to be interviewed.

...yeah.

When the very, very, very best, most sympathetic media coverage that there is thinks that it needs to make the actual people who did this wait so that some fucking poobah can equivocate, instead of the other way around, that right there is a perfect symbol of how goddamn hard the fight is.

Urgent

If you're not watching Al Jazeera right now, fucking do it. English stream here.

Mubarak and Suleiman have just spoken, and shit is going down. I have a feeling things are about to get really really good, really really bad, or both.

UPDATE, Friday around 11:00 AM my time, I think around 6:00 PM in Egypt: In case you haven't heard, Suleiman has announced that Mubarak is "resigning" and handing leadership over to the military leadership.

Recycling my words on Egypt

I hope no one minds if I copy and paste the bulk of a comment I left over at Richard's place and call it a post. Here goes:

As I see the word coming out of Tahrir Square, particularly from Mona Seif (@monasosh), I've been reminded more and more of what people say about life in the Paris Commune. They're making their own world there, and it's amazing. But then of course the more I'm reminded of the Commune, the more I'm reminded of how that ended.

I'm still more optimistic than pessimistic, though. Last night some friends came over for dinner, and of course all we could talk about was Egypt. At one point I brought up that there's at least one couple honeymooning in Tahrir, and at least one other that was married there, and we all kind of paused for a moment and thought about that, and how if you get married in a revolution, there's no way that you don't pass that down to your kids.

There's just so much beauty going on there--the Copts protecting the Muslims during prayers and vice versa, the guy giving free haircuts at the "revolution salon," the singing welcoming committees at the entrances to the square, the increasing strikes across the country....even if, God or whoever forbid, it is crushed, they can't kill everyone, and they can't make them--or us--forget.

Welcome to our liberated zone.

The one week with closed factories and minimal tratfc has given us clean air and a blue sky.

Everyone who isn't in #tahrir is thinking about post-Mubarak Egypt, everyone in #tahrir is living post-Mubarak Egypt.

At Tahrir sq. you can find pop corn, couscous, sweet potatoes, sandwiches, tea & drinks! Egyptians know how to revolt!

one couple spending honey moon in tahrir, another couple signing marriage contract today. THIS IS REVOLUTION

More Egypt

I know it's a completely meaningless gesture but I still feel the need to make here a statement of solidarity with the revolutionaries under attack in Tahrir Square. Beyond that, I have no words.

Logic

Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press earlier:

I want the Egyptian people to have the chance to chart a new future. It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy like the elections we saw in Iran two years ago, where you have one election 30 years ago and then the people just keep staying in power and become less and less responsive to their people. We want to see a real democracy that reflects the vibrancy of Egyptian society. And we believe that President Mubarak, his government, civil society, political activists, need to be part of a national dialogue to bring that about.

Via John Caruso at Distant Ocean.

It would be funny even if Mubarak weren't currently in exactly his thirtieth year in charge of Egypt, but man, that really pushes it over the top, right?

(Note please: a member of one of two families was president of the US for 20 consecutive years, and a member of one of those families is still currently in one of the most powerful positions in the government. I forget her name.)

I wanted to pair this with one of the many scenes from Caligula where Malcolm McDowell is very impressed with his own logic, but couldn't find any on youtube and didn't have the patience to put one up myself. Fortunately, this does almost as nicely.

Egypt catchup

Apparently at some point this morning (in my time zone, that is), Egypt shut down Al Jazeera's Egyptian bureau and revoked their licenses; their broadcasts in English and Arabic have been taken off the air within the country.

An hour ago my twitter stream lit up with people talking about low-flying fighter jets buzzing the protesters (150,000 according to some reports) gathered in Tahrir Square. No attacks as of yet. And the protesters didn't move an inch.

Should I keep using the word "protester" or should I switch to something more appropriate?

This AJE interview with PJ Crowley is near eight minutes long, but trust me, the time will fly by because it's one of the most entertaining things you'll ever see. The interviewer, Shihab Rattansi, is wonderful, and I want to send him a present. I would pick out a favorite moment ("That's interesting," perhaps), but really it's the momentum of it all, the blow after blow to Crowley's insipid metaphors and non-answers, that is so magical.



(Source)

Yasmin Hamidi on Twitter (via a retweet from Aaron Bady) says "Think colonialism is dead? Turn on @CNN & watch white men in suits debate wat role US shud play in deciding the fate of Egyptians."

UPDATE: It is of course entirely possible--likely, even--that I'm missing some subtleties here, but AJE is pissing me off with its attempts to organize this. They keep saying that the protesters need a "figurehead" or a "leader" to make their demands, and it's clear they want it to be ElBaradei (who is about to speak, apparently)--but, hello, this is what people making their demands looks like:



And then they keep saying that the protesters "need" the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point one reporter said that the Brotherhood can "organize people on the streets, and no one else can." But, hello, this is what people organizing themselves on the streets looks like:



The Muslim Brotherhood didn't do that. ElBaradei didn't do that. People did that.

UPDATE II: I don't find Fox News any more or less propagandistic than any of the other American networks, nor do I think their propaganda is in favor of anything different. I do, however, admire their methods, particularly their regular habit of "accidentally" mislabeling things:

Egypt again

I can't sit in front of AJE all day and all night again. If you feel like it, keep me updated; if not, I'll catch up.

UPDATE: Via Jack, evidence:

Egypt

Al Jazeera English has live coverage streaming here.

Also might be interesting, when there's a chance to go through them (which I haven't had yet), wikileaks just released a whole bunch of Cairo cables, indexed here.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton: "People in the Middle East, like people everywhere, want to have a role in the decisions that will shape their lives." Meanwhile, the NDP headquarters are on fire.

UPDATE II: The moment PZ Myers posts something about how stupid Egyptians are for praying in the middle of a riot, I'll let you know.

UPDATE III: The NDP headquarters are still on fire, and were extensively looted already. Protesters are setting up makeshift barricades on the streets and, according to Al Jazeera's reporters, seem to still be pretty much in control of central Cairo at least.

UPDATE IV: Speaking as an American the idea that the police and the military might not be serving the same interests is very difficult for me to grasp. In comments Jack points out that the military is "booted up with conscripts," which seems like it might be significant, but I don't know nearly enough to understand the situation.

Right now reports seem to conflict. There is some indication that there have been gunfights between military and police. AJE is reporting in turns that the military was greeted with cheers as they rode through saluting the protesters or that the military actually fired on crowds of protesters; AJE themselves seem to be confused about it. It may be that different things are happening in different places.

As I write various people on AJE are talking about how the military "has been shielded from politics for at least thirty years," which I'm not quite sure what that means; mentioning also that they are significantly smaller than the internal police forces; and speculating about military leaders taking over if Mubarak steps down or is deposed; they also point out that the military has issued no statement about whether they're backing the government or the people.

I don't know anything about this aspect of the situation, absolutely zip, and am kind of at a loss of where to look to learn more.

UPDATE V: There has been some fear for the Egyptian Antiquities Museum, which is, if I understand correctly, pretty much right across the street from the NDP headquarters. At this point, protesters are apparently forming a human shield around it to prevent looting and to try to keep the fire from spreading to it. Which is damned impressive if you ask me.

UPDATE VI: A reporter on the street is showing a handful of live ammo shells she's been given by protesters, who picked them up off the street, so that seems to be confirmation that live ammo has been fired. She also says many people have pointed out to her the "MADE IN THE USA" stamps on the tear gas canisters fired on protesters.

UPDATE VII: Robert Gibbs's favorite word is "monitoring." He uses it whenever he would otherwise be required to answer a question.

UPDATE VIII: No word from or sign of Mubarak, no one seems to know where he is. Do we feel like he's fleeing?

UPDATE IX: Prominent businessmen have been "boarding private jets and leaving."

UPDATE X: One thing AJE keeps emphasizing is that there is no real leader of the protests, that it's the people themselves making themselves heard.

UPDATE XI: Hah! AJE tells me Reuters just reported that Egypt is in "Mubarak's safe hands," and then says "If this is what we're seeing, what does that say about Mubarak's safe hands?"

UPDATE XII: Mubarak has given an address on television, saying basically that the protests have suppressed people's desires for more of his rule, or whatever it is that he means when he says "democracy." He doesn't seem to think he's lost power.