Egypt: Another Leaderless Revolution Succeeds!

© Demotix / Autopauta
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amnesty-international/

After 18 days of protests, the most well-funded US-backed dictatorship has fallen and the people of Egypt, like their friends in Tunisia, are victorious. In this beautiful moment, Egyptians can also revel in the fact that their revolution, as in Tunisia, was one truly by and of the people. There was no political party leading the charge, no revolutionary vanguard agitating the masses and seizing power, and no charismatic politicians at the head of the crowd. In fact, the revolution was led by the thousands and sometimes millions of people in the streets who became actors in history over the past weeks.

The bottom-up nature of the protests in Egypt has been widely remarked in the international and US media, with reactions ranging from dismay to fascination. While much of the spotlight in the West tends to focus on the role of Twitter and Facebook, these were secondary to the people who were using them as some tools among many to overcome the Mubarak regime. The protests in Egypt were distinctly anarchist and anti-hierarchical in form, if not always in demand, as highlighted below:

- spontaneous protest with little or no planning
- acts of property destruction (police stations and party headquarters) were spontaneous and carried out en masse
- spontaneous strikes and resistance by workers in the last week of protests
- self-organization of protests and neighborhood defense
- women as leaders and protesters
- open discussions and consensus decision making about how to bring the regime down, what a new society would look like, etc. in Tahrir Square
- mutual aid - everything from Christians protecting Muslims from government thugs during prayer to sharing of food and knowledge in Tahrir Square
- the lack of any spokesperson, party or centralized leadership

This is a very exciting time in world history, and the meme of ‘leaderless revolution’ is now much more present within the consciousness of US media and political culture, a plus for those waging anti-hierarchical struggles here. What the future holds for Egypt is hard to tell at this point. A great battle has been won, but with the US-backed military in control declaring that they will for the time being maintain the crony government arranged by Mubarak protesters have vowed to defend the revolution.

In the words of Alice Cooper, stay hungry, Egypt!

Egyptian and Tunisian Revolts and the Limits of Nationalism

Among all the amazing events occurring in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the Middle East and North Africa, one of the most recurrent pictures has been massive crowds of people waving and even wearing national flags. News coverage has stressed that people from "all walks of life" have come out to protest the decrepit and failing dictatorships as they cling to power, and indeed it seems to be the case that entire countries have entered into revolt against these governments. Yet among the momentous events in recent weeks, there have been reminders that these riots are about more than overthrowing dictatorships and gaining political representation.

Within the battles against repressive governments, a class war has been unleashed. While protests continue to rage in Tunisia, shopkeepers are fighting against protesters in defense of the transitional government. In Egypt, the poor and dispossessed are looting wealthier areas. It is especially notable in Egypt, where the fearful specter of the mob has been conjured by both US media and Al Jazeera, that we see comments like this emerging:

“These big guys are stealing all the money,” said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. “If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.”

He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. “And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.”

In a massive protest against a dictatorship, just as everywhere else, class matters. "The Egyptian people" and "the Tunisian people" are not a single unit, and in both of these countries there are serious disparities in wealth (although not as serious as in the United States...). At the end of the day, will it be the "big guys" who take power again? Let's hope not.

Non-profiting off of our souls

Life goes on in Washington, D.C.

I am once again employed, albeit far from "gainfully", at a call center in the city. All of my distaste and anger at the nonprofit industrial complex has been affirmed once again, making this the third nonprofit job I've worked since graduation that has been exploitative of the people who worked there and acted at best as a band-aid solution to a deep, systemic problem. This is also my second nonprofit job (almost my third) where the pay has been low and the benefits poor (in this case, nonexistent).

The domination of the job market of young college students and graduates by low/no-pay and no-benefit positions isn't a secret - consider the recent article run on the New York Times about the growing concern about internships. Unfortunately, this article is focused on the private sector and the scandal of a "for-profit employer" hiring unpaid workers. Where is the outcry about unpaid or low-paid labor in nonprofits? While I'm not holding my breath for the NYT to break the story, the reality is that the nonprofit field is full of low-paying entry-level jobs (or unpaid internship positions) that take advantage of well-meaning, socially-concerned generally young people.

At this point you may be wringing your hands and muttering to someone else in the room (or no-one in particular) about how nonprofits are strapped for cash and really can't afford to pay people all that much. It's true that many nonprofits don't have all that much money - they're generally running off of grants, dues and private donations, none of which are guaranteed and all of which are subject to change from year to year. The big problem, though, is that nonprofits tend to divide up the money they do get in really bad ways. Because they're usually top-down, the executive director tends to take a huge cut of the money coming into the company, leaving less to work with when it comes to the actual work and the people doing it. I work in a nonprofit where the ED gets almost 200 thousand dollars in pay and benefits - meanwhile people staffing the phones are getting a meager 9 or 10 an hour. Even at my last job, when I was pulling in around 32K for a year's work, my boss was making much more (at the same time lecturing me about how we needed to hold off on spending money on the organizing I was doing).

In order to truly remedy this problem, we need to destroy nonprofits themselves and create/grow fresh, vital forms of creating real social change. But while we're choosing to work these jobs, we need to force these organizations to give us the pay, benefits, and respect that we deserve. In addition, we need to confront and expose nonprofits for how they treat the people that they say they're "helping" or "advocating for" and the problems they say they're "solving". Because the reality is that they're doing neither in any meaningful sense of the term. They don't respect people calling into the call center any more than they respect the people picking up the phone. Real change comes through struggle, in the workplace and outside of it.

Student Debt Destroys the World

"Debt is the perfect commodity, and the future itself became the new market the financial market was born, ushering in the era of postmodernism."

"The value of the financial system grew to an astounding four times the real productivity of capital. Furthermore, the very concept of debt has as its implicit promise that the future must be an eternally frozen version of the present, as debt is a claim on the materialisation of future profits. As it became evident that the poor could never pay back such massive debts, the age of financial capitalism and its secret religion of the free-market ended. No-one believed in the banks and they collapsed, just as the pagan temples of ancient Greece fell into ruins when no-one believed in Zeus any longer."

-Introduction to the Apocalypse

Happy New Year!

As we enter 2010, we drag with us all the messes of the past year and before. Now renting an apartment with some friends in Washington, D.C. (the belly of the beast), yours truly is feeling the sting of two particular messes (unemployment and crippling student debt) more than ever. And I'm certainly not the only one.

One thing particular striking to me about the above quotes is the idea of debt freezing the future as a version of the present. As graduates, many of those of us whose families were not running a multi-thousand dollar household budget surplus in multiples of 10 to pour into the ever-more-expensive education system in this country have been deprived of a future. For years, decades, (forever?), we are tied to the past by our debt. Every month we pay tribute to the most expensive years of our lives in the hundreds of dollars we send to Bank of America, Nelnet, Wachovia, the US government and all the other loan sharks getting fat off of a broken system. We are debt serfs, and those of us lucky enough to have employment tithe a large portion of the meager paychecks from our entry-level jobs to rich people living in mansions somewhere. We are tied to the past when we are unable to move out of our homes because we cannot afford to pay for the cost of living as an independent adult. Our future is frozen when we are unemployed for months on end and our parents must support us as if we were still children.

Debt is the perfect commodity because we cannot escape it - the banks and lenders own our future. But just like the mortgage industry before it, the student loan giants are heading for collapse. When you have a loosely-regulated industry filled with companies offering easy (or not so easy) money to people whose ability to pay it back is questionable at best, it's going to go bust at some point.

These are not happy days for America's young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

-"Generation Recession", The Nation

Given the reality of youth unemployment, underemployment, and indebtedness, it's not hard to see the end in sight. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

Let's look at what happened to the recent collapse of the housing market, a situation where you have many people who couldn't make payments on multi-thousand dollar home loans they had taken out. Similar to student loans, mortgages were made to lower-income folks in a market where housing was very expensive. Investors put tons of money into this market because the interest on these loans, which often got very high, was profit for them. The companies that made these loans, some of which had been created simply for this purpose (or rather, to make massive profits through these loans), hemorrhaged money and many collapsed because the inevitable happened: people without the money to pay high monthly loan payments stopped paying and the house of cards fell in on itself. This caused a chain reaction which tore through the whole capitalist system, causing massive losses across the board and producing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

How did the government respond? Bailouts for these massive debt factories kept companies like Bank of America, AIG and Citigroup going on our money, while the most unstable fell apart at the seams (think lines of people making a run on IndyMac bank in California in the summer of '08, or google American Home Mortgage Services, one of the biggest mortgage lenders ever). For the people who were losing their homes, however, the government's generosity and understanding was noticeably absent. In other words, the government gave tons of money to wealthy corporations to keep them afloat while letting many, many people who got screwed by their loans lose their homes and ruin their credit ratings. Those that have gotten help have had to beg the same banks that abused them with ridiculously high interest rates and threats to take away their homes to re-negotiate their loans.

In other words, the government acted in the interest of the banks, not of the vast majority of people in this country.

We are the next bubble to burst - the rotten business of student loans has to fall in on itself at some point, and soon. Homeowners got and are still getting screwed while the rich are handed our money by the government they control. We're certainly not looking for the same treatment, but how do we avoid it?

Friday the 13th, the final installment

The final installment of my extended Friday the 13th album dump. Take a listen, let me know what you think!

After the Burial - Rareform


Every summer I make it a point of going the the Summer Slaughter tour, which has in the past had such awesome headlining bands as Necrophagist, Vader, Dying Fetus, Suffocation and more. However, the line-up usually includes a good amount of up-and-coming bands which get to play in front of a large audience drawn in by the more well-known acts. Whoever is selecting these newcomers has (generally) a pretty good ear, and I've been pleasantly surprised each year I've gone. After the Burial is one of those surprises from this past summer. Their name and album art give the appearance of a run-of-the-mill deathcore band, but take a listen and you will discover a very talented and technical death metal band (with no squeals!). Keep an eye on these guys, it sounds like they're going places.

Favorites: Ometh, Cursing Akenaten

Get it here.

The Meads of Asphodel - The Early Years


I have posted in this blog before about The Meads and how amazing I think they are, so if you're curious check out this post for more info. The Early Years is a compilation of the band's EPs, their half of the Jihad split with Mayhem, as well as miscellaneous covers and other songs they have done. Great as an introduction to their music or an addition to their discography if you've heard them already.

Favorites: I'd heard most of this already, but I really enjoyed the synth-heavy cover of Bulldozer's 'Neurodeliri' as well as 'Og's Last Stand' and 'Bleed for Me'

Get it here.

Viraemia - Viraemia EP


Another young, up-and-coming band from Phoenix, Arizona of all places. Viraemia is an extremely technical brutal death metal band that was recommended to me by my friend Will because of a link he clicked on accidentally while reading a different blog. I don't have too much to say about these guys, except that they're an interesting band and, if they keep up this kind of intensity in their music, they'll go far. Also, points for not having the cadaver on the operating table be obviously female-bodied - there can be brutal death metal without misogyny!

Get it here.

Fluisterwoud - Langs Galg En Rad


Black metal from the Netherlands, Fluisterwoud is one of those bands that I hear recommended often but only bothered to get their full-length debut, Langs Galg En Rad, in the past year. This album is very good - the band plays fairly straightforward 'raw' black metal, but tracks like the introductory 'Een Sinister Schouwspel' and the closing title track add some creepy atmosphere. Also, the album art is badass. Like many great bands, Fluisterwoud put out a single excellent album before breaking up (with another, post-mortem release which came out this year). Are they worth the hype? You'll have to check them out to answer that question.

Favorites: Langs Galg En Rad (the outro!), Hoer Van De Zeven Hemelen

Get it here.

David Bowie - Station to Station


Probably my favorite David Bowie album of all time. Flash back to 1976. David Bowie is an effete, coke-addled mess whose persona "The Thin White Duke" makes controversial allusions in support of fascism. I quote Wikipedia at length:

According to biographer David Buckley, the Los Angeles-based Bowie, fuelled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975–76 "in a state of psychic terror".^[6] Stories—mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone—circulated of the singer living in a house full of ancient-Egyptian artefacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page.^[4] Bowie would later say of L.A., "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".

Out of this maelstrom comes Station to Station, one of his most acclaimed albums. Containing such classics as 'Golden Years' and 'Wild is the Wind', it's a must-have.

Favorites: Station to Station, Wild is the Wind.

Get it here.

Orgy - Candyass


This one takes me back. Candyass by the band Orgy was one of the first cd's I ever bought, and was definitely one of my most played of all time. Readers may remember these guys from their popular cover of New Order's 'Blue Monday'. That track came off of this, their debut album, which was released in 1998. For those who have not heard them, Orgy is synth rock which incorporates elements of industrial, New Wave and goth music into their sound and appearance.

Favorites: love the whole damn album

Get it here.

And that's a rap! I hope you enjoyed these posts, and please give me some feedback (these posts took some time and energy). Until next time...

Friday the 13th, part II

By popular demand, here are 5 more albums for the weekend of the 13th. I plan on sharing the rest tomorrow!

Immortal - Sons of Northern Darkness


I don't have many albums from bands which can be considered 'traditional' black metal from Europe, but this video made me go out and get this one. Immortal is an band which you can tell had a lot of influence on the creators of Metalocalypse - everything from the corpsepaint and ridiculous videos to the obsession with being as 'grim and frostbitten' as possible. Indeed, Sons of Northern Darkness is an album which contains such over-the-top song titles as 'In My Kingdom Cold', 'Antarctica', and of course the title song.

Favorites: One by One, In My Kingdom Cold

Check it out here.

Napalm Death - Time Waits for No Slave


Napalm Death is a fantastic grindcore (lately more death-influenced) band from England. They're probably one of my favorite metal bands going, especially given their consistent political ideology of anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, and even good gender analysis! If you're political at all (and maybe if you're not) and you want to get sold on these guys, check out this interview with current lead singer Barney Greenway where he talks about not having to be a fascist to listen to metal and getting into a brawl with a Russian hate band before a show. Time Waits for No Slave is their latest album, and a very good one. They are one of the most energetic and heaviest bands in their genre in my opinion, and this album is a testament to that.

Favorites: Fallacy Dominion, Larceny of the Heart

Get it here.

Anaal Nathrakh - Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here


A recent find for me, Anaal Nathrakh is an industrial/black metal band also from England. Brutal stuff, much of their music is centered around apocalyptic themes and features screams, guns firing, explosions, and more. The vocalist himself is screaming much of the time, combined with some clean vocals interspersed throughout. They do what they do very well and I would consider them one of the more intense and dark bands of today. AN has put out a lot of music, all of it good, and is even starting to play live. I would consider Hell is Empty... to be a good example of their music, including songs like 'Until the World Stops Turning' which begins with the firing of a chain gun that is then backed by the guitar and drums. Very, very good.

Favorites: Virus Bomb, Genetic Noose

Get it here.

Agalloch - The Silence of Forgotten Landscapes


Folk/Ambient-ish black metal from the Pacific Northwest. Agalloch is one of my favorite metal bands, many of their songs dwelling on darkness within the human spirit and its reflection in the grandeur of nature. They also feature some of my favorite uses of clean vocals in the genre (check out John Haughm's voice in the album version of In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion). The Silence of Forgotten Landscapes is a live album ripped from a DVD and has a mix of songs from their very early work through Ashes Against the Grain), so you get a good mix of different music. If you're already a fan it's still worth checking out for curiosity value and hearing a little, though not too much, innovation by the band in their performances of studio songs.

Favorites: it's all pretty good!

Get it here.

Clint Mansell - The Fountain OST


A great score to a great film! The Fountain is a sci-fi/romance/fantasy directed by Darren Aronofsky which tells the story of a man's obsession to save his wife from her cancer which takes them through time and space. It's kind of hard to describe, but besides my endorsing it through this blog I think the score makes a great recommendation as well (I actually heard it before I saw the film, and once I did I knew I had to see it). Beautiful orchestral work composed by Clint Mansell (of Requiem for a Dream soundtrack fame) and performed by the Kronos Quartet (who also performed on Requiem's OST) and Mogwai. The score ranges from bombastic and fast-paced to depressed and lamenting, usually hovering somewhere around sad, fragile and contemplative.

Favorites: Holy Dread!, Death is the Road to Awe, Together We Will Live Forever

Get it here. (if it asks for a password, it's www.mediaportal.ru)

13 albums for Friday the 13th, pt. 1

Hey Kids,

Long time no talk. I've been pretty busy of late, of which I will get into more detail in a later post, but in the meantime here's some music. It's Friday the 13th, so I'll post two albums that I've been listening to lately. Get excited. Here are the first two!

Brand New - Daisy


Brand New's fourth studio album, Daisy continues in the noisy direction of their previous effort, The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. BN is a band whose sound has varied considerably from album to album, and Daisy I think represents a harder, more 'mature' tendency. Lyrics are dark and well-delivered by Jesse Lacey, who also does a fair bit of yelling throughout the tracks. I know some of the people who (may still) read this blog will be shaking their heads at this more mainstream, pop-like entry, but give it a chance. Would recommend: Noro, Bought a Bride.

Download here

Paramore - Brand New Eyes


I figured I'd get both of the pop albums I've been listening to lately out of the way (or maybe there are more and I just don't want you to catch on). I think Paramore's a very decent/good band for its genre - their catchy songs and honest, straightforward lyrics have often reminded me of Jimmy Eat World around the time of Bleed American. This album seems to be a bit harder than All We Know is Falling and Riot!, as was signaled by the first single - Ignorance. Hayley Williams's vocals are great as well, and even though I don't have too much to say about the artistic merits of the band (capable as they may be) I'd recommend them if you're looking for something not too involved and pretty entertaining.

Favorite tracks: Careful, Playing God

Get it here

Moar to come!