I want to freely speculate here without much sensible or reasonable limits on what I think I am seeing in the last couple of weeks in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.
I think I am seeing my own tiny struggles over the last forty years reflected on a titanic scale, a vast system of class war carried out by the tiny minority of power elites who are enterlocked together against the vast masses of the earth.
If the people's will, endurance, spirit, cohension, solidarity, and creativity can hold for several years ahead, we might just be looking at the beginning of the end of the neoliberal era. It has failed to deliver as we all knew it would. But now it has even failed to deliver stability for the world elite class itself. So far this class has pretended that it didn't need any particular people to exploit because it as a class could always move and focus its systems elsewhere, some new population and culture. That frontier seems to be closing simply because there are no regions of the earth or its peoples who have not felt the impact. And the result has been a continuous and steady stream of discontent that has built and built and built and keeps on building.
So then, in the US, its elite doesn't care what happens to US society and its intitutions because our elite has already arranged to substitute vast tracks of the non-US and non-EU masses to exploit for pennies on the dollar and with the near total cooperation of other elites who run other societies.
What the rise of the Arab voice means to me, is the above elite plan is now under serious threat. On my side, all I see are direct corresponding features between me and many Egyptians, and the US and Egypt. For example the police thugs that Sulieman and the Interior minister organized to assault Tahrir correspond to the US Teabags cum rightwing populists, organized and paid by the GOP and Koch bros and other elites to symbolically assault in mostly discursive fashion even a faux neoliberal health reform law. it worked well enough to install a totally reactionary governor in Wisconsin. And then look. Within days of introducing his bill to crush unions, several thousand people mobilize and occupied the capital building, while the opposition members of the senate left the legislature.
And it wasn't all symbolic since six people are dead in Arizona and another is brain damaged for life. And remember these were men, women, and children. There are also the thousands killed in the drug wars and the ruined millions in Mexico and Latin America... And for silent killers there's always the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster. I watched while the convergent interest of corporations, the US military industrial complex and the political establishment attempted and accomplished an entire cover up and dismissle of an evident social, economic, and ecological disaster. Then there is the continued absurdity of Haiti, as an island of death, disease, poverty and greed.
Much like state run Egyptian tv and radio, our complicit US media produces the spin doctored propaganda of the ruling elite, while the also bought and paid for think tanks produce whatever analytical garbage they produce, which even if occasionally near point remains a propagandistic cover for one faction or another internal to the power elite.
Even Carrol is beginning to see...
``That's my slight glimmer of being optimistic: however little a given struggle achieves, if they start to multiply, things can happen. They build up mutual courage and trigger others to move towards political activity.''
Let me put it this way. On Monday I was asked to re-invent communism for the Berkeley disabled community as a bourgeois manager in the form of a mobility service center that depended most on a volunteer work force. I had to re-invent the concept of volunteer (in the past few days) in order to re-establish not a volunteer, but a comrade participant and activist, somebody who would make the transition from volunteer to comrade, community soldier, to re-own his and her own community against the individualistic and charity driven model of service delivery---which has almost completely broken down anyway.
I've done this in my mind, via Egypt, now I have to, if I get the job, create it in fact. I think I can figure out a way to mobilize people in the community to work in this center as a form of return to social justice. I think the secret is to politicize a group to organize itself to set up the equipment recycling center that covers both assistive technology and mobility equipment and service. In other words the people run the place, organize their own system, set their own rules, determine their own service delivery system.
CG