In The Absence Of Truth —

At least Signalfire got a firm opinin on the phenomenon of neighborhood militias in Egypt; and it is quite reasonable:

The mass arrests of looters in Egypt and the para-military self organization of petty bourgeois citizens for the protection of their ill gotten gains against the destitute majority, once again illustrates the heinous fraud that is every cross-class “popular” and “democratic” movement.

To citizens intoxicated with bourgeois ideology’s normalization of commodity tyranny and human degradation, proletarians appropriating what they need is a crime and an act of provocation, which can only be explained by their being in the pay of the old regime.

The sanctity of the banks, the supermarkets, and most of all the homes of the well to do, these temples of the modern age must be protected at all costs from the grubby hands of the dispossessed mob, a mob which was of course more then welcome to die for democratic and national slogans which were never its own.

The problems faced by the masses in Egypt have nothing to do with the “corrupt tyranny” of Mubarak and his cronies, they are the same problems faced by the proletariat worldwide, unemployment, wage dependency, police terrorism, overwork, austerity measures and hunger.

No restructuring of the state to allow for the idiotic circus of competitive elections, no shift of power towards this or that sordid gang of “socialist” or populist bureaucrats will change these conditions in the slightest.

Only the self organization of the class for the expropriation of the means of production and the abolition of commodity production, can emancipate the proletarianized majority from the misery to which capital is compelled to consign it.

Billions of people around the world, confront the contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production everyday in the form of crushing poverty and humiliating slave labor and this contradiction can only be resolved by the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the democracy of commercial exchange.

The looting of a supermarket or the torching of a bank, possesses immeasurably more authentically political significance then all the whining of every opposition party and human rights group put together.

The poor and the wage dependent have no stake in the political deals which will be written in their blood.

As for the shop owners and residents of upscale neighborhoods fearful for their designer furniture, we can only say, your time will come and when it does, moaning about democracy will do you no good.

Although they perharps miss the fact that there are defence committes in destitute quarters as well, they certainly got one important thing right: those gangs that defend property today will support everybody who credibly promises to return order. That is, to protect property. In 1979, those militias were the fiercest champions of Khomeini.