Americans have become so enmeshed in the transience of work, life, housing, play, finance and the proliferation of virtual spaces that it is easy to forget taking collective action in a shared physical space is how social change happens from below. Take the labour movement. The history of industrial workers' struggle starts with the insight that capitalists are their own undoing, by amassing workers in a common space - the factory - where they become aware of their common interests, as well as their potential power to stop the machinery of capital. The same is true of student movements. The shared educational space can unite students around common grievances and goals. And for the civil rights movement, black churches played a pivotal role.

Now, Occupy Wall Street differs in that it appropriated a private-public park and reconfigured it as a political space. It was a manifestation of the central concept of the Occupy movement: there can be no political democracy without economic democracy. Its potency sprang from the same source as the Arab Spring, Spain's Indignados and the Wisconsin labour uprising - peacefully liberating public space and governing it through participatory democracy.

Before this social contagion first surfaced in Tunisia in late 2010, the previous moment of a mass global outburst was Feb, 15, 2003, the day of protests against the impending US invasion of Iraq. That was the problem: it was only a day with no bottom-up democratic essence. Not only could Bush shrug it off as a "focus group", the protests could be twisted as legitimacy for aggressor states - because they allowed space for democratic dissent in contrast to the terror of Saddam Hussein.

Colonised by consumption

Anti-war protest has little impact anymore, because it has devolved into gathering on a weekend in the political capital, marching around empty streets with pre-printed signs, mouthing toothless chants and listening to cliched speeches. It is too predictable and too easy to ignore, by rulers who are insulated from the ruled by dollars and truncheons. On the other hand, occupying space in the heart of a city without end is a challenge to state power.

One activist said of the encampment on Wall Street: "At any moment, you could call for an impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you." The night of October 5, 2011, was a spectacular example of this. After a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their backs, Wall Street felt fragile and the New York Police Department was under siege.

Keeping a space continually, and using democratic forms of self-governance recreates the commons, which has been colonised over decades by full-spectrum consumption - shopping, eating, drinking, entertainment and paid spectacle. Occupy Wall Street attracted throngs of journalists and the curious because it was a completely different spectacle. It was a miniature society that rejected the private, individualism and capitalism. The scene of hundreds of people exchanging food, art, music, knowledge, politics, healthcare, shelter, anger, ideas, skills and love was unlike anything else in our consumer societies - because not one exchange was lubricated by money (of course the goods were paid for at some point). Within the occupation, thousands shared the experience of having a direct democratic stake in a society they were helping to build from scratch.

These democratic societies, more than 300 of which popped up around the United States by October 2011, propelled Occupy by enticing a huge number of political neophytes to join an organic movement. The real power of a social movement, from the 1960s to the Tea Party, is not to recombine existing activists in a new formation but to bring in the previously

via www.aljazeera.com

The single biggest evolution in A/B testing over its history is not how pervasive it has become but rather how fast it has become. In the early ’00s, test results were typically delayed 24 hours: You ran a test today, saw the results tomorrow, and learned something—a principle, a rule of thumb—to apply to future designs. This might explain why testing began in marketing teams before it moved to product teams: Ads generally stick around over many days and weeks, making them amenable to revision at that pace. But for many web businesses, the product is too dynamic to sit still for that long.

That’s all different today. “Ten years ago you did not have data. Five years ago the best reporting tools were a day behind,” says Yulie Kim, VP of product at the furniture etailer One Kings Lane. “But we’re in a world now where you can’t wait a whole day to get your data.” Kim’s boss, CEO Doug Mack, says the speed of the feedback has become integral to the operation: “Big data is not enough. It has to be real-time data that we can act on during the course of the day. This has been a huge boon for the growth of our business.”

The difference with live testing is not just that there is no time to learn and apply lessons. It’s more radical than that: There are no clear lessons to learn, no rules to extract.

At the gaming network IGN, for example, executives found that crisp, clear prose was outperforming hyped-up buzzwords (like free and exclusive) on certain parts of the homepage. But in previous years, the opposite had been true. Why? They talked and talked about it, but no one could figure it out. Soon they realized that it simply didn’t matter. A/B would guide them at ground level, so there was no need to worry about why users behaved in one way or another.

Similarly, One Kings Lane has a business model that involves swapping out inventory every day, and Optimizely’s A/B tool plays a big role in the on-the-fly improvement that happens within each of these “flash sales.” Why do people like the ottoman better if it appears to the left of the throw rug than if it appears to the right? There’s no time to ask the question, and no reason to answer it. After all, what does it matter if you can get the right result? Keep testing, keep reacting, and save your philosophizing for the off-hours.

If you find that last implication to be somewhat troubling, you’re not alone. Even if we accept that testing is useful in learning how to run a business, it’s hard to take the next step and accept that we won’t learn how to run our businesses at all. Indeed, as A/B becomes more widespread, we might not even know what choices the tests are making: One of the burgeoning trends in A/B is to automate the whole process of adjudicating the test, so that the software, when it finds statistical significance, simply diverts all traffic to the better-performing option—no human oversight necessary.

via www.wired.com

So what then killed Occupy? The 99%ers and reactionary liberals will quickly point to those of us in Oakland and our counterparts in other cites who wave the black flag as having alienated the masses with our “Black Bloc Tactics” and extremist views on the police and the economy. Many militants will just as quickly blame the sinister forces of co-optation, whether they be the trade union bureaucrats, the 99% Spring nonviolence training seminars or the array of pacifying social justice non-profits. Both of these positions fundamentally miss the underlying dynamic that has been the determining factor in the outcome thus far: all of the camps were evicted by the cops. Every single one.

All of those liberated spaces where rebellious relationships, ideas and actions could proliferate were bulldozed like so many shanty towns across the world that stand in the way of airports, highways and Olympic arenas. The sad reality is that we are not getting those camps back. Not after power saw the contagious militancy spreading from Oakland and other points of conflict on the Occupy map and realized what a threat all those tents and card board signs and discussions late into the night could potentially become.

No matter how different Occupy Oakland was from the rest of Occupy Wall Street, its life and death were intimately connected with the health of the broader movement. Once the camps were evicted, the other major defining feature of Occupy, the general assemblies, were left without an anchor and have since floated into irrelevance as hollow decision making bodies that represent no one and are more concerned with their own reproduction than anything else. There have been a wide range of attempts here in Oakland at illuminating a path forward into the next phase of the movement. These include foreclosure defense, the port blockades, linking up with rank and file labor to fight bosses in a variety of sectors, clandestine squatting and even neighborhood BBQs. All of these are interesting directions and have potential. Yet without being connected to the vortex of a communal occupation, they become isolated activist campaigns. None of them can replace the essential role of weaving together a rebel social fabric of affinity and camaraderie that only the camps have been able to play thus far.

May 1 confirmed the end of the national Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the best opportunity the movement had to reestablish the occupations, and yet it couldn’t. Nowhere was this more clear than in Oakland as the sun set after a day of marches, pickets and clashes. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that tents would start going up and the camp would reemerge in the evening of that long day. The hundreds of riot police backed by armored personnel carriers and SWAT teams carrying assault rifles made no secret of their intention to sweep the plaza clear after all the “good protesters” scurried home, making any reoccupation physically impossible. It was the same on January 28 when plans for a large public building occupation were shattered in a shower of flash bang grenades and 400 arrests, just as it was on March 17 in Zucotti Park when dreams of a new Wall Street camp were clubbed and pepper sprayed to death by the NYPD. Any hopes of a spring offensive leading to a new round of space reclamations and liberated zones has come and gone. And with that, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland are now dead.

via www.bayofrage.com

BERNARDINE DOHRN: I think, Amy, one of the challenges in this militarized state that we’re in, having—

AMY GOODMAN: Bernardine, we wanted to bring in a comment of the Chicago police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: These are plans—these are comments he made about the department’s plans ahead of NATO protests.

SUPERINTENDENT GARRY McCARTHY: We’ve taken the added steps to train the entire department, to at least a minimal level, to have knowledge of the crowd control procedures that everybody else is getting trained up to a higher level for. Only about a third of the department is going to be used for this event. Those officers are being trained to levels that have been called exceeding the national standards by the people who do this across the country. And the fact is, there’s a three-tiered level that we’re looking at. We are not only going to be ready, we’re going to be more ready than any other city in the country, as per the people who do that training have told us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy speaking to Chicago Tonight. Bill Ayers, your comments on what the superintendent had to say?

BILL AYERS: Well, what they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat. They’ve begun to—there’s a mass campaign. They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear. We have police officers we—who are friends of ours, we run into in coffee shops. They’ve told us that the training is focused a lot on the danger of the protesters and how you should be careful when you grab one of them, because they might have some kind of poison spike in their sleeve or something. I mean, it really is quite nuts.

At the same time, they’ve denied permits, taken permits away, given them back, been very vague about making any agreement with the protesters. Bernardine just said we’ve asked—we insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: Yeah, but I want to emphasize that these war games—and where does this money come from? Let’s just ask. How do we have the money to do this when we don’t have the money for basic human needs in Chicago? But, OK, so there’s suddenly, as for all the wars, moneys available. We don’t have budget concerns for any of this permanent militarization. But this is war games at home. This is the war come home. This is national security state.

via www.democracynow.org

How’s this for innovative direct action? Last week, 25 life-size figures appeared in front of a Deutsche Bank branch in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. At first glance they appeared to be protestors, but were in fact cardboard “clones” of Occupy activists from around the world. Because you can’t arrest a piece of cardboard.

In October, two Berlin designers visited Occupy Wall Street, Occupy DC and Occupy London to meet occupiers and take their photos. “The protests of the Occupy movement address global issues,” said Paul Stabe, one of the designers, who dubbed the project Wall Street To Your Street. “We wanted to give protesters the opportunity to make their voice heard in other countries.”

Deutsche Bank was heavily involved in bringing about the financial crisis, knowingly selling subprime mortgage-backed securities that its own analysts described as “crap.”  Although the German bank received $11.8 billion in bailout funds, European governments insist that the costs of the financial crisis be paid for by working people as part of the hugely unpopular austerity programs.

The cardboard protestors also made an appearance during the global day of action against austerity on May 12. And who knows? Perhaps one day you’ll find yourself at a demonstration, face-to-face with a cardboard cutout of you.

via occupiedmedia.us

The New York-based advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, which has frequently criticized the city’s annual street homelessness survey, cast doubt on the city’s findings when they were released last month. “Today’s release of the City’s street homeless survey estimates a 23 percent increase in street homelessness from last year and confirms what we already know – there are more and more New Yorkers sleeping on the streets and in the subway system each night,” Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst for the Coalition said in a statement. “Sadly, even this estimate understates the severity of the problem given that the City's survey consistently fails to count many unsheltered homeless people. More needs to be done to provide appropriate housing and services to the growing number of homeless New Yorkers—especially the record numbers of homeless children.”

Last November, the Coalition for the Homeless released a report documenting how New York City's homeless shelter population had grown to over 41,000 people—including 17,000 children—by the end of October 2011, the highest number ever recorded. According to that report, homeless families are staying in the municipal shelter system for longer periods, and the percentage of families entering the shelter system who’ve been homeless before has nearly doubled since 2005, when Mayor Bloomberg ended permanent housing programs for the homeless.

While Bloomberg set a goal in 2004 of reducing the number of people who sleep on the streets or use the shelter system by two-thirds by 2009, the report released by the Coalition for the Homeless last November found that the total homeless shelter population was 33 percent higher than when Mayor Bloomberg took office; the number of homeless families was 45 percent higher.

Over the years, New York’s billionaire mayor has repeatedly demonstrated his indifference to the plight of the city’s homeless population and his contempt for the working class as it has been battered by the financial crisis unleashed by Wall Street. Refusing to implement any initiatives to address the underlying causes of homelessness such as poverty, housing costs, unemployment and mental illness, Bloomberg’s policies have been directed entirely towards forcing homeless individuals off the streets and out of sight.

Last spring, the city eliminated the Advantage rent subsidy after it lost state funding for the program. The program was for low-wage workers, who had to pay 30 to 40 percent of their income for housing, with the subsidy making up the rest. Advocates for the homeless warned of a spike in homelessness after the Bloomberg administration immediately stopped admitting new participants. Their warnings proved correct. The Coalition for the Homeless report released last November, showed a 10 percent increase in the number of children in the shelter system between May and October of 2011.

via www.wsws.org

Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.

The importance of the Occupy movement was and is positioning its challenge to capitalism front and center among its concerns and passions. No oppositional mass movement of the last fifty years—one drawing broadly inclusive participation—has been similarly daring in going beyond single-issue focus to make economic injustice for the 99 percent and the ruling economic system central, defining issues. Despite the power of pro-capitalism ideology, Occupy has been able to contest it in amazingly profound ways in an amazingly short time and for an amazing number of Americans.

Of course Occupy is a first step. Nothing of comparably broad scope and with such transformative social objectives has ever moved forward in a straight line. It's rather two steps forward, one step backward. However a major barrier has been broken, a major line crossed, and a new stage of U.S. politics has begun. The issue of our economic system and whether it is adequate to our needs as a people has now been returned to the center of national discussion, criticism, and debate.

The political, mass media, and academic establishments react predictably. They can not acknowledge the historic significance of what Occupy says and does; that would require admitting the need to debate precisely those issues they had effectively banned from acceptable public discourse. So the politicians repress. New York's Mayor Bloomberg claimed that he forcibly removed Occupy from Zuccotti Park for reasons of cleanliness. Bloomberg, it should be remembered, has presided for many years over one of the filthiest subway systems in the industrial world, one of the dirtiest public garbage systems, and a snow removal system that inspires only our leading comics. The mass media did their usual bit: ignoring Occupy as long as possible, massively misreporting when Occupy was hot news, largely cheering or glossing the removal of Occupy encampments, and then resuming the basic practice of ignoring the ongoing developments of Occupy and related events and activities.

via truth-out.org

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."

That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it's how they succeeded that's the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation – and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.

via www.rollingstone.com

.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.”

Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again.

Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule - creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown.

And now - only a few years after the banking crisis that forced American taxpayers to bail out the Street, caused home values to plunge by more than 30 percent and pushed millions of homeowners underwater, threatened or diminished the savings of millions more, and sent the entire American economy hurtling into the worst downturn since the Great Depression - J.P. Morgan Chase recapitulates the whole debacle with the same kind of errors, sloppiness, bad judgment, excessively risky trades poorly-executed and poorly-monitored, that caused the crisis in the first place.

via readersupportednews.org

Remember the "Volcker Rule" that was supposed to stop systemically significant financial institutions from wracking up huge losses on proprietary speculative bets? Well earlier this evening JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced that his company just lost $2 billion on some of (French-born) "London Whale" Bruno Iksil's bets on credit default swap indexes.

Dimon repeatedly insisted that the whole operation is Volcker-compliant, and JP Morgan is describing the operation as an effort at hedging gone wrong. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but in general if you just lost $2 billion that's a good sign that you're not hedging. The idea of hedging is to accept a small cost in order to insure yourself against the risk of a big loss. Two billion dollars is a big loss even for JP Morgan. So why call it hedging? Presumably because the Volcker Rule allows proprietary trading for the purposes of hedging. This turns out to be a big loophole. As it happens in this case JP Morgan has a big enough capital buffer to eat the loss and they only lost $2 billion rather than $20 billion. But nothing was stopping them from screwing up even worse.

Meanwhile, fine wine flashback to April 4:

Dimon's biggest regulatory beef is with a requirement that will force JPMorgan and other large banks that are deemed "Systemically Important" to hold as much as a third more capital than the minimum other banks have to hold to protect themselves against bad loans and other losses. He called the rule "contrived," and said that it would make the banks less diversified, not more so. Dimon said he also had problems with the Volcker rule, which limits banks' ability to make risky trades, and with rules that govern derivatives, an area that JPMorgan is big in.

Indeed, if only JP Morgan were allowed to run a thinner capital buffer and riskier trades. Then we'd all feel safe.

via www.slate.com

Amid deepening poverty and unemployment for masses of American working people, the largest US corporations once again posted record profits last year.

Fortune magazine released its ranking of the 500 biggest US corporations Monday, which showed that they received a record-breaking $824 billion in combined profits in 2011, up 16 percent from 2010.

But despite having more money than ever, companies are refusing to invest and hire. Instead, they are paying out record bonuses to executives and hoarding what remains in cash.

The average CEO took home $12.14 million in 2011, up from $12.04 million in 2010 and $10.36 million in 2009, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute published earlier this month.

The ratio of CEO pay to workers' wages has also risen steadily, according to the report. The average CEO received 231 times in as much pay as the average worker in 2011, up from 228 times in 2010 and 193 times as much in 2009. It is rapidly making its way back up to the pre-crisis peak of 383.4 times the average worker set in 2000.

The money left over after the executives had stuffed their pockets was simply hoarded. Last year, corporations held $1.8 trillion in cash, up from $1.6 trillion in 2010, and nearly double the amount that they held in previous decades.

This hoarding of cash has come at the expense of productive investment. Over the past ten years, the share of corporate assets used for investment fell by a third for major corporations, while the portion of assets held as cash doubled, according to a report by the International Labor Organization published earlier this month.

Between 2006 and 2010 alone, the portion of corporate assets held as cash by large corporations rose from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 5.3 percent in 2010, the report noted.

Business investment is now hovering at around 16 percent of GDP; much lower than the pre-crash levels of around 20 percent, according to the International Institute for Labour Studies.

During the economic crisis, the US economy lost 9 million jobs. But since hitting the lowest level of employment, the economy has added only 4 million jobs, while 3 million people have come of working age since 2010.

As a result, the employment-population ratio has bottomed out at its lowest level in three decades. Between, 2008 and the present, the portion of the working-age population that holds a job has fallen by 5 full percentage points.

via www.wsws.org

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place.  In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce -- which owned it anyway -- turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

via truth-out.org

In response to the planned actions, the City Manager of Charlotte, Curt Walton, has unilaterally declared the shareholder meeting an "extraordinary event," meaning the city plans to restrict free speech and expand the ability of police and security forces to target and profile the homeowners, worker, community members, students and immigrants who plan to demand justice from one of the largest banks in the country.

The label tightens restrictions on what protesters are allowed to do at such events and gives police more power to search people's property (backpacks, coolers, etc.) in the vicinity. Certain items, such as scarves, are now banned from the event, and the possession of items like markers, hammers and spray paint is now grounds for arrest.

The extraordinary event tag's origins date back to a city ordinance enacted in January in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Charlotte in September.

via www.thenation.com

In recent days, the signs have been accumulating to suggest that the radical left coalition SYRIZA would perform some sort of remarkable upset in the Greek elections. Well, stow your cynicism because the exit polls say they're in second place in this election. In the actual vote, poll experts say they may even come first, though I hasten to say that we need make no such assumption in order to appreciate that this is a tremendous victory for the Left.

At present, SYRIZA appears to have 16-18% of the vote, with New Democracy first on about 19-20%, PASOK third on 16%, Independent Greece (right-wing anti-austerity) fourth on 10%, Communist KKE fifth on 9%, the neo-Nazis of the Goldan Dawn (note, actual hard-core neo-Nazis) on 7-8%, with other left parties and the Greens taking up the remainder.  The distribution of the seats will probably favour a coalition of the capitalist austerity parties, with New Democracy and PASOK forming a government. But make no mistake: this is a cataclysm for the Greek and by extension European political establishment. It signals a fundamental realignment of Greek politics, to an extent that wouldn't have been predictable even weeks ago.

via www.leninology.com

Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counter-revolutionary. Whomever sides with the revolutionary people in words only but acts otherwise is a revolutionary in speech. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense.

Closing speech at the Second Session of the First National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (June 23, 1950).

I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.

To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing (May 26, 1939), first pocket ed., p. two. *

We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.

"Interview with Three Correspondents from the Central News Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao" (September 16, 1939), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 272.

via www.marxists.org