Aljazeera (Arabic) reported on a conference of Arab thinkers and commentators entitled “The Arab Revolution and Democracy – The roots of sectarianism and how to combat it” organized by the Arabic Centre for the study and research in political thought. It warns that “sectarian and ethnic tensions and divisions are complicating and impeding the birth of democracy in the region.”

These obstacles and problems on the road to true democracy should come as no surprise to any objective observer of events.   Those with vested interests in the old despotic regimes are not going to relinquish their power and wealth so easily. Driving the revolution into the destructive blind alley of sectarianism and ethnicity is their way of countering the glorious revolution of the young.

Azmi Bishara, head of the Centre, opined that these sectarian tensions should have been expected and “it is wrong and naïve to sweep them under the carpet of unity”

Wajeeh Kanso, academic at the University of Lebanon, believes that “sectarianism is an ever present danger” because knowledge of the true democratic ideals is superficial among the populace, citing – and regretting – the lack of representation of the young revolutionaries in the new parliaments.

I agree that there are these dangers. The question, however, is this: are those divisions really deep in society or are they being played up and heightened by counter-revolutionary forces and corrupt politicians to shore up their power base?  I believe it is the latter, even in Iraq where the fabric of Iraqi society was ruptured by the illegal war.

Egypt, a pivotal country in the Arab world, is still a revolution in progress. The Egyptian people are now struggling with the military junta that still more or less represents the old regime. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to commemorate the first anniversary of the revolution on 25 January, and to remind the Supreme Council of the Armed forces that currently rules Egypt that they have not gone away and will continue their protests until full democracy is established.  What happens in Egypt matters and will have a profound influence on the rest of the Arab World.

I am not as pessimistic as many commentators are; the reason being that this revolution is grass roots based; it is not led by army officers spouting nationalism and empty slogans, only to become worse than the kings and despots they replace. The revolutions are led collectively by young people who have, particularly in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, given the world a lesson in the power of mass peaceful action.  They have shown that their idealism, passion, resilience and their courage are stronger and more powerful than the instruments of repression and violence wielded by the regimes of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.  Their tenacity in using peaceful means to fight the forces of darkness is nothing short of miraculous.

The revolutionary young of Egypt are fully aware that more needs to be done.  Al-akhbar Arabic Newspaper (27 January) quotes some of the people in Tahrir Square and gives a flavour of the slogans on banners, such as “Down with military rule” and “Where is our revolution, Field Marshal, we do not feel any change?”  in reference to Field Marshal Tantawi, Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).  One demonstrator was quoted as saying:

What we achieved needs to be safeguarded… and most important to remember is that some of the actions of the military junta are more brutal than those of the dictator Hosni Mubarak.  The revolution must continue until full powers are transferred to an elected government.

The chains of fear imprisoning the Arab people have been broken by the revolutionary young; the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back. The tide of pent up yearning to be treated with dignity, respect and to be free is triumphant. Sectarianism is but one of a number of setbacks and difficulties on that road on which Arab masses have embarked. But make no mistake, these will be overcome and Arabs will be free.

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  1967

1.  Human rights must be taken absolutely seriously.  Every single person is entitled to dignity and human rights.  No application needed.  No exclusions at all.  This is our highest priority.

2.  We must radically reinvent contemporary democracy.  Current systems are deeply corrupt and not responsive to the needs of people.   Representatives chosen by money and influence govern by money and influence.  This is unacceptable.  Direct democracy by the people is now technologically possible and should be the rule.  Communities must be protected whenever they advocate for self-determination, self-development and human rights.  Dissent is essential to democracy; we pledge to help it flourish.

3.  Corporations are not people and are not entitled to human rights.   Amend the US Constitution so it is clear corporations do not have constitutional or human rights.   We the people must cut them down to size and so democracy can regulate their size, scope and actions.

4.  Leave the rest of the world alone.  Cut US military spending by 75 percent and bring all troops outside the US home now.  Defense of the US is a human right.  Global offense and global police force by US military are not.  Eliminate all nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.  Stop allowing scare tactics to build up the national security forces at home.  Stop the myth that the US is somehow special or exceptional and is entitled to act differently than all other nations.  The US must re-join the global family of nations as a respectful partner.  USA is one of many nations in the world.  We must start acting like it.

5.  Property rights, privilege, and money-making are not as important as human rights.  When current property and privilege arrangements are not just they must yield to the demands of human rights.  Money-making can only be allowed when human rights are respected.  Exploitation is unacceptable.  There are national and global poverty lines.  We must establish national and global excess lines so that people and businesses with extra houses, cars, luxuries, and incomes share much more to help everyone else be able to exercise their basic human rights to shelter, food, education and health care.  If that disrupts current property, privilege and money-making, so be it.

6.  Defend our earth.  Stop pollution, stop pipelines, stop new interstates, and stop destroying the land, sea, and air by extracting resources from them.  Rebuild what we have destroyed.  If corporations will not stop voluntarily, people must stop them.  The very existence of life is at stake.

7.  Dramatically expand public spaces and reverse the privatization of public services.  Quality public education, health and safety for all must be provided by transparent accountable public systems.  Starving the state is a recipe for destroying social and economic human rights for everyone but the rich.

8.  Pull the criminal legal prison system up and out by its roots and start over.  Cease the criminalization of drugs, immigrants, poor people and people of color.  We are all entitled to be safe but the current system makes us less so and ruins millions of lives.  Start over.

9.  The US was created based on two original crimes that must be confessed and made right.  Reparations are owed to Native Americans because their land was stolen and they were uprooted and slaughtered.   Reparations are owed to African Americans because they were kidnapped, enslaved and abused.  The US has profited widely from these injustices and must make amends.

10.  Everyone who wants to work should have the right to work and earn a living wage.  Any workers who want to organize and advocate for change in solidarity with others must be absolutely protected from recriminations from their employer and from their government.

Finally, if those in government and those in power do not help the people do what is right, people seeking change must together exercise our human rights and bring about these changes directly.  Dr. King and millions of others lived and worked for a radical revolution of values.  We will as well.  We respect the human rights and human dignity of others and work for a world where love and wisdom and solidarity and respect prevail.  We expect those for whom the current unjust system works just fine will object and oppose and accuse people seeking dramatic change of being divisive and worse.  That is to be expected because that is what happens to all groups which work for serious social change.  Despite that, people will continue to go forward with determination and purpose to bring about a radical revolution of values in the USA.

1. “Suicide that sparked a revolution”
Upload date: January 19, 2011; Source: Al-Jazeera English

The self-immolation of Menobia Bouazzizi, a young Tunisian man, was the spark that ignited the Arab Spring.

2. “The Most AMAZING video on the internet #Egypt #jan25
Upload date: January 27, 2011; Source: hadi15

Beginning on January 25, the Egyptian people revolted against its Western-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak. At the height of the protests, anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million people occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo.

3. “Go Forth and Revolt”
Upload date: August 17, 2011; Source: go4thREVOLT

This parody of a Levi’s commercial reminds us never to accept corporate co-optations of revolutionary acts or symbols.

4. “I AM NOT MOVING – short film – Occupy Wall Street”
Upload date: October 10, 2011; Source: CoreyOgilvie

Taking its lead from the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street attempted an insurrection in the heart of finance capitalism. While many people accused it of being too white, too amorphous, or too masculine, OWS rehearsed the pluralistic politics of the world to come, and brought considerable mass media attention to the crimes of capitalism.

5. “Oakland Policeman Throws Flash Grenade Into Crowd Trying To Help Injured Protester”
Upload date: October 26, 2011; Source: kresling

There was no shortage of police brutality captured on video in 2011. Veteran Scott Olsen was shot in the head by an Oakland police officer, while defending Occupy Oakland from a police assault.

6. “London Riots. (The BBC will never replay this. Send it out.)
Upload date: August 9, 2011; Source: mYcHeMiCaLrOmAnCeGaL

Darcus Howe, a West Indian writer and broadcaster, called the London Riots what they were: an insurrection. This wasn’t the explanation a condescending BBC newscaster wanted.

7. “Anonymous—Message to the American People”
Upload Date: December 3, 2011; Source: anonymous04210

Hacktivist collective Anonymous continued to attack repressive state and corporate apparatuses in 2011, promoting the Guy Fawkes mask and V for Vendetta to the status of revolutionary icons for the digital age. In this video, Anonymous addresses what may be the most draconian piece of legislation the United States has ever seen, the National Defense Authorization Act 2012, which appears to enable the US government to detain American citizens indefinitely and without trial, another expression of creeping global fascism.

8. “Oil Gateway”
Upload Date: September 16, 2011; Source: stimulator

Colonial resource extraction has always harmed indigenous communities and the environment. Oil extraction is no different. The planned Keystone Pipeline extension and Northern Gateway pipeline would expand production in the notorious tar sands of Alberta. Dozens of First Nations communities in Alberta and British Columbia united in 2011 to oppose these pipeline projects.

9. “Police pounded by petrol bombs in Athens”
Upload Date: February 23, 2011; Source: ReutersVideo

“Austerity” was the word of the year for 2010. Greece was ground zero of the global austerity agenda. After stealing as much as $29 trillion of public money, the global finance capitalists decided to re-engineer capitalism on the backs of workers worldwide. In Greece, the opposition to austerity has been militant.

10. “Shocking Video: ‘Blue bra’ girl brutally beaten by Egypt military”
Upload Date: December 18, 2011; Source: RussiaToday

The symbolic import of this video cannot be overstated: the vicious beating of an Egyptian woman by members of the military captured the dominant visual meme for 2011, the visible brutality of state actors against domestic populations. In particular, the gendered violence on display reminds us that women of colour, especially living in the Global South, continue to receive the brunt of state capitalist violence.

Of course, there are more than 10 such videos. If you have a personal favourite from 2011, please post it in the comment section below.

Even before the elections, on the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, in the major cities’ (and even some of the provincial ones’) classrooms and among school teachers, people had begun talking about politics, albeit a politics which does exist as of yet. After the election farce, it was not just the usual attendees of the right-wing “Marches of the Discontented” and left-wing protests taking to the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, but even those who were previously apolitical. And this is important.

It would be wrong to claim that these elections were fundamentally more fraudulent than previous ones or even the 1996 elections in which Zyuganov conceded to Yeltsin. But this time the now-traditional vote rigging was crasser than usual and occurred under different circumstances. In order to understand what precisely those circumstances are, we have to remember who the current powers that be in Russia are. Too many people have managed to forget this, and the new generation (thanks to the liberals’ successful demolition of our education system) never knew.

20 years of pillage

The USSR was dissolved by the party nomenklatura, who then undertook to seize (“privatize”) all state property while also attempting to maintain power. The current regime is merely an extension of the Yeltsin government. During the course of the 1990s everything inherited from the Soviet Union was torn asunder — a vicious process that continued throughout the decade, engendering countless local wars, widespread crime, impoverishment, marginalization, and death. As a result, an intense feeling of hatred took hold over the vast majority of the country’s population. Various scams and tricks allowed this process to continue all the way up to the economic catastrophe of 1998 — and even for a little while after that. But then the jig was up and it was time to change the signs.

The ideological project known as “Putin” was created at the end of the 90s in order to preserve Yeltsin’s oligarchic system, but with a new face (the very same system that is being exposed in London now as the court battle between Berezovsky and Abramovich unfolds). The project’s purpose was supposedly to counteract the consequences of the “roaring 90s,” which entailed rehabilitating certain elements of the Soviet past. The old Soviet hymn was brought back, having been rewritten for the fourth time by the very same author Sergei Mikhalkov, along with red flags for Victory Day and the mass production and distribution of “St. George ribbons” [trans. note: the St. George Medal was a medal of honor given to Soviet soldiers during WWII, itself an attempt by the Stalin regime to revive Russian patriotism]. They “discovered” some positive aspects of Soviet history such as the “strong state” and the “effective manager” comrade Stalin. But in the country’s social structure and economy nothing changed fundamentally: the capitalist oligarchic system was preserved and even reinforced, even if the crew at the helm changed a little bit. The bureaucracy and big capital merged into a single class, but not everyone made it. Khodorkovskii, for instance, went to jail (as he made a wrong move in the clan war). In the 2000s, the process of class formation came to an end. The ruling class crystallized and achieved a kind of semi-permanence. The division of spoils came to an end, but this new ruling class was not capable of anything, except cannibalizing the remains of the old Soviet economic and scientific achievements.

Nevertheless, a good many people took Putin seriously, although we won’t delve into this story of public deception here, the success of which was largely facilitated by rising prices for raw materials. Throughout the Putin decade the strip mining of the Soviet inheritance continued, which resulted in its virtual destruction in all spheres: the economy, education, the sciences. Scientists emigrated or died prematurely, education and the health care system were successfully and consciously laid to waste under the pretext of “reform”, and the strategic sectors of manufacturing were dismantled by consensus between foreign competitors and our home-grown parasites. If social inequality somewhat lessened during this period, it was largely due to a certain “bounce back” after the monstrous impoverishment of the population in the 90s. Russia definitively entered the ranks of the dependent countries of the “third world”, albeit one with nuclear “red button” inherited from the Soviet Union. The “middle class” — all the necessary qualifications of this term aside – did grow in size a bit during the 00s in the largest cities, but only thanks to the expansion of the ranks of managers and servants serving the ruling class, just as you would expect in a country of peripheral capitalism.

In the Putin decade feelings of disappointment and discontent slowly accumulated amongst the masses. At the beginning of the 2000s politically naïve voters had completely different hopes: an end to the widespread thievery at the top and the destruction of the economy and the return of some kind — any kind — of social justice. But what happened was the opposite. Now these frustrations and feelings of discontent are rising to the fore. The crisis that began in 2008 and continues to this day sowed seeds of uncertainty amongst the people and detonated their hopes of “stability” (and stability, after all, was the mantra of the Putin project!).

The powers that be have gotten so lazy and so caught up with their own personal enrichment that they have become completely deprofessionalized, having lost their last competent members long ago. Even in the realm of propaganda! Take for instance the recent pseudo-exposé about “Golos” [trans. note: a Russian liberal NGO doing independent election monitoring], which supposedly is carrying out orders from the American and Swedish intelligence services to destabilize Russia and recruit young students as spies. It was the most unbelievable garbage one could imagine. By comparison, the anti-dissident propaganda films of the Andropov era, which in their own time were considered quite sloppy, seem like cinematographic masterpieces on the level of Bergman and Fillini! And so it goes everywhere and with everything now in Russia. Our GLONASS satellites and Fobos-Grunt probes are falling out of the sky, our Bulava missiles do not fly, our orphanages and nursing homes are burning down, our Bulgaria river cruise ships are sinking and our Sayano-Shushenskii hydroelectric stations are crumbling. The ruling class simply does not know how to do anything anymore; except rob, cheat and steal and then divvy up the loot.

“Elections,” “Parties,” and “Leaders”

Elections in Russia have been rigged ever since the attack on the Supreme Council in 1993 and the new constitution was passed. But before that, elections to the legislature were marked by low turnout, with just about 25% of registered voters casting a ballot. For that reason, the first act of voting fraud began with inflating the number of voters, so that the elections were not ruled void. Then, with the same purpose, they removed the “Against all” option from the ballots.

During previous elections they were already resorting to audacious acts of fraud. In fact the fraud and kleptocratic politics of the powers that be evoked protests those times too. But we need to remember how they ended.

After the attack on the parliament in 1993, all its leaders — Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and others [trans. note: parliamentary opposition leaders at that time] — managed to insinuate themselves into the new political system wonderfully well. While they were in fact the losers in that battle, they were simply the losing faction and thus occupied not first, but second place in the new system. They apparently were not worried at all about all those who died in Moscow on those fateful October days in 1993.

In 1996 Yeltsin’s victory in the presidential election was facilitated by the consolidation of the ruling class. Zyuganov, who had won the first run-off, voluntarily conceded to Yeltsin. Despite its platform and all the protests that the Communist Party (CPRF) seemingly supported, this supposedly communist party simply conceded to the powers that be — and did so as soon as it could.

The protests against monetization of state benefits and the commercialization of education are some of the most recent, yet already forgotten examples of mass public actions. In 2005-2006 these protests — far larger than the ones we see today [trans. note: this article was written before the mass actions on Saturday, 10 December] in 550 cities and towns, each with participation of tens of thousands of people. What was the upshot of these protests? Some small concessions, mostly on the local level; in other words a complete flop. This was the inevitable result because the ruling class would have had to make available a significant amount of funds to the erstwhile recipients of those state benefits — funds that they already had their dirty paws on. With today’s protests, though, the government will likely gladly allow for some repeat elections in this or that contested district, as such a concession will have no effect on anything of consequence.

Right now none of the parties — not the CPRF, not Just Russia, and certainly not the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR) — are willing to declare the elections completely fraudulent. We are already hearing from their representatives things like: “it would be absolutely silly to give up the opportunities that increased Duma representation will offer (CPRF);” that they will create a federal “election violation investigation committee” to “make inquiries” and that “we do not recognize the results for certain districts, but there were districts where there was no vote rigging at all (Just Russia).” These are pathetic excuses made for the sake of maintaining their Duma salaries and kickbacks. They have been making these excuses their entire parliamentary career. Certainly none of these parties has raised doubts about the prevailing political system or state of social relations. Nor have any of them promised to abolish or at least substantially amend the existing constitution, alter property relations or punish those who are guilty for the ruling class’ crimes.

You have to understand something. These clowns in parliament are corrupt to the core. They sit in parliament for ten and half years doing absolutely nothing. And they do not plan to do anything. They are all just factions of a single ruling class, utilized for the management of public perception. In no way do they fundamentally differ from One Russia, except maybe in their greater degree of civility. If you believe them for even a second (having been deceived, perhaps, by their high-profile visits to opposition protests, whereby they are simply trying to accumulate political capital for future sell-outs), they will just betray you again — just like they did ten times before.

But what about the leaders of the so-called “extraparliamentary opposition?” Can we trust them? Let’s take a look:

Boris Nemtsov — formerly a close member of the oligarchic Yeltsin “family,” and one of the architects of the 1998 default and personally responsible for that economic catastrophe.¹

Ilya Yashin — former leader of Yabloko’s youth faction, who organized MGLU student protests in 2003 against tuition hikes and later recruited students to participate in his party’s protests for a modest sum of money (in 2003 it was about 200 rubles, but later 500).

Aleksei Naval’ny — by his own admission, a “Russian nationalist,” was expelled from Yabloko for nationalism, is aligned with DPNI (Movement against Illegal Immigration [trans. note: a nativist group whose politics are akin to those of the U.S. "minuteman" groups]), is a regular participant in the fascist “Russian marches,” yet despite these well-known facts, is hailed by the Russian liberal press [trans. note: and the Western media as well² ]. He is warmly received at the U.S. State Department (and here is one case where the dullards in Putin’s propaganda team are not lying). Let’s be very clear: fascists and nationalist populists have never defended the interests of the working class — they simply exploit them.

And now voicing their support for the protests are the former Putin PR rep Marat Gel’man and Chubais and Gaidar’s old pal from the privatization team Alfred Koch (and the assassin of Gusinskii’s old NTV station). All of these characters are from the same group of 90s-era parasites.

None of these people will hesitate at any moment to sell the protesters out for their own economic interests or for the sake of political capital. Once again, they are just a fraction of the ruling class. A fraction — but nothing more than that. Their struggle is one between clans. That is not ours!

Elections, elections…

What is their program? Under which slogans are they calling people into the streets? A protest under the slogan “I’m for honest elections” — such a protest constitutes an a priori defeat. Any election presided over by these forces simply cannot be “honest”. Any federal level election these days is a farce. Therefore, they will only result in the usual fraud. The only exit from this impasse is to create an extra-systemic opposition. It is pointless to hold “honest elections” or support the corrupt politicians from CPRF, Just Russia, LDPR or Yabloko. It is imperative that we begin to engage in some do-it-yourself politics, outside the pre-drawn lines of the powers that be and in direct contradiction of parliamentary cretinism.

“Honest elections” according to prevailing constitutional and electoral rules will only lead to replacing Putin with a Zhirinovskii [trans. note: the literally clownish leader of LDPR] or Sobyanin [trans. note: current mayor of Moscow and Putin protégé] or the half-fascist Naval’ny. How are they better? There will be no radical concessions on the part of the powers that be. These are people who have stolen billions of dollars, all stored away in foreign banks, and built palatial estates on the Black Sea Coast (as both Putin and the Patriarch have done).³ They have no intention of giving up these things.

“Honest elections” will in no way solve the most pressing problems of the country. They will not change Russia’s position as a raw material-supplying appendage of the West. They will not revive our devastated and thoroughly stripped manufacturing sector — not to mention our high-tech industries (robotics, electronics, aviation, biotech, etc) because we already lack the human resources necessary for it. They won’t resurrect those millions of our countrymen and women who went to an early grave, driven there by the ruling class.⁴

They will not repair our now thoroughly broken health care system and will not make it once again free and universal. “Honest elections” will not resuscitate our de facto destroyed and utterly profaned education system. They will not eliminate mass alcoholism and drug addiction or our AIDS and hepatitis epidemics. They will not undo the country’s monstrous, shameful social inequality, as a result of which some people are already killing themselves and children out of hunger (just read the news!⁵ ), whereas others are buying islands, mansions, yachts and soccer clubs for millions of dollars. Those “honest elections” will not change anything except to replace one set of snouts in the offices with another – and yet all exactly the same.

What is to be done?

The problem, of course, is not with the elections, but with capitalism. If some fools still think that all our woes stem from the fact that we do not have the kind of capitalism they have abroad (ours is the “wrong capitalism” or “underdeveloped capitalism”), just let them have a look at what is going on abroad: an economic crisis, the collapse of the financial system, declining production, mass unemployment, riots in the streets, three million families have been tossed out of their homes in the U.S. alone (and this the richest capitalist country), and the impending meltdown of the Eurozone. The peripheral countries are being hit even worse by all this.

Political rejects like Yashin, Navalny, Nemtsov, Limonov [trans. note: leader of the National Bolshevik movement, a "left-leaning" nationalist group] and others are all hoping to ride atop this wave of spontaneous and so far ideologically formless protests into the political “big leagues” (just like Zhirinovski and his ilk managed to do 20 years ago right before the collapse of the USSR). Why help them in this endeavor? A repeat of 1991 (and 1993 and 1996 and 2005) — this is the same damn rake. The country’s economy will not withstand a second 1991; there is no Soviet material reserve left to tap. It has already been devoured and pillaged. Our entrance into the WTO is literally on the horizon, which assumes, by the way, a second edition of “shock therapy” — and right now would be a great time from the ruling class’s perspective to have an occasion to tighten the screws even further.

The substantial uptick — even under the conditions of vote rigging — in the share of votes for the CPRF and Just Russia speaks to the fact that socio-economic issues are important to the voters. And it’s precisely socio-economic issues that should be in the slogans of the protesters: against joining WTO; against capitation financing of schools;⁶ against the demolition of health care and education. But so far there is not even a call for progressive taxation of the rich [trans. note: Russia has a flat tax of 13 percent]! And the current “leaders” of the “opposition” are keen on keeping even this modest demand under wraps. Therefore there is no point in following them.

If you want change — do not bother to choose between Putin and Zhirinovski, Medvedev and Navalny or Zyuganov and Nemtsov. Do not entrust your fate once again to another new, wonderful “daddy.” Instead work to create structures that reflect your own social interests. Certain comrades on the left have already claimed that the current events are a “revolution”, an “uprising”, a “revolt” and see in them the specter of a Russian Tahrir Square. This rrr-revolutionism and exaggerated self-ascribed importance is not only laughable, but shameful even. It is inexcusable to mislead the youth (who are still not all that politicized) with talk of easy fixes. In Moscow there are eleven million people, but only about seven thousand took to the streets, whereas those in the provinces remained mostly passive and indifferent.

The only thing that could save Russia (or any other country occupying the periphery of the capitalist world system) from further degradation, decay and decomposition is the overthrow of the capitalist system itself, in other words: socialist revolution. That is a worthy cause for which to live and struggle. Socialist revolution, however, will not take place by the will of some petty provocateurs like Naval’ny or Yashin, who, please note, do not strive for revolution – they actually fear it. They simply want to amalgamate themselves with the same class to which Putin, Medvedev, Abramovich, Deripaska and the like belong and join them in robbing and oppressing you. Do you really need this?

If you really want to go to protests, go with your own slogans and signs — ones that reflect your own interests, not the interests of opportunists like Naval’ny and Yashin. May we suggest some?

“Give us universal, equal and free education and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Give us universally accessible and free health care and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Down with the ruling class funded trade unions of FNPR! Give us free and independent trade unions!”⁷

“Down with the pro-capitalist new Labor Code! Bring back the Soviet-era KZoT!”⁸

“Down with the political police! Abolish the OPONs and the “E” Center!”⁹

“Down with clericalization of the state and schools! We demand full separation of church and state!”¹⁰

“Give us student stipends that will allow us to actually study full-time, not part-time and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Hail to the new, democratic constitution! Power to the people, not the oligarchs and bureaucrats!”

And demand that they give you the opportunity to pronounce those slogans. If they do not, you will be taken advantage of again by the opportunists and parasites.

Do not rely on elections or career politicians to solve your problems. Career politicians are professional con-men and flimflammers. If you wish to defend your rights and your interests, create blocks of resistance to oligarchic and bureaucratic caprice at your places of work, study and residence. Fight against the introduction and/or increase of tuition and medical fees; against the closing of hospitals, schools and daycare centers; against the demolition of parks for the more churches; against the imposition of religion and obscurantism in schools; against low salaries, speed-ups and overtime; against the thievery of the utilities companies. Begin with these small things as there is no other choice!

Letting off steam and venting your frustrations at protests will not change your situation one bit. The bureaucrats and capitalists couldn’t give a damn about your angry shouts on the street. They will not lower the exorbitant utility fees, they will not increase the paltry salaries and pensions, they will not resolve the housing problem, they will not abolish the OPK¹¹ or the university entrance exam, they will not reinstate free universal health care. We need to engage in concrete battles for very concrete things.

The choice is this: class struggle or replacing one set of parasites with another. No other choice is available.

The process whereby one realizes his or her interests and fights for them is not an instantaneous one. It is not just attending one or several protests. In our country the people have for too long stopped thinking and acting in line with their own interests. But this here is the only chance to actually change things for real. Do not let yourself step on the rake again!

1. Anatolii Lantov, “‘Stoprotsentnaya lozh’ Borisa Nemtsova,” Politoline, December 27, 2010.
2. Foreign Policy magazine named Navalny one its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" for 2011. See "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers," Foreign Policy, December 2011. The New York Times also featured a rather laudatory article about Navalny, although to its credit, it did include a disclaimer about his politics: "Five years ago, [Navalny] quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’ See Ellen Barry, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” New York Times, December 9 2011.
3. For some pictures of his palatial estate on the Black Sea shore. Putin’s personal wealth is estimated at $40 billion. See “Sostoyanie Putina mozhet dostigat’ 40 milliardov dollarov,” Novy Region 2, November 16, 2007.
4. In his study on Russian mortality in the 90s, epidemiologist Neil Bennet stated that “the Russian mortality crisis of 1990-95 represents the most precipitous decline in national life expectancy ever recorded in the absence of war, oppression, famine, or major disease.” He estimated that between 1990-1995 there were 1.36 to 1.57 million premature deaths, with approximately 70% occurring amongst men. This calamitous drop coincided with the economic reforms of that same period. See N. Bennet et al., “Demographic Implications of the Russian Mortality Crisis,” World Development, 26.11 (1998): p. 1921. Boris Kagarlitskii likewise notes that, “During the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, the Russian population fell by 2.8 million. During the years of Yeltsin’s ‘first presidency’ alone, the decline was 3.4 million.” See Boris Kagarlitskii, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neoliberal Autocracy, London: Pluto Press, 2000, p. 3.
5. In January 2010, a women who had been laid off and couldn’t afford to buy food suffocated her children and then hanged herself. See Irina Gollay, “V Chelyabinske zhenschina zadushila detey iz-za bednost”, Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 25, 2010, .
6. The capitation financing scheme is explained by a local teacher and activist of the Communist Party K. Ladogin thusly: “The term “capitation financing of educational institutions” means that every middle school student in the country will get an equal amount of funding. This money will go to the school where the individual student is studying. The schools must now actively promote themselves to attract more students. The school principal should therefore become a financial manager and the vice principal a “representative of the government within the school – in other words a commissar and should “insinuate himself into the teacher collective”. He is also charged with conducting monthly testing of the students and send the results up the ladder.” See K. Ladogin, “Uchitelya dolzhny otgovarivat shkolnikov ot postupleniya v vuzy,” Skepsis, September 17, 2007, .
7. In a recent article for the Russian Analytical Digest, Irina Olimpieva provides this useful summary of the current labor union structure of Russia:

   Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Russian labor movement has been divided into two continuously warring camps—the “official” unions, affiliated with the Soviet-legacy Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) and the so-called “free” or “alternative” labor unions. Free labor unions differ from official unions in many respects, including their militant nature and conflict-based ideology, grass-roots methods of labor mobilization and organization, the economic resources that they use, and their forms of membership and leadership. Today two different modes of labor interest representation exist at the same time: the distributional mode employed mainly by the official unions and the protest mode, which is more typical for free labor unions. While official labor unions continue to dominate the organized labor scene, in recent years they have faced growing competition from their alternative counterparts. Overall, the dominance of the distributive
   system, based on cooperation between the employer and union, over the protest model signifies the preservation of the strength of management in labor relations, squeezing unions to the sidelines in serving workers. Accordingly, labor relations based on market mechanisms have not replaced the previous administrative system as many observers had once anticipated.

   See Irina Olimpieva, “‘Free’ and ‘Official’ Labor Unions in Russia: Different Modes of Labor Interest Representation,” Russian Analytical Digest 104 (October 27 2011), p. 2.

8. The new Russian Labor Code, passed in 2002 eliminated many rights long held by Russian workers and their unions (the old code was inherited from the USSR) such as overtime compensation for working over 40 hours. After the passage of the law, respected legal specialist and pro-labor activist Vladimir Mironov was moved to comment that “The practical meaning of the new labor code is that it gives the employer the legal right to force his employees to work as long as he wants. The worker gets nothing in exchange – not even token compensation.” See V. Mironov, Uzdechka dlya trudyashchikhsya, VMN, (11.01.2002), which can be read here: . See also Aleksandr Yelagin, “New Russian Labor Code Allows Employers to Gut Workers’ Rights,” Socialist Action (July 2000).
9. OPON (formerly OMON) is more or less the Russian equivalent of the U.S.’s SWAT team and is frequently deployed to break up demonstrations and/or intimidate protesters. Center “E” is the Russian Interior Ministry’s notorious “Center for Extremism Prevention,” which Amnesty International has accused of stifling dissent from journalists and activists under charges of extremist activity and using torture to extract confessions from criminal suspects. For a recently published evaluation of Center E’s performance over the last three years, see Pyoter Sarukhanov, “‘Eshnikov’ bez raboty ne ostavyat,” Novaya Gazeta, October 10, 2011.
10. In 2007 a course on Russian Orthodoxy was introduced in public schools. See Clifford J. Levy, “Welcome or Not, Orthodoxy Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools,” New York Times, September 23, 2007. See also “Otkrtoe pismo nauchnykh sotrudnikov protiv vvedeniya OPK v shkolakh i teologii v universitetakh i VAK,” Alternativy, April 4, 2008.
11. OPK stands for Fundamentals of Russian Orthodoxy Culture, a new course that has been introduced into the Russian public school curriculum.

In the late 1960s I was traveling low budget, working in vineyards, hitchhiking, sleeping under bridges or in youth hostels, visiting medieval castles.  After six months in Europe, I went to North Africa and the Middle East, then back to see more of Europe.  I got a ride on a Greek freighter, working my way, washing pots and pans in the galley.  The ship was headed for the French port of Marseilles. The month was May.

But as we neared our destination, the ship changed course.  ”The port is closed,” the captain said. “There’s a strike.”  He spoke little English and I understood no Greek, so that was all I knew for the moment.  We were now heading for Genoa, Italy, where we docked the next day.  There I left the ship and set about to see Italy.  I was thinking of going to Rome, but I’d barely set foot on land when I heard news of something really big happening in France.  It wasn’t just a local dock strike in Marseilles.

Being the incorrigibly curious person that I am, I had to see it, whatever it was, and the place to see it was obviously Paris.  So I set out northward, hitchhiking up through Switzerland and into France, where I lucked out and got a ride all the way to Paris.  I was doubly fortunate in that the driver was a Britisher who had spent much of his life studying French history, specializing in the late 19th century.  ”This is 1871 all over again,” he told me.

What happened in 1871?  I wanted to ask, but was too embarrassed to reveal my ignorance of French history.  I could nevertheless look around me now and see that the whole country was shut down, clearly in a state of extreme upheaval.

The driver turned on the radio from time to time, and we heard President Charles de Gaulle making an impassioned speech to the nation. Not understanding French, I only caught the closing line. “Vive la république!”  Then they played La Marseillaise.

“He’s finished,” the driver told me.  ”Just like Louis Napoleon.”  He spoke with the assurance of one who knew his subject.

We passed fields and vineyards.  When we got to the toll roads, we were asked by the local toll-keepers for donations to support the strike.

It was evening when we reached Paris. Darkness had fallen, and a loud banging sound of explosions could be heard from not too far away.  ”Do you think they’re shooting it out?” I asked.  The driver shook his head.  He looked worried

“Let me off here,” I said.  ”I have to see what’s happening.”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” he advised me.

The explosions were somewhere off to the right.

I promised him I would be careful, and, thanking him for the ride, I set out in the direction of the blasts.  Looking back at my youthful curiosity, I still shudder at my presumptions of immortality.  Having already passed through so many ostensibly dangerous places, I’d come to feel as though I were a non-material being, a ghost-traveler, immune to the hazards of the road.

The dark streets were empty, and all the lights in the buildings seemed to be off.  I could hear the hollow knocking of my footsteps on the pavement, and I wondered where all the people were.  After walking a few blocks, I came to a broad avenue where a large crowd was gathered.  As I got closer, I saw they were behind a barricade fashioned of cobble stones and whatever was at hand.  Making my way to the front of the crowd, I saw in the distance a phalanx of riot police.  They were launching bombs or grenades in our direction which burst with a very loud sound and a flash of light.  I guessed that they were intended for psychological effect, as they didn’t seem to be causing physical damage or injuries.  Nobody seemed bothered by them.

Finally the gendarmes charged, and everybody ran up side streets, then regrouped.  I watched this repeated several times over.  Finally, late in the night, I found a space on the floor of a large crowded hall where I could unroll my sleeping bag.  I think it was in the Sorbonne University, which was occupied by the students.

In the morning I went out to see what was going on.  Everything was fairly quiet, with only a few cars on the streets.  The gendarmes were nowhere to be seen, not even the traffic cops who normally stood in the intersections. In their place were the demonstrators, the students and workers, directing the traffic. That sight impressed me, a world of no gendarmes.  They had been driven from the streets, and the world of Paris was now in the hands of the demonstrators.

It was an eerily calm and peaceful world. Shops and stores were closed.  No windows seemed to be broken.  Debris littered the streets, and there were still the remains of barricades here and there.  Nobody manning them now, the police being gone.

I thought of the riots which were then taking place in so many in U.S. cities, where there’d been burning and looting, but there was none of that here in Paris.  I marveled at the order and self-discipline of the French; truly a cultured people, who rioted without breaking windows.  I used the word “riot,” but was it a riot?  Or was it something else?

I saw it all, but I had no idea what I was looking at.  A revolution?  Was this what a revolution looked like?  Surely it couldn’t be a revolution, but what was really going on around here?

Being unable to speak French, I finally found someone who spoke English, and I asked, “What’s happening?”  The guy looked at me as though I were the biggest idiot he’d ever in his life encountered, and he said: “Can’t you see for yourself?”

Finally I looked up Bernard, a friend who lived in the Latin Quarter.  I’d met him a couple years earlier, on my way to Japan.  He’d been out in the demonstrations of the night before. Since he was a friend, I felt I could ask him the question nobody else seemed willing to answer.  ”What is going on?” I asked him. “Can’t you see for yourself?” he replied.

I stayed a few more days in Paris, then set out for England.  But on reaching the port of Calais, I found that it too was closed.  Why had I even bothered to go to Calais?  I should’ve known it would be shut down like the rest of France.

So I went a different way; I went to Germany and up through Scandinavia.  Eventually, I came back to France, and everything seemed to be pretty much back to normal.  Gendarmes were directing traffic at intersections, just as they always had.  It was like nothing had happened  The massive, nationwide strike, shutdown, whatever it was, was over.  Gone.

On some streets, artists were vending posters with revolutionary slogans.  That was all.  As before, it was useless to ask my friend.  ”You can see for yourself,” he would have said.

Later I learned the tragedy of what had happened.  The nation-wide strike I’d witnessed had been more than a protest; it had been a bid for change, in effect, a revolution, that failed because the very large French Communist Party, which controlled the unions and dominated the left, had taken over the strike and sent the workers back to work.

The May rebellion took place more than forty years ago, but the story of what happened in France was enough to make me eternally suspicious of the establishment left–whether it’s the allegedly radical Communist Party, or the supposedly progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Others seem to feel the same way today.  When Occupy Wall Street came into existence last September, activists carefully steered clear of the Democratic Party, the party which has offered so much hope and delivered so much disappointment.  And so Occupy has established itself outside of our broken political system, and this has been key to its instant traction and phenomenal growth as a movement about occupying public space, buildings, and our imaginations.

Vive la France?  Vive l’Amérique?  Mais non! Vive Occupy!  Vive le monde!

Angie Tibbs:  Dr. Ezzat, let’s start at the beginning.  In January 2011 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began their Tahrir Square occupation; you were on the ground there as a journalist and as a medical doctor. Would you recreate the mood of the demonstrators, and, in fact, of the country?

Ashraf Ezzat:  Egyptians still refer to those 18 days (January 25- February 11) as the glorious days of the revolution. Those days will undoubtedly carve their place in the modern history of Egypt. And contrary to what the mainstream media concluded, the Tahrir Square saga that captured the world may have been called for by some activists using the internet social media, but it was mainly fueled and triggered by years of political corruption and oppression. The build-up for this uprising has been brewing for years and specifically after Mubarak made it clear he was bequeathing the presidency for his son, Gamal.

Hence, the general mood of the Egyptians was a blend of dissatisfaction, anger and a potent urge for change. It is funny but it seems that the Egyptians had a clear-cut idea what they wanted from the first day they took to the streets. I joined the protests from the second day; the people on the streets were not divided about their demands.  You could see it in their eyes and hear it as they chanted “Bread, freedom and social justice” … and those three demands are what the “Tahrir Square” is still fighting for.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat in Tahrir Square

AT:  One of the demands of the protesters was for President Mubarak to step down, effectively ending his 30 year authoritarian rule.  This he did on February 11, at which time the military council took over the country, promising to bring about democracy and to respect the wishes of the people. Did this happen, and did anyone expect it would happen?

AE: The military council of armed forces (SCAF), whose generals are Mubarak’s handpicked appointees, did nothing in the last ten months to promote democracy in the country; on the contrary, the generals, and through their ineptness or unwillingness actually to restore security on the street, have helped to bolster the tide of the counter-revolution.

And hadn’t it been for the thousands who lately returned to Tahrir Square to denounce the military rule and ask for a hand-over of power to a civilian salvation government, the revolution would have been done with and declared dead.

The majority of the Egyptian people kind of hoped the military would lead them out of these difficult times but while most of Egyptians didn’t doubt the capability of SCAF to do so, a lot of activists and political analysts suspected that the way SCAF has been handling things would eventually put the country on the road to democracy.

AT: Are you saying that there were those who believed that in time the SCAF would have, if left in power, brought about democracy?

AE: No, I meant to say that the downfall of Mubarak was so abrupt that nobody actually had seen it coming, not even the military which is part and parcel of the despotic old regime. And while stunned by the uprising’s rapid pace, military generals were following how this people vs. regime uprising was going to end, and they decided not to take sides until this whole thing was almost settled.

And when it was obvious, despite the White House’s pro-Mubarak stance, that the people were gaining the upper hand in this uprising the military, only at that moment, decided to side with the people and this is when the protesters in Tahrir square chanted “ The people and military are joined hand in hand”

But not everybody was fooled by this “wait and see” approach by the military. A lot of activists and political analysts knew that the self-serving generals would try to somehow steer this transitional period in their favor. And that is exactly what they did when they proposed a new draft for a constitution that would shield the military from parliamentary scrutiny and which declares the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy,” suggesting the armed forces could have the final word on major policies.

AT:  How did Egyptians feel about the military and the police from the commencement of the Mubarak regime up to the demonstrations of January 2011?

AE: Actually Mubarak’s regime was just a police regime. A giant police apparatus that stifled dissent by violent means and that only served and protected the corrupt elite and the president. The citizen/police relation has been quite tense over years of coercion and misconduct. Throughout most of Mubarak’s rule Egyptians feared and somehow distrusted the police.

But in the last couple of years and prior to his ouster they began to loathe the corruption that swept across the whole security apparatus that turned the policeman into a thug with a badge, placed him above the law and allowed him to get away with almost anything … even crimes.

The famous case of the killing of Khalid Saeed, young Egyptian man from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by security forces after he was indicted on framed charges, has incited unprecedented anger and helped trigger the revolution in January. 

While the majority of Egyptians had negative feelings for the police they honored and respected the military for its patriotic role of protecting the sovereignty of the state and for the long and heroic confrontation with Israel especially after the 1973 war.

But I hope that Egyptians will make the necessary and fair distinction between the military forces or the army as a whole and the generals in the military council when they come to judge the conduct of SCAF in the transitional period that followed January 25 revolution.

AT:  In the months since the occupation of Tahrir Square ended, have there been any changes meaningful to Egyptians?

AE: Though a lot of things have remained the same if not for the worse, I would say that the only thing that really changed in the life of Egyptians is their ability to say NO to anything and anyone. And also to vote freely, as we all have witnessed the huge turnout for the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections.

The Egyptian people broke the fear barrier and this, for people who have been enduring under tyranny for centuries, is quite an achievement. Moreover, I truly believe that once placed on the path of real democracy, the whole world will witness a new and amazingly different Egypt.

AT: Since the demonstrations ended in February, thousands of people have been arrested and tried before military tribunals, yet throughout the occupation of Tahrir Square there appeared to be good relations between the protesters and the security forces.  What caused these widespread arrests and are they continuing?

AE: As I mentioned before, many of the Tahrir activists viewed the stance of the military with suspicion and as days went by it became obvious that the generals were trying to give the old regime a comeback chance. The scenario of chaos and sectarian violence that Mubarak threatened would engulf the country if he was to step down was beginning to be unleashed.

Shortly after the toppling of Mubarak, Egypt began to witness months of unrest, economic plunge, lack of security forces on the street, sectarian violence and a series of churches attacks which culminated in the lethal clashes with a Coptic rally on October 9 that left 27 killed by the military forces in what is now known as the Maspero massacre.

But this was not what the revolutionary youths and activists demanded when they initiated the January uprising. This was not why people got killed in the protests. The people didn’t topple Mubarak to have a military dictatorship instead.

So this is why the honeymoon with the military didn’t last and it wasn’t long before many activists began to point the finger at SCAF for all the scenarios aimed at thwarting the revolution tide. And it wasn’t long either before the thousands – almost 15,000 according to Human Rights Watch – were thrown behind bars and tried before military tribunals until this very day.

AT:  Protesters have again taken to the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, and the police are responding, thus far killing over 30 people. What has prompted this, and what do you anticipate happening as a result?

AE:   According to the counter-revolution plan, which the United States fully backed, the military was supposed to grab the power permanently. To set the stage for such scenario, the military in the last ten months has done everything possible not only to thwart the advance of the revolution but to turn the Egyptians against the idea itself as the plan augmented the sense of vulnerability and insecurity of the average Egyptian citizen and cunningly linked it to the revolution.

And just when the generals thought they had managed to hijack the revolution, they were in for a big surprise.

Emboldened by the power they’ve got and by the American support, the generals dared to propose a new draft for a constitution that could only pave the way for a military fascism and this is where they went wrong.  This blatant exploitation on part of the military council triggered the pouring of thousands into Tahrir Square once again in what is now dubbed “the second revolution”.

AT:  The military council is now promising presidential elections before July of 2012.  Is this a satisfactory response to the current uprising? Will the Egyptian people accept this or will they view it as an attempt by the military to divert world attention from its ongoing crackdown? Furthermore, do Egyptians accept the military as a caretaker government? 

AE: Egyptians didn’t flock back to Tahrir Square to demand elections. The protesters in Tahrir Square have made it clear that they don’t want the military council as a caretaker and moreover they insist that the council should step aside and hand over power to a civilian salvation government. In January the protesters in Tahrir Square wanted Mubarak to step down, and in November they wanted the military to step aside.

AT:  Were you surprised to hear the US State Department initially praising the “exercise of self-restraint and professionalism” of the Egyptian security forces with respect to the present demonstrations?

AE:  There seems to be a growing number of people in and around the Tahrir Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries like the US, making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt. The US government and its weapon companies continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

So once again the unexpected course of the Egyptian revolution – and contrary to the conspiracy theorists who view the Arab revolutions as orchestrated by the CIA & the neo-cons – has exposed the flagrant American double standards in the Middle East and especially in regard to the Arab spring.

The mere fact that protesters refused to meet Mrs. Clinton, the American secretary of state, on her first visit to Cairo after the ouster of Mubarak should tell us how the revolutionary youths of Egypt view the United States’ stance on their revolution.

AT: Do you see a connection between the Egyptian military and possible US and Israel future plans for Egypt?    

AE: I doubt the Egyptian military would undertake any move that could jeopardize its patriotic history, but I would certainly be relieved if this current top command of Egypt military could be replaced soon.  No matter how we look at it, those generals of Egypt military council are part of the old regime.

Indeed our reading into the current turmoil and change gripping Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is bound to open our eyes to a brand new Arab world in the making right now – but not the Condoleezza Rice’s new Middle East. New forces are emerging and the United States will soon have to relinquish its old diplomacy in Middle East that relied mainly on the so called strong allies/dictators and try to prepare for the rise of a new political front – most probably of Islamists – that will rule in Tunisia, Libya, and Cairo and maybe Syria.

AT:  What is happening in Egypt today, and what is the mood of the people?

AE: The parliamentary polls opened amid escalating protests that reject the newly appointed prime minister and a build-up of public opinion that demands the generals must go back to their barracks. The general mood is split between the youths who seem determined to take the revolution to the farthest limit and the older generation who believe that stability and compromise is what the country needs right now.  It is split between the conservative front who thinks it is time we gave our support for the Muslim Brotherhood (the longtime outlawed Islamist political group) and the liberal groups who, despite their modest preliminary showing in the parliamentary polls, believe that we should separate the mosque from the state.

In that sense, you could say the current struggle is between the old and the new or the past and future; in other words, between the conservatives and the liberals. But I don’t think Egypt, the land of moderate Islam and the liberal hub of the Arab world, will get lost as long as the Tahrir Square spirit remains with us.

There is a hint of guarded optimism in the air, and it seems like an inspiring time for progressives. At a time when so many people voice defiance against the status quo, it seems like a propitious moment for progressives to stake out a new revolutionary path — a path not laid down by the establishment preceding them.

In the progressivist realm, Norman Solomon is a well-known figure. Yet, has Solomon embraced the swirling winds of change?

Solomon must have pondered many choices available to a well-educated and articulate man as himself. For instance, have any opportunities been opened up for progressives to seize in the electoral arena? Should progressives even participate as candidates in the highly rigged system of elections that some people refer to as democracy. Do people really think that a system which elects 90+ percent of the highest campaign-spending candidates is democracy?¹

Solomon has decided to participate in the farce of elections. That left the choice of being a candidate dedicated to the reform of a corrupt political body from within or to participate in kick-starting or reviving a progressivist political movement without the corrupt baggage. It seems unlikely that Solomon even considered the latter option as his candidature appears opportunistic. He made his announcement when it became known that the Democratic incumbent Lynn Woolsey would not stand for re-election to the US Congress.

Robert Jensen wrote about Solomon’s declared candidature.²

One DV reader took exception to the article. He wrote,

Are you having an attack of dementia? Norman Solomon? You might as well post a piece praising Obama, they both stand for the same bullshit. wake up. Jezuz.

Solomon’s record is clear, he’s a DemoRat operative. All that crap about “green” and “pwogwessif” is just cover for his real job: misleading the dull of wit.

First, I agree with the basic sentiment expressed by the reader, although I would not impugn the integrity of Solomon. Second, I would choose a different phraseology. Third, regarding the tactics of Solomon, I respect the right of readers to reach their own conclusions about what progressivism really is and how best to attain the aims of progressivism.

It is clear that the Democratic Party is part of the political-corporate duopoly in the US. The Democrats are a warmongering party serving elitist interests that differs from the Republican Party ever so slightly in that they are less open about their corporate and militaristic ties.

Solomon touted Barack Obama — the hyped “hope” and “change” candidate — for the presidency in 2008, and when Obama demonstrated himself to be anything but the Great Progressivist Hope, Solomon complained. Now he wants to join Obama’s team. How does Solomon reconcile the contradictions?

“I’m skeptical about election campaigns that abandon principles, but I’m also skeptical about campaigns that have no hope of winning and that are only for protest or public education,” Solomon said.

With all due respect, I’m skeptical of Mr. Solomon. Before Obama, Solomon also supported the presidential candidacy of Democrat John Kerry. Solomon and colleague Jeff Cohen pointed to leftist author Tariq Ali’s support for Kerry. Ali opined that since an Al Gore was not a neo-con, his administration would not have attacked Iraq, and presumably since Kerry was not a neo-con, he would be more dovish than his opponent George W. Bush. The argument is severely flawed because facts contradict it. The Bill Clinton-Al Gore administration enforced genocidal sanctions against Iraq and ordered bombing campaigns in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Kerry’s rhetoric suggests that his administration would have been just as violent as the Clinton-Gore administration.³

Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. There has been no let-up in warring by either the Democrats or the Republicans. Moreover, they both support the neoliberalism which oversees the transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves.

Despite the record of the Democrats, Solomon argues the solution is more progressive-minded politicians: “Having John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey in Congress is important. We need more of those sorts of legislators as part of the political landscape.”

However, Kucinich is a good example of a progressivist voice being drowned out by the Democratic Party’s corporate cacophony.⁴ What makes Solomon think his fate would be any different than the political veteran Kucinich? The fact is that Solomon has shown the same willingness to compromise progressivist principles as has Kucinich by supporting the candidature of Kerry and now Obama.

Lesser evilism is a large part of the problem.⁵ As long as people continue to confine themselves to the choice between neoliberal warmonger 1 and neoliberal warmonger 2 (as Solomon and some other “progressives” advocate), then why would the system change? Do the progressives have the cash for the highest-spending-candidates-win electoral system? Solomon claims to be running a grassroots campaign. I’m skeptical.

Lesser evilism has not brought about change, and part of the reason is that the term is misleading. It is just plain evilism (there is no lesser) — whether it is a Democrat or a Republican administration.⁶

The reader added,

Now I consider the problem presented by Solomon, Moveon, Obamism among African Americans, Trumka and others claiming to represent the interests of the “American People” while really working for the interests of the SuperRich to be a top priority, a key obstacle, maybe THE key obstacle to efforts to oppose the current insanity and all its evils.

I agree.

Forget change! It is past time for a revolution. It is past time for an end to warring, an end to poverty, and an end to inequality. Hope is not enough. The Occupy movements must stand firm. Either people power wins or it is the continuance of a top-down society where the elitists wage war, profit from corporate greed, and oppress Indigenous peoples, minorities, Palestinians, workers, and the poor.

The stamina and solidarity required for a full-fledged revolution will be demanding, but then living on the trickle-down droplets from the so-called 1% isn’t a cakewalk either.

1. See Communications, “Money Wins Presidency and 9 of 10 Congressional Races in Priciest U.S. Election Ever,” OpenSecrets.org, 5 November 2008.
2. Robert Jensen, “Occupy Congress: Norman Solomon sees a role for progressive legislators,” Dissident Voice, 28 November 2011.
3. See Kim Petersen, “The Futility of Revolving Warmonger Regimes: Time for the Revolution,” Dissident Voice, 14 August 2004.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Same Shit Different Asshole!” Dissident Voice, 19 February 2004.
5. See Kim Petersen, “The Utter Futility of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 24 May 2007.
6. See Kim Petersen, “Evilism: There Is No Lesser: The Left Can Pose Its Own Challenges to Ron Paul,” Dissident Voice, 29 July 2011. “… there is little substantive difference between the Republicans and Democrats; they are both corporate dominated and controlled parties. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to talk about there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant political parties in the United States.”

Those dreams have been assassinated and we know the identity of the assassin.

For nine long months, we have witnessed an undeclared but unrelenting war of attrition against the Egyptian revolution. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces led by Field Marshall Tantawi has executed one of the most brilliant counter-revolutions in modern history. Even if Tantawi were to step aside today, history would have to accord him credit for accomplishing his mission and breaking the spirit of the revolution.

Like any war of attrition, the desired outcome is to vanquish your opponent by exhausting him to the point where you break his will to resist. The day Mubarak fell, it was hard to imagine that the collective will of the Egyptian people could be broken. But in hindsight, it’s clear that the SCAF put together and executed a brilliant blue print for wearing down the exuberance of the Egyptian masses.

On taking command of the ship of state, the SCAF promised to hold power for six months – just enough time to allow for free and fair elections. By that timeline, which passed unnoticed on August 11, Egypt was supposed to have a new president, a national assembly and a new constitution. That done – the army was to return to the barracks.

To say that the SCAF broke its promise would be a charitable understatement. The hated emergency laws that were used to enforce the dictates of Mubarak’s regime were briefly rescinded, then reinstated and zealously enforced. Fifteen thousand civilians have since been tried and sentenced before military tribunals. The judges who looked the other way and sanctioned Mubarak’s rigged elections continue to infest the court system. The vast media resources at the disposable of the state remain in the safe hands of the old guard. Censorship is back and every journalist knows that the freshly painted red lines are wider than the old red lines. And, once again, the unrestrained hands of a vengeful police force have been unleashed on peaceful protestors.

At every junction of this nine month odyssey, the military junta has defied the public will. The SCAF insisted on keeping Mubarak’s appointed Prime Minister, Ahmed Sahfiq. Only a show of force by millions of demonstrators managed to convince them to appoint ministers untainted by links to the former dictator. And there was one minister who insisted on keeping his position – Field Marshall Tantawi – the 76 year old Minister of Defense, a stalwart Mubarak ally for two decades.

It took concerted public pressure to convince SCAF that Mubarak’s criminal file deserved the attention of law enforcement. When the generals finally conceded to put their old boss and a few of his cronies on trial, they also promised to televise the proceedings. But for unexplained reasons, the cameras were turned off and the trials have been postponed for months at a time on the flimsiest of legal grounds.

At first, it seemed that the generals were simply out of touch with public sentiment and clueless in the art of governing. But with the passage of time, it became evident that they had a deliberate policy of wearing down the revolutionary spirit. Their tactic was to grant concessions only under the duress of mass demonstrations and the predictable result was that the public gradually tired of disruptive million man marches. Simultaneously, the public airwaves, owned and operated by the SCAF, were deployed in a calculated campaign to erode the revolutionary spirit. The talk shows and news programs delivered a not so subtle message that the only fruit of the revolution was economic stagnation and a breakdown in law and order. As part of the effort to undermine the public’s embrace of the uprising, the government media stopped airing the popular video clip music that hailed the sacrifices of the hundreds of young men and women who gave their lives for the revolution.

As if the SCAF needed any reinforcement in their war of attrition against the popular uprising, the political class entered the fray and splintered into sixty odd factions, the largest one being the divisive Muslim Brotherhood which was happy to make back room deals with the generals. A week before the elections, you would be hard pressed to find a single Egyptian who can name ten of the five dozen parties vying for a share of the political spoils.

One of the few tangible gains of the revolution was the public’s right to peacefully assemble and protest. Even that hard won concession has gone with the wind – first with the slaughter of Coptic demonstrators in Maspiro and now with the lethal show of force in Tahrir.

Today, Egyptians look to Tunisia’s recently elected government with envy. But in Egypt, under the skillful hands of a military dictatorship that has six decades of experience under its belt, the uprising has been contained, the old guard remains in charge and the revolutionary spirit has floundered.

As an eyewitness to both uprisings, I can testify that there is little of the euphoria or the universal public support that marked the overthrow of Mubarak. Once you exhaust a nation and cheat a people out of dreams as vibrant as the ones Egyptians shared on January 25, it’s hard to revive that revolutionary spirit again. That spirit was the essential fuel that could have propelled a democratic political renaissance, clean government and economic progress. Whether Tantawi stays or goes, he has to take full credit for assassinating Egyptian dreams.

During the fateful 18 days in January and February when Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to topple the brutal Mubarak dictatorship, President Obama remained largely silent, refusing to call directly for democracy until it was clear that young Egyptians were about to topple the dictator’s three-decade-long rule.

In the months since then, as thousands of Egyptians have been attacked, imprisoned, sexually assaulted and murdered by their government, the United States has not merely remained silent, but has continued to provide crucial diplomatic, economic and military aid to the regime responsible for these crimes.

The latest Egyptian protests were sparked by growing anger over signs that the military leadership plans to hold on to power indefinitely. The military rulers say they will relinquish power once presidential elections are held, but have refused to commit to a plan and a timetable for handing over power to a democratically elected government.

The first of many rounds of voting for parliament is scheduled to begin November 28, but the military has not agreed to form a new government based on these elections. Moreover, it is trying to limit any civilian government from having control over the military’s budget. And it has postponed a presidential election to an indefinite time late in 2012 or in 2013.

Now the façade of a democratic transition has been ripped away and Egyptians are once again battling the military government in Tahrir Square for the future of their country, with at least 35 civilians killed since Saturday. The Obama administration remains as quiet as it was in the early days of the revolution. Such silence is both morally indefensible and politically and strategically disastrous for the United States.

The United States, with $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt every year, supplies a large part of the Egyptian military budget. But it refuses to use its considerable leverage. During Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Egypt in October, he actually praised the Egyptian military. “I really do have full confidence in the process that the Egyptian military is overseeing,” he said, “I think they’re making good progress.”

On Monday, November 21, White House spokesman Jay Carney only mustered up the courage to call for restraint from “all sides”—as if the pro-democracy activists were somehow equally responsible for the violence. When asked if the generals should specify the date for a presidential election, Carney replied, “I don’t want to dictate specifics to Egypt.”

As during the Mubarak era, the administration appears to believe that U.S. interests, including Egypt’s peace accord with Israel, are more important than the lives of the Egyptian people.

The march for freedom in Egypt cannot be stopped and when Egyptians finally rid themselves of the military government and establish a democratic system, the United States will have few friends in Egypt, or the Arab world more broadly, if it is seen as having supported the military rather than the people at this pivotal moment.

A principled U.S. position would be to immediately issue a strong condemnation of the violence unleashed by the Egyptian military on its people. The U.S. government should suspend all military aid to the Egyptian government until it stops attacking peaceful protesters, and until it releases the 12,000-plus citizens jailed since Mubarak’s ouster and commits to handing over power to a transitional civilian government as soon as parliamentary elections are completed. President Obama should coordinate with other Western allies and supporters of the Egyptian government to develop a clear and strong policy in support of a rapid transition to democracy and apply the full weight of international diplomatic, economic and legal pressure on the military junta towards that end.

Anything less will be a stain on the United States that will haunt this administration, and the United States more broadly, for years to come.

Join us in signing this letter urging President Obama to condemn the military crackdown and stand with Egypt’s brave citizens struggling for democracy.

The relation of information technology (IT), and more specifically the internet, to politics is a central issue facing contemporary social movements.  Like many previous scientific advances the IT innovations have a dual purpose:  on the one hand, it has accelerated the global flow of capital, especially financial capital and facilitated imperialist ‘globalization’.  On the other hand, the internet has served to provide alternative critical sources of analysis as well as easy communication to mobilize popular movements.

The IT industry has created a new class of billionaires, from Silicon Valley in California to Bangalore, India.  They have played a central role in the expansion of economic colonialism via their monopoly control in diverse spheres of information flows and entertainment.

To paraphrase Marx “the internet has become the opium of the people”.  Young and old, employed and unemployed alike, spend hours passively gazing at spectacles, pornography, video games, online consumerism and even “news” in isolation from other citizens, fellow workers and employees.

In many cases the “overflow” of “news” on the internet has saturated the internet, absorbing time and energy and diverting the ‘watchers’ from reflection and action.  Just as too little and biased news by the mass media distorts popular consciousness, too many internet messages can immobilize citizen action.

The internet, deliberately or not, has “privatized” political life.  Many otherwise potential activists have come to believe that circulating manifestos to other individuals is a political act, forgetting that only public action, including confrontations with their adversaries in public spaces in city centers and in the countryside, is the basis of political transformations.

IT and Financial Capital

Let us remember that the original impetus for the growth of “IT” came from the demands of big financial institutions, investment banks and speculative traders who sought to move billions of dollars and euros with the touch of a finger from one country to another, from one enterprise to another, from one commodity to another.

Internet technology was the motor force for the growth of globalization at the service of financial capital.  In some ways IT played a major role in precipitating the two global financial crises of the past decade (2001-2002, 2008–2009).  The  bubble in IT stocks of 2001 was a result of the speculative promotion of overvalued “software firms” de-linked from the ‘real economy’.  The global financial crash of 2008-2009 and its continuation today, was induced by the computerized packaging of financial swindles and underfunded real estate mortgages.  The ‘virtues’ of the internet, its rapid relay of information in the context of speculator capitalism turned out to be a major contributing factor to the worse capitalist crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Democratization of the Internet

The internet became accessible to the masses as a market for commercial enterprise and then spread to other social and political uses. Most importantly it became a means of informing the larger public of the exploitation and pillage of countries and people by multi-national banks.  The internet exposed the lies which accompany US and EU imperialist wars in the Middle East and Sothern Asia.

The internet has become contested terrain, a new form of class struggle, engaging  national liberation and pro-democracy movements.  The major movements and leaders from the armed fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt, to the student movements in Chile and including the poor peoples’ housing movement in Turkey, rely on the internet to inform the world of their struggles, programs, state repression and popular victories.  The internet links peoples’ struggles across national boundaries – it is a key weapon in creating a new internationalism to counter capitalist globalization and imperial wars.

To paraphrase Lenin, we could argue that 21st century socialism can be summed up by the equation:  “soviets plus internet = participatory socialism”.

The Internet and Class Politics

We should remember that computerized information techniques are not ‘neutral’ – their political impact depends on their users and overseers who determine who and what class interests they will serve.  More generally the internet must be contextualized in terms of its insertion in public space.

The internet has served to mobilize thousands of workers in China and peasants in India against corporate exploiters and real estate developers.  But computerized aerial warfare has become the NATO weapon of choice to bomb and destroy independent Libya. The US drones which send missiles that kill civilians in Pakistan and Yemen are directed by computer ‘intelligence’.  The location of Colombian guerrillas and the deadly aerial bombings are computerized.  In other words, IT technology has dual uses:  for popular liberation or imperial counter revolution.

Neo-liberalism and Public Space

The discussion of “public space” has frequently assumed that “public” means greater state intervention on behalf of the welfare of the majority; greater regulation of capitalismand increased protection of the environment.  In other words, benign “public” actors are counter-posed to exploitative private market forces.

In the context of the rise of neo-liberal ideology and policies, many progressive writers argue about the “decline of the public sphere”. This argument overlooks the fact that the “public sphere” has increased its role in society, economy and politics on behalf of capital, especially financial capital, and foreign investors.  The “public sphere”, specifically the state, is much more intrusive in civil society as a repressive force, particularly as neo-liberal policies increase inequalities.  Because of the intensification and deepening of the financial crises, the public sphere (the state) has undertaken a massive role in bailing out bankrupt banks.

Because of large scale fiscal deficits provoked by capitalist class tax evasion, colonial war spending and public subsidies to big business, the public sphere (state) imposes class based “austerity” program-cutting social expenditures and prejudicing public employees, pensioners, and private wage and salaried employees.

The public sphere diminished its role in the productive sector of the economy.  However, the military sector has grown with expansion of colonial and imperial wars.

The basic issue underlying any discussion of the public sphere and the social opposition is not its decline or growth but rather the class interests which define the role of the public sphere.  Under neo-liberalism, the public sphere is directed by the use of public treasury to finance bank bailouts, militarism and expanded police state intervention.  A public sphere directed by the “social opposition” (workers, farmers, professionals, employees) would enlarge the scope of public sphere activity with regard to health, education, pensions, environment and employment.

The concept of the “public sphere” has two opposing faces (Janus-like): one facing capital and the military; the other labor/social opposition.  The role of the internet is also subject to this duality: on the one hand the internet facilitates large scale movements of capital and rapid imperial military interventions; on the other hand it provides rapid flow of information to mobilize the social opposition.  The basic question is what kind of information is transmitted to what political actors and for what social interest?

The Internet and the Social Opposition:  The Threat of State Repression

For the social opposition the internet is first and foremost a vital source of alternative critical information to educate and mobilize the “public” – especially among progressive opinion — leaders, professionals, trade unionists and peasant leaders, militants and activists.  The internet is the alternative to the capitalist mass media and its propaganda, a source of news and information that relays manifestos and informs activists of sites for public action.  Because of the internet’s progressive role as an instrument of the social opposition it is subject to surveillance by the repressive police-state apparatus.  For example, in the USA over 800,000 functionaries are employed by the “Homeland Security” police agency to spy on billions of emails, faxes, telephone calls of millions of US citizens.  How effective the policing of tons of information each day is another question.  But the fact is that the internet is not a “free and secure source of information, debate and discussion”.  In fact, as the internet becomes more effective in mobilizing the social movements in opposition to the imperial and colonial state, the greater is the likelihood of police-state intervention under the pretext “combating terrorism”.

The Internet and Contemporary Struggle:  Is it Revolutionary?

It is important to recognize the importance of the internet in detonating certain social movements as well as relativizing its overall significance.

The internet has played a vital role in publicizing and mobilizing “spontaneous protests” like the ‘indignados’ (the indignant protestors) mostly unaffiliated unemployed youth in Spain and the protestors involved in the US “Occupy Wall Street”.  In other instances, for example, the mass general strikes in Italy, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere the organized trade union confederations played a central role and the internet had a secondary impact.

In highly repressive countries like Egypt, Tunisia and China, the internet played a major role in publicizing public action and organizing mass protests.  However, the internet has not led to any successful revolutions – it can inform, provide a forum for debate, and  mobilize, but it cannot provide leadership and organization to sustain political action let alone a strategy for taking state power.  The illusion that some internet gurus foster, that ‘computerized’ action replaces the need for a disciplined, political party, has been demonstrated to be false:  the internet can facilitate movement but only an organized social opposition can provide the tactical and strategic direction which can sustain the movement against state repression and toward successful struggles.

In other words, the internet is not an “end in itself” – the self-congratulatory posture of internet ideologues in heralding a new “revolutionary” information age overlooks the fact that the NATO powers, Israel and their allies and clients now use the internet to plantviruses to disrupt economies, sabotage defense programs and promote ethno-religious uprisings.  Israel sent damaging viruses to hinder Iran’s peaceful nuclear program; the US, France and Turkey incited client social opposition in Libya and Syria.  In a word, the internet has become the new terrain of class and anti-imperialist struggle.  The internet is a means not an end in itself.  The internet is part of a public sphere whose purpose and results are determined by the larger class structure in which it is embedded.

Concluding Remarks:  “Desktop Militants” and Public Intellectuals

The social opposition is defined by public action:  the presence of collectivities in political meetings, individuals speaking at public meetings, activists marching in public squares, militant trade unionists confronting employers, poor people demanding sites for housing and public services from public authorities…

To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”.  It is a form of pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed.  Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind.

The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power.  By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual:  of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere.  The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little.  The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity.  The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office.  The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.

Peter Bohmer has been an organizer and participant in the struggle for social and economic justice since the 1960s. In recent years, his political activities have taken him to Venezuela, Cuba, Greece and a number of US cities. He teaches political economy and has been a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA since 1987.

Peter and I go back over twenty years. The conversation that follows is but one of many we have had since we met. We share it as a springboard for thought and discussion. At the same time, we do not claim any special knowledge and pretend to no higher wisdom. We hope that the dialogue is received in the spirit of revolutionary camaraderie.

Ron Jacobs: Do you remember last spring you said in an email (during the Arab Spring stuff before NATO and Libya) that this could have the same impact as 1968? Can you briefly explain that perception?

Peter Bohmer: I was very inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt beginning at the end of last year and early this year, 2011. The growing numbers in the face of murderous repression, the courage, the participatory democratic process of the occupiers, and the call in their statements and in the actual occupation for democracy and economic and social justice really resonated with me and captivated me.

Movements and uprisings tend to spread within and between nations as people begin to feel that there are alternatives to resignation to the status quo and the sense of powerlessness that so many people feel. When I said that I hoped 2011 would also be a world historic year, I thought it was somewhat likely these movements and upsurges would burst forth first in countries where there was growing economic inequality and poverty, where austerity programs were in place and where the majority of the population had no power over the direction and policies of their country. I thought of places as ripe for major rebellion such as Greece which I had visited in September 2010 where the IMF and the European Union was increasingly calling the shots and particularly in other nations in North Africa and the Middle East where the people were following what was happening in the region’s largest country.

Although the resistance to budget cuts in Washington Stare where I live was somewhat limited, I also thought it possible that the examples of the occupation in Egypt and the labor led protests in Madison against their Tea Party Governor, Scott Walker’s frontal attack on State workers and their unions would spread throughout the U.S.

RJ: And now we have the occupy movement, which seems to be inspired by the events in Tahrir Square. Despite it’s indecisiveness in its agenda, it has captured the hopes of many and the wrath of most of the corporate right wing. I have concerns about what I consider a lack of focus but at the same time there is a part of me that understands that the current political understanding of people in the US would reject something more directed. In fact there are those in the occupy movement that lump unions right up there with corporations. What this says to me is that they are confusing union leadership with the rank and file and misunderstanding the role of unions in a capitalist economy, not to mention an unawareness of that history. Nonetheless these types of political misconceptions exist. Is the movement a step forward?

PB: As a result of observation and participation in the still-growing “Occupy Movement”, an alternative to the pervasive feelings of powerlessness and resignation are emerging. There has been for quite some time in the United States widespread opposition to the growing inequality of income and wealth, to total corporate control over all parts of our life, to global warming, to a government that tortures and is totally beholden to Wall Street, to homelessness and losing our homes, to unemployment and underemployment, to growing debt and poverty, to the imprisonment of over two million people, to militarism and endless wars, and this list is incomplete. At the same time, resistance although greater than reported in the mainstream media has been somewhat limited and ineffective. The importance of this movement is that active resistance is increasingly being seen as valid and the right thing to do. There is a growing feeling beyond the occupiers that hopelessness and escape or maybe voting for the lesser of two evils are not the only options.

Common to the growth of powerful social movements have been people who are willing to resist the status quo and take a stand who by their bold actions strike a chord with much larger numbers of people. This causes them to then change for at least a period of time the organization and activities of their lives and also change their values and ideology towards a less self-centered and me first system of belief and towards solidarity and cooperation, and towards a commitment to economic and social justice. This is happening right now, something is in the air.

Having a physical space which people occupy makes this movement visible and also possible for new people to join it. In Olympia, Washington, it is creating dialog and community between homeless people, young people, anarchists and other activists, retired people, etc (many people belong to more than one category). Although in Olympia and in many other places there are no visible demands and somewhat limited discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there or what we want in the short and medium run, occupiers needs for food, shelter and increasingly health care are being addressed and increasingly met as is the question of self-government. So to say, this occupation is not political is a very narrow definition of political.

RJ: If the occupy movement is at the forefront of left-oriented popular struggle, how do we move forward? What might forward look like?

I’ve been in a few occupation/liberation actions over the years, as have you. In fact, I think we were involved in two or three together. Anyhow, whether it was Peoples Park in 1979, a campus building sometime in the past few decades or the Occupy encampments in our respective towns, the fact is these actions usually end. Many of the ones I was involved with ended with some kind of compromise agreement between the bureaucrats involved and the occupiers. Peoples Park ended with a temporary truce and the park still a park. As I involve myself and observe the Occupy movement, I am also doing what I can to make it into something beyond the occupations. However, I am not sure what. We saw one possibility at the end of the Oakland Strike day when folks took over the foreclosed Travelers Aid building in Oakland’s downtown. Although the timing was obviously wrong (it’s not a good idea to occupy a building while the cops are down the street ready to kick ass), the impetus behind the action makes a lot of sense. In fact, I have been a part of discussions about squatting foreclosed buildings here in Vermont and also with folks online in other parts of the world.

A sidebar to this is how long can the occupations remain meaningful before they become like so much graffiti in the minds of the supportive observer?

PB: As of today, November 7, 2011, most of the occupations are maintaining their momentum. This is a very positive accomplishment. For example, in Olympia, many people in Occupy Olympia are looking ahead to November 28, 2011, to confront the Washington State Legislature when it is being called back into a special session by the Governor Gregoire, a Democrat, in order to make further cuts in a State budget that has already severely reduced needed spending for health care, for education at all levels and for poor people. Occupy Olympia is committed to maintaining the occupation of a downtown park at least until the legislative session and possibly beyond.

Nonetheless, as Michael Albert pointed out in his ZNet article, “Occupy to Self-Manage,” occupations and the related general assemblies, the decision-making group for most occupations, tend to decline over time in numbers and enthusiasm. So it is key to bring in new people and create an atmosphere that is welcoming of new people so that we do not wither away. Let us not unconsciously exclude people who have not been part of the left or activist communities. It is also important that we use our occupied sites as a base to for actions and education outside of our sites.

We need to consciously make movement building one of our goals of this phase of the Occupy Movement. This means developing organizations, institutions, and people who have a deepening analysis and critique of capitalism, with growing capacity and skills to confront this system, and to put forward and win non-reformist reforms. Hopefully this will last beyond these set of occupations. By non-reformist reforms, I mean reforms that meet people’s expressed needs, that build our understanding of the limits of capitalist reform, and that also build our capacity to struggle for and win more fundamental and radical transformation of this oppressive and unsustainable society.

For example, Occupy Olympia is trying to develop a set of tents where there would be free medical care, traditional and non-traditional, on-site. This would meet an important need and also point towards a system of free and universal health care as a basic human right. A next step could be to demand and/or occupy indoor and permanent space that could be used a free health clinic, to provide quality health care and also does popular education in the broader community that healthcare should not be a commodity.

I like the idea of creating housing by squatting in unoccupied buildings as you suggested in Oakland. Whatever we do must be done in a way that large numbers of people beyond the occupation understand and support our actions. That will increase the likelihood that if there is police and government repression our movement will grow rather than become isolated.

Overcoming defeatism and resignation and furthering community and beliefs in the importance of collective action is happening, that is a great start. We do not have the power during this period of the “Occupy Movement” to create a participatory socialist society nor even to seriously reduce the obscene inequality of income and wealth in this country. Hopefully some limited short-term goals will be won.

It is a long struggle. Building healthy networks, institutions, organizations within and between communities and cities; that create the basis for a more conscious, powerful and visionary and radical occupy movement in the not too distant future is a goal. It will make this current movement worth the time and effort and commitment of so many people throughout this country and beyond. Most of the specific occupations of space may come to a close in the not so distant future but the movement can and should continue.

RJ: There are those that say part of the reason the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was able to be as effective as it was is because the establishment media covered it. Most the time, the coverage was negative, but the coverage itself spread the word and highlighted injustice. Since then, most of the movements against capitalism and its symptoms (war, poverty, environmental degradation, etc.) have been mostly ignored by that press. Occupy seems to be changing that. Perhaps it is because there are so many young middle class people involved, but nonetheless, the coverage is there. Consequently, the numbers may not be as big, but the message is reaching further, at least for now. Meanwhile, there are the new Internet social media. What’s your take on the role that these various media play today?

PB: Certainly in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the mass media coverage of the protests, Black Freedom, anti-Vietnam war and the TV images of the U.S. war against Vietnam, and of the women’s liberation movement contributed to the growth of these movements. Probably even more important was a vibrant “underground” and radical press such as the Black Panther Party newspaper which was national, the Guardian which was also a national weekly newspaper and papers in many, many cities such as the Berkeley Tribe, the Old Mole (Cambridge, MA), the San Diego Street Journal and OB Rag (San Diego), and the Fifth Estate (Detroit). There were also important papers by the women’s liberation movement such as Off Our Backs, and the GI movement and a news service that provided news and graphics for these papers, Liberation News Service. These papers had significant circulation. They were an integral part of the new left and other movements of that period. Today these types of movement papers are few and far between although for example in Olympia, Works in Progress, plays that role to some extent. On the other hand, social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, play an important role in spreading the word about actions although providing less context and analysis than the “underground” papers of the 60’s and early 70’s. Democracy Now today plays a very important and positive role in providing an alternative analysis to the mainstream media and in covering social movements such as the Occupy movement. So do websites such as Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternews (among others). They lack some of the boldness and creativity of that earlier “underground press” but are very valuable. We need to tell our own stories.

The mainstream media has given a lot of coverage to Occupy Wall Street and the growing national movement. Although much of it is negative, it does as you say spread the word and has helped publicize the obscene economic inequality in the United States. I am not sure why it has gotten so much coverage. Its novelty may be a factor.

RJ: These last several months of worldwide anger organized against the neoliberal capitalist economy reminds me of a number of historical events. 1968 is but one. The Occupy movement is somewhat reminiscent of the IWW’s free speech crusade when their insistence on exercising their free speech rights by setting up soapboxes on street corners throughout the US West and the subsequent arrests and harassment by police exposed the myth of free speech in the US. Could this be that spectre that Karl Marx wrote about? Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in his book Antisystemic Movements about the years 1848 and 1968 as failed revolutions that ultimately changed the world’s consciousness in greater ways than the revolutions that preceded them (France 1789 and Russia 1917). “The fact that they were both unplanned and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous explains both facts,” he writes. “The fact that they failed and the fact that they transformed the world.” Perhaps the events of the past year and a half–from Greece to Egypt to Tunisia to Britain to Europe and North and South America–will be perceived similarly. I think it is much too early to tell. In the meantime, there is a growing surge of calls to converge for a number of actions in the spring.

PB: I think we are at the beginning of a huge upsurge, the beginning of a transformative social movement not just a movement that made a big splash for two months and then fades quickly. There will be setbacks. From what I saw and read, the demonstration in New York, today November 17th, was huge and powerful. The occupation of land may be winding down because of repression, the weather and fatigue but hopefully the Occupy movement will find new forms and really blossom in this coming spring. The high unemployment and poverty rates in the United States are not going to improve and may get worse. They are going to worsen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and many other countries. The causes for action are not going to go way nor is the anger nor is the growing understanding of the need for collective action. We are part of a global movement. That capitalism is being named as the problem by many of the participants, not just the banks, is very exciting. Also necessary and beginning to happen although clearly a lot more needs to is a slowly growing awareness that anti-racism and the need for all forms of equality, economic, gender, racial, LGBT, is central both inside the movement and in the greater society.

The coordinated repression of many of the occupations, e.g., NY, Portland, Oakland, is clearly connected to the fear that much of the economic and political elites have of the potential power of this movement. Because of the widespread anger and the resonance this movement has with growing numbers of people, police brutality has rather than scared people increased participation. Bold and creative actions need to continue and grow. So does popular education of participants in these occupations and of the rest of the 99% in the causes of the economic and social crisis and of all forms of oppression. Equally important is further discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there in the short, medium and long run. We need to consciously build organizations and institutions that can improve people’s lives now, particularly those suffering the most, while also building the capacity to revolutionize this society.

The movement is much bigger than those who have been occupying various sparks and sites. It includes those who have in ways big and small contributed to it, e.g., bringing food down to the occupiers, discussed and supported it at union meeting. One challenge here in Olympia and the Pacific Northwest more generally is to be more inclusive, to welcome and listen to and reach out and include more people who identify with the goals of the Occupy Movement but do not feel comfortable at the sites or the marches or direct actions.

It is a very exciting time to be alive. There is something in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time. In spring, 2013 I intend to co-teach a full time program at the Evergreen State College comparing and contrasting the liberation and social movements of 1968 to 2011 in the U.S. and globally. There will be a lot to examine for 2011 and we still have six weeks to go. I am confident 2012 will be hotter than 2011.

Power to the People!

RJ: I myself think it’s a bit early to tell if this is the spectre that Karl wrote about or if Wallerstein is correct. The underlying politics of the movement are too muddy right now. As far as I have seen, the relationship between the US wars and occupations and the 1% has only begun to become part of the conversation. This relationship needs to be addressed and brought to the forefront of the movement.

There are those in the movement who are anti-leftist (and I don’t mean the various non-left anarchists) and many more that haven’t consciously considered left politics. However, I can’t help but agree with you when you say it is an exciting time to be alive. This is especially the case after the events of N17 in New York, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Indeed, although the numbers were smaller here in Burlington, VT., the spirit of resistance and hope present across the nation and in Greece and Italy on N17 permeated the march and teach-in here, as well. I concur: Power to the People!

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

Further south in the Americas, civil society organization over the past decade brought social movement leaders to state power and marginalized peoples’ rights to national agendas. In this interview, Uruguayan intellectual and journalist, Raúl Zibechi, gives us a South American perspective of the momentous changes taking place globally, through a focus on the inaugural mobilizations in the Middle East. As the Occupy Wall Street protests gain ground, U.S. activists may well engage with such locally rooted yet transnational conversations aimed at the transformation of globalized power structures.

Raúl Zibechi is one of the foremost political theorists writing on, and working with, social movements in Latin America. His work combines acute, generative and ethical analyses of socio-political developments in Latin America with collaborative efforts to support grassroots transformation in the region. He is international section editor of the acclaimed Uruguayan weekly Brecha, lecturer and researcher with the Multiversidad Fransiscana de América Latina and a regular contributor to the Americas Policy Program and to La Jornada in Mexico. His recent books include Dispersing Power (2006, English translation 2010) and Territorios en Resistencia (2008). In order to contextualize the following interview with Zibechi in his wider body of work, our conversation is interspersed with selected translations from some of his essays previously available only in Spanish.

From “The Revolutions of Ordinary People”

(First published in La Jornada, 03 June 2011. Translation of entire article available here.)

The inherited and still hegemonic conception of revolution must be revised, and, in fact, is being revised by current events. Revolution as exclusively focused on the capture of state power is being replaced by another concept of revolution, more complex and integral, which does not exclude a state-centred strategy but supersedes and goes beyond it. In any case, the conquest of state power is a bend in a far longer trajectory, one which seeks something that cannot be achieved from within state institutions: to create a new world.

Traditional politics – anchored in forms of representation that replace collective subjects with managerial professionals, professionals of deception – are of little use in the creation of a new world. Instead, a new world that is different from the current one implies rehearsing and experimenting with horizontal social relations, in sovereign, self-controlled and autonomous spaces, in which no one imposes on or directs the collective…

Beyond their diverse circumstances, the Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol movements in Cairo and in Madrid, form part of the genealogy of “All of them must go!” declared in the 2001 Argentinian revolt, the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, the 2003 and 2005 Bolivian Gas Wars and the 2006 Oaxaca commune, to mention only the urban cases. These movements all share two characteristics: the curbing of those in power and the opening of spaces for direct democracy and collective participation without representatives.

Cristina Cielo: Is such a concept of revolution based on horizontal relations similar to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude? What is the difference between their multitude and your idea of dispersed power?

Raúl Zibechi: Hardt and Negri’s multitude is linked to post-Fordism and to non-material work in cognitive capitalism. This mode of production is still in the minority in Latin America and I believe in the Arab world as well. So while it is interesting, their idea of multitude cannot be employed to understand what is happening here. My take on the collective is quite different. We live in societies that are “variegated”, an interesting concept developed by the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado to describe social relations in his country. These are societies in which many different types of traditional and modern social relations co-exist.

The best example of this is the Andean market, or the urban market in the peripheries of cities like Buenos Aires. These are spaces in which many families live together in a small area, with various businesses that combine production and sales in different fields, with diverse modes of employment – familial, salaried, in kind, commissioned – that is, a “variegated” mode that implies diverse and complex social relations that are interwoven and combined. In this way, if one of these relationships is modified, the rest are as well…

My proposal of “dispersing power” is rooted in communities in movement, non-formal communities, which, once set into motion, can disperse state power. How? Simply because they are composed of mobile powers… These cannot confront the state frontally, because they are annihilated. They surround it, embrace it, paralyse it, penetrate it subtly. That is what we saw in Tahrir when protesters slept under tanks, when women approached soldiers.

CC: Reports on Tunisia and Egypt’s uprisings emphasized the use of Facebook, Twitter and the internet as media for the horizontal organization of the protests. Your own work has focused on the territorial character of Latin American social movements. What are the implications of the differences between the virtual spaces of Arab mobilizations and the physical territories of the Latin American movements?

RZ: I don’t believe in virtual spaces. Spaces are always material as well as symbolic. It’s another matter to speak of virtual media of communication among people in movement…. For me, territories are those places in which life is lived in an integral sense, they are settlements, as we say in Latin America. These have existed for a long time in rural areas: indigenous communities or settlements of Brazil’s Landless Movement, ancestral lands or lands recuperated in the struggle.

What was new in the 1970s onward was the proliferation of urban land occupations. In some cities, more that 70% of urban land, and therefore of households, are illegal yet legitimate occupations. In some cases, this marks the beginning of another type of social organization, in which semi-craftwork production – including urban gardens – is combined with popular markets and informal modes of distribution. In the decisive moments of struggles against the State or at times of profound crisis, these territories become “resistor territories,” that is, spaces that are in some senses liberated from state power and from which challenges to the system may be launched.

CC: What is the importance of urban spaces in popular mobilizations?

RZ: There is a double use of spaces. One is the daily spaces of the neighbourhoods, the markets, all the spaces of daily socialization. The other is the space of protest, the mega-space such as Tahrir Square in Cairo or the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. These spaces are occupied for a time, sometimes for longer periods such as the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, but they are not permanent spaces in which people live their daily lives, because they have to go to work, go home to sleep, etc.

It seems to me necessary to make this distinction and at the same time to establish links between both kinds of urban spaces. I agree with James Scott’s point that people tend to “rehearse” their public actions in spaces that are distant from power, spaces that they can control and in which they feel secure. In contemporary cities, those spaces are the markets, the churches or mosques, social or cultural clubs, youth gangs. It is important to understand what is happening in those spaces, because it is from there that people come out to take Tahrir Square. It is in those spaces that powerful rebellions are spun, that is why they are so important. And, of course, the family. The changes in family, the role of women, of children, the number of children, all of these are indications of what is to come. I don’t believe that great popular uprisings can take place without some shift in the role of patriarchy in the home.

From “This is No Time to be Given to Distraction”

(First published in La Jornada, 25 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

With the Arab revolts, the global systemic crisis enters a new phase, more unpredictable and increasingly beyond control. Until now, the main actors have been the financial oligarchs, the powerful multinationals and the leading governments, particularly the United States and China, followed at some distance by institutions such as the G-20. Now, as popular sectors around the world enter the scene, a momentous shift has taken place. It implies a deepening and speeding up of the global transformations taking place…

The activation of popular sectors modifies our analytic axes, and above all, imposes ethical choices. The scenarios of inter-state relations will increasingly collide with the scenarios of emancipatory struggles…

We are entering into a period of systemic chaos that at some moment will shed light on a new order, perhaps better, perhaps worse than the capitalist order. That system was born with the demographic catastrophe of the Black Plague, which killed a third of the European population over the span of a few years. It will not surrender on tiptoes and with fine manners, but rather in the midst of chaos and barbarity, as with Gaddafi’s regime.

From “The Arab Revolts and Strategic Thinking”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 4 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

It is a matter of understanding the lines of force, the relations of power, the strong and weak points in international relations understood as a system. It is like understanding that the bricks on a wall are what sustains the structure; if these bricks are removed or affected, the whole building – despite its appearance of stability – may tumble….

To say we are traversing a systemic crisis, however, is not to say that the capitalist system is in a terminal crisis. The point, rather, is that the international system will not continue to function as it has since its last great re-structuring, which took place more or less in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. While systemic analyses do not pretend to specify exact dates for such profound changes, they do indicate stages characterized by important tendencies. For example: the crisis of U.S. hegemony. [Some of these systemic shifts include] not only the decline of U.S. power, but also the growth of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China, to which South Africa has now been added). Turkey’s geopolitical shifts have also been noted, as it has slowly abandoned Washington’s sphere of influence. But the Arab revolts constitute a pronounced turn of the screw.

CC: Why has the coverage of events in the Middle East portrayed these as ‘revolts’, ‘rebellions’ or ‘uprisings’ rather than as social movements, as popular mobilizations in Latin America tend to be portrayed?

RZ: Social movement is a Eurocentric concept that has been useful in describing what happens in homogeneous societies that revolve around the capitalist market in which there is one basic form of social relations. In Latin America, the concept has and is used by academic intellectuals whose perspective is external to popular sector organization. If they were on the inside, they would see that, in fact, there are two societies: the official one, of the upper and middle-upper classes, and the other society, the informal one, of use values and of the popular sectors. When I say that there are two societies, I mean to say that each of these is shaped by different types of social relations, and as such, by diverse relationships of power. That is why when the alternative, popular society sets itself into action, it makes more sense to speak of societies in movement, or alternative societies in movement, rather than of social movements. The difference is critical.

In any case, I suspect that in the Arab case the international media has not spoken of social movements because of issues of racism, of colonialism, as if it takes some level of modernity – which they don’t consider the Middle Eastern people to have achieved – to have a so-called civil society, which is also a Eurocentric construction. I prefer to speak, along with Partha Chaterjee, of political society, because it is only by doing politics that it can exist.

CC: If socio-political transformations in different regions point to a global systemic crisis, how do particular events in one region influence the processes or possibilities in other regions? That is, are there ways in which such diverse and disperse forces can transform each other, or transform into something else?

RZ: Fundamental processes and situational junctures respond to different logics and views. There is no mechanical relation between the two; rather, we must focus our attention on the longer processes, and insert events into those, as Braudel taught us. The fundamental tendency is: a crisis of the centre-periphery relationship, a crisis of U.S. domination and of the unipolar world, and now, also, a crisis in Western hegemony. In this transition, which has been taking place over the last four decades, we must insert current processes.

What I mean to say is that the Arab and Latin American revolts disrupt previous equilibriums, or better said, they accelerate the processes of the crises of older structures. And when there are cracks in the imperial Occidental construction, emergent tendencies are strengthened: for example, China, India, Brazil. At the same time, we can register changes in micro structures such as the family, school, health system, the city itself; that is, in spaces of discipline that are undergoing very powerful transformations. Macro and micro transformations must be jointly examined, included within the same description. If we do that, we see a world in movement, one that enters into situations of systemic chaos at particular moments, such as the present one. We do not know what will come, but we are sure that it will be very different. All the cards say: Asia, multipolarity, emergent nations. I hope that some of the cards also say emancipation, but nothing is certain.

From “Everything Solid Melts into the Street”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 15 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

The people in the street are a spanner in the works in the accumulation of capital, which is why one of the first “measures” taken by the military after Mubarak left was to demand that citizens abandon the street and return to work. But if those in power cannot co-exist with the streets and occupied squares, those below – who have learned to topple Pharaohs – have not yet learned how to jam the flows and movements of capital. Something much more complex is needed than blocking tanks or dispersing anti-riot police. In contrast to state apparatuses, capital flows without territory, so it is impossible to pin down and confront. Still further: it traverses us, it models our bodies and behaviours, it is part of our everyday lives and, as Foucault pointed out, it shares our beds and our dreams. Although there is an outside to the State and its institutions, it is difficult to imagine an outside to capital. Neither barricades nor revolts will suffice to fight it.

Despite these limitations, the hunger revolts that became anti-authoritarian revolts are a depth charge to the most important equilibriums of the world system. These will not remain unscathed by the destabilization in the Middle East… We are entering into a period of uncertainty and increasing disorder. In South America, the emergent power of Brazil has assembled a regional architecture as an alternative to the one that has begun to collapse. Everything suggests, however, that things will be far more complicated in the Middle East, given the enormous political and social polarization in the region, the ferocious interstate competition and because both the United States and Israel believe that their future depends on sustaining realities that can, in fact, no longer be propped up.

The Middle East brings together some of the most brutal contradictions of the contemporary world. Firstly, there are determined efforts to sustain an outdated unilateralism. Secondly, it is the region where the principal tendency of the contemporary world is most visible: the brutal concentration of power and wealth…. It is possible that the Arab revolts may open a fissure in the colossal concentration of power [which] has been manifest in the region since the Second World War.

Only time will tell if what is brewing is a tsunami so powerful that not even the Pentagon will be able to surf its waves. But we mustn’t forget that tsunamis make no distinctions: they sweep up rights and lefts, the just and the sinners, the rebels and the conservatives. Nevertheless, they are in many ways similar to revolutions: they leave nothing in their place and they provoke enormous suffering before things return to some kind of normalcy, better perhaps than before, or maybe just less bad.

Prachanda’s strange path

Chairman Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai have gone from heroic revolutionary leaders to rather common high caste Brahmin politicians in expensive suits, watches and ties. They went from speeches about smashing the state and Cultural Revolution to promises about millennium development goals and private finance initiative. What happened?

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachanda Path was the official ideology of the Nepali Maoists, and was to be the union of the Soviet and Chinese models of revolution; the Maoist peoples war with Leninist urban insurrection. Prachanda Path was Maoism synthesised for Nepali conditions; Prachanda Path was said to be a zigzag path, one that goes from left to right to left to right to confuse the enemies and play them off against one another. So, the Maoists would play the royalists against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie off against the royalists; play India off against China and China off against India, and then to play the UN off against the US. In the party itself, Prachanda would play the left winger Kiran against the right winger Bhattarai, one time supporting Kiran, another time Bhattarai, all the time advancing ahead. Prachanda was thought of as the master strategist, with a secret plan, and in some ways this is true.  But Bhattarai is now the Prime Minister, and it is his line the party are following, as they have been since the end of the Peoples War.

The ending of the Peoples War and the entrance into parliamentary politics was justified to the cadre by saying that the struggle had changed form, and that the new struggle would be in the urban centres. This was a change of form from a rural movement towards an urban one, from a secret and hidden leadership to an open leadership in the parliamentary system. The cadre were told that the outward form was electoral struggle, but the internal and true essence was preparation for urban insurrection.

This did indeed seem at the time to be an ingenious tactic, and one that might succeed. And if it had worked, it would have been truly glorious. That is, under the cover of entering into the parliamentary system, the Maoists would bring their troops into the capital and mobilise the Kathmandu proletariat for an urban insurrection. The cadre were told that at an opportune time, the reactionaries would attack and there would be the final conflict between the RNA and the PLA for control of Nepal. The PLA would leave the cantonments, and the YCL (Young Communist League) would take control of the streets in Kathmandu. And, indeed, this was possible; after the peace process when the YCL turned up in Kathmandu, they were organised as a paramilitary force which attracted many young people, their core leadership were ex-PLA, and the popular mood was for revolution.

However, the longer and longer the Maoists stayed in the parliamentary system; the less and less likely this seemed. The leadership said they were taking part in elections as a tactic, confusing their enemies and that their real purpose was to expose the parliamentary system. Unfortunately, it was not the electoral system that was exposed, but the Maoist leaders themselves who were exposed as just another bunch of corrupt opportunist politicians; it was not the enemies of the Maoists who became confused, but their friends and supporters.

The role and importance of the UN has been overlooked by many.  From the point of view of the ‘international community’ and the UN itself, the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) must be judged a quiet success. The UN oversaw the transformation of the Maoists from a revolutionary party to a civilian party, and oversaw the dismantling of the PLA. The Maoist leadership agreed to the UN DDR program (Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration) for the PLA, and this has been almost carried through; the handover of the keys is really only the last symbolic gesture before demobilization of the PLA. International donors will help reintegration by giving a pay out to the PLA soldiers to restart their life as civilians. As for the number of PLA to be integrated into the Nepal Army, it is really just a bargaining chip; it does not really matter much apart from to the soldiers themselves and their families. Some form of integration will take place; that much is agreed upon by all parties, including Kiran and the left wing of the Maoist party.

The UN allowed the implementation of those Maoist demands that did not conflict with the demands of the ‘international community’. These included the abolition of the monarchy and the widening of political participation of previously unrepresented groups, such as Dalits, as well as various social development programs-hospitals schools orphanages etc, generously aided by NGO money. It was indeed strange to see the Maoists get on so well with the UN, not wanting the UN to leave; it was finally the Congress and the UML that asked the UN to leave Nepal. The UN had done their job.

The Maoist leadership justified a lot of this international money coming in by saying ‘we are tricking the imperialists, we are taking the imperialist money but we will use it for revolution’. This excuse seemed plausible for a short time, but unfortunately it is not really possible to fool international donors, such as the World Bank, because they will certainly check how their money is spent. It was not the imperialists that were tricked, but rather the Maoist cadre and supporters. They took much of what the leadership was saying on trust, and did not have the money or resources to check what was happening.  The practice of emphasising the personality of the great leader Prachanda made it hard for ordinary cadre and supporters to challenge or question the great leader’s decisions.

There is another justification that has been coming from the leadership regarding the integration of the PLA into the Nepal Army. This justification suggests that the PLA integrated into the Nepal Army will subvert the army with their superior ideology, winning the ordinary soldier over to the cause of revolution, and thus suggesting that there are still plans for the coming urban insurrection. These types of justifications from the Maoist leadership are simply too hard to believe, there have been too many of them, all incapable of being verified and all in the end proved false.  The leaders of the Nepal Army are surely not that stupid to be tricked. Just as the PLA does not consider itself defeated, neither does the Nepal Army. Prachanda tried to sack the army chief when he was Prime Minister and he was forced to resign. The Nepal army is much bigger than the PLA, well equipped, funded and trained by Britain, US, and India; the leadership of the Nepal Army is controlled by the same people who were previously known as ‘royalists’, the big money in Nepal. The real power in Nepal has not really changed, despite the changes in government.

This was the final zigzag of Prachanda Path, as Prachanda turned from being the leader of the proletariat to being a ‘paid representative of capital’, his public persona changing from revolutionary leader to a man of peace and  great statesman speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, meeting Bush in the White House etc. This is what has been truly strange, to see how easy it was for Prachanda and Bhattarai to use the communist language to the communists, and the capitalist language to the capitalists, to both making promises and pretending to be in their camp. But whose interests do they serve, truly?

During the Peoples War, most of the Maoist political leadership were not in Nepal, but in India.  After 9/11, tough new policies were passed internationally to finish off groups on the ‘US terrorist list’.  In Sri Lanka the LTTE were finished off in an extremely brutal fashion; there was the likelihood of a similarly brutal war in Nepal.  The Indian government arrested several Maoist central committee members, including Com. Baidya and Com. Gajurel, the leaders of the left wing of the Maoist party. It seemed likely that Prachanda would be arrested soon, probably to face a similar fate to Chairman Gonzalo in Peru. The decision to end the Peoples War must have been made at this time, by Prachanda and Bhattarai, and a compromise was agreed upon. The strength of the Maoists and their depth of support among the people, as well as the mass movement (janandolan) led to a compromise on both sides. The revolution would end, the Maoist leadership would join the political establishment, and the monarchy abolished.

The PLA, however, were never defeated. The Maoists controlled a good deal of the country, and they had mass support in their base areas, where things such as the abolition of the caste system, the abolition of feudal barbarities around marriage; the abolition of the various forms of serfdom, the building and running of schools and hospitals, the giving of land taken from rich landowners to landless peasants, communal villages etc. had taken place. There was much that was achieved and much that could have been extraordinary. These things have more or less ended, and the base areas are swamped with NGO funded projects. We may say that the revolution was not destroyed by real bullets so much as by sugar coated bullets.

The party slogan and vision during the Peoples War was Nepal as a ‘base area for the world revolution’. During the elections, the slogan became ‘turning Nepal into Switzerland’. Again, not a bad idea in itself, Nepal reformed along Singaporean lines, but not a communist one. Likewise, the policies of the new Bhattarai led government are not bad as such, and may well create jobs and develop the country but they are simply neoliberal policies dressed up in socialist sounding rhetoric.

Unlike Prachanda, Dr. Bhattarai was always quite honest; he is an honest reformist. His honesty must be commended and is rare in the communist movement.  When he spoke of ‘leaving communism to our grandchildren’- he meant it.  He is also speaking honestly when he says that: ‘Even if some leaders and cadre may oppose or some splinter groups may move out, even then it won’t make much impact on the political line followed by the party’. The left wing of the party has been consistently outplayed and marginalised, and has been unable to challenge or present a viable alternative to Dr. Bhattarai’s line. The most they can do is split off and form a new party, and cause a little commotion.

Dr. Bhattarai probably does have popular support of most Nepalese at the moment, as most are sick of the bickering of the political parties and their failure to reach a consensus, write the constitution and provide jobs. Most Nepalese do not want a return to war, and Dr. Bhattarai is a man of peace.

Dr. Bhattarai is also telling the truth when he speaks of a ‘historical compromise’; the extent and terms of the compromise will no doubt become clearer in time. The Nepali revolution has been over for a long time. The Nepali revolution ended not in defeat, not in victory, but simply as compromise

The immediate popular response was notable for its level of organization and decisiveness. It was also interesting because most of the women protesting did so while wearing the Niqab. Fully covered Yemeni women have continued to inspire – if not fuel – the revolution which started in February. Without their active participation and resilience in the face of violent attempts to quash the uprising, one wonders if Yemen could have held on for so long.

The role of Yemeni women in the revolution should significantly challenge any ideas of Arab women that are based simply on statistical or superficial criteria. In 2010, the Freedom House report on women in the Middle East had already determined that Yemen made no significant progress on women’s rights in the preceding five years. Most international reports examining the standing of women in Yemen – whether in education, health or any other field – have consistently been bleak. Yet, in revolutionary Yemen, the discounted women were more than equal to their male peers when it came to articulating their demands for freedom, democracy and equality.

Yemeni women have not simply broken the stereotype regarding what truly ‘radical’ women in a traditional society should be. They have also challenged all sorts of academic takes on the subject. No famous feminist or NGO has been responsible for mobilizing the women’s activism. Yemeni women are also not specifically asking for equality in a supposedly men-dominated society. They seem to understand that a truly free and democratic society will naturally deliver on its promises of equal treatment, opportunities and expectations for all.

Western media and think-tanks have long presented a mistaken and divisive understanding of Arab – and other – societies. There is a discrepancy between the actual situation and indicators-driven understanding. Entire Arab societies are deconstructed and reduced into simple data, which is filtered, classified and juggled to fit into precise criteria and clear-cut conclusions. Public opinions and entire policies are then formed or formulated based on these conclusions.

The problem does not lie in academic practices, per se, but rather the objective-specific understanding that many in the west have towards the Middle East. Most Washington-based think tanks – regardless of their political leanings – tend to study distant societies only for the sake of producing definite answers and recommendations. However, providing an all-encompassing depiction of a society like Yemen’s – whose internal dynamics and complexity necessarily differs from any other’s in the region – would be most unhelpful for those eager to design policies and short-term strategies on the go.

Arab revolutions continue to tear down archaic beliefs and misguided understandings, challenging the wild theories around Arab peoples and their supposed wrangling between secularism and Islamism. Despite all of this, the self-seeking objectifying of Arabs continues in western media.

Under the all-inclusive title, “The Arab World: The Awakening”, an article in Economist Magazine (Feb 17) attempted to describe the upheaval currently underway throughout the Arab world. Interspersed with such predictable terms as ‘extremists’, ‘Islamists’, ‘strongmen’ and so on, the inane analysis made way for equally silly conclusions. The article, for example, suggested that the West’s decision to accommodate dictatorial regimes in the Middle East was motivated by a mix of despair and altruism: “The West has surrendered to this (Arab) despair too, assuming that only the strongmen could hold back the extremists.”

While words such ‘extremists’, ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘terrorists’ may have their own special ring to western audiences, they could well mean something entirely different – if anything at all – to Arabs. Listening to the Arab media’s coverage of ongoing revolutions, one may not even encounter any of the above terminologies. At times, they can be entirely irrelevant in terms of understanding the momentous happenings underway throughout the region.

The Libyan rebellion is another example to note here. Revolution and war in Libya have ignited a heated debate among Arab intellectuals, pertaining to the use of violence and foreign intervention – although barely in support of the Libyan regime. However, for the New York Times, the coverage of the story is often slated and removed from current reality in Libya. The article “Exiled Islamists Watch Rebellion Unfold at Home,” (NYT, July 18) attempted to answer a nagging question concerning the relationship between Islamists and the Libyan rebels. This question is relevant only to western governments. Although the group examined – the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – has long been dismantled, its alleged former ties with al-Qaeda continue to concern many in the west. While for Libyans, “the men are seen not as an alien, pernicious force but as patriots,” the article claims that many in the West “are trying to assess their influence and any lingering links to Al Qaeda.”

Arab revolutions are attempting to examine larger issues that have tremendous impact on all aspects of life. They are actively confronting the suffering caused at the hands of local dictators supported by Western and other foreign governments. Western media and intellectuals, however, continue to seek only easy answers to intricate, multi-faceted questions. In doing so, they follow the path of the same superficial, stereotypical and predictable discourse. While Arab societies discuss democracy, freedom and social justice, Western writers continue to follow the imagined paths of al-Qaeda, Islamists, moderates and extremists. In all of this, they are embarking on yet another futile hunt, a hunt that will yield no concrete answers, and more misguided policies.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

After being held for 76 days in isolation without access to reading material, Fidel Castro, the 26-year old leader, came into a courtroom filled with 100 soldiers. He gave a rousing defense of the need for revolution to topple the dictator and change the corrupt and brutal socio-economic system so that all could be fed, obtain education and health care, so that farmers could own land and all have a voice.

In his five-hour speech, Fidel said, “The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.”

Instead of asking for acquittal, he demanded to be with his brother and sister rebels in prison. “Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me!”

Fidel Castro considers ethics and morality to be essential for revolutions. In My Life: Fidel Castro, the 2006 interview book with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel speaks of these highest principles on numerous occasions. He asserts that “especially ethics” is what he learned most from the national liberation hero, José Martí.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, from December 2, 1956 to January 1, 1959 the revolutionaries acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. As Fidel told Ramonet, “We did not kill any prisoners,” “not even one blow” was dealt. That is “our principle.” “All revolutionary thought begins with a bit of ethics.”

I think that is also the key reason why so many millions of people the world over love and respect Che Guevara: his moral stance, his example as a just revolutionary leader. This from Socialism and Man:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love…Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible…one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

I agree with Fidel and Che. Revolutionaries must be ethical in vision and use morality in practice, both at home and in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere. As Fidel told Lee Lockwood in Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel:

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.

I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked or oppressed beyond limits of toleration. A moral person, organization, political party or government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality:

1. We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people, class or caste. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making about vital matters with relation to local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

Ethics and Sri Lanka Tamils

True solidarity activists have no choice. We must support a people under attack by aggressors wherever in the world. That is what I see as our task as anti-war activists concerning Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine…just as we did in the wars against Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia and the South Africans…

For us solidarity activists, and governments viewing themselves as progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe our task must be to press for the very lives and rights of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka where governments have systematically oppressed and repressed them for half-a-century.

As a solidarity activist—who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to change oppressive governments from terrorizing us—I denounce all perpetrators of terrorism, no matter the party or cause, and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology embracing fellowship with justice and equality.

I find that most armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with the Colombian FARC and Palestinian PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. The ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation also committed horrendous acts of terrorism.

Most of the dozens of Tamil groups that took up arms, at one time or another, considered themselves Marxists, and many looked up to Che Guevara and Cuba’s revolution as an ideal. But they nearly all became terrorists in much of their actions. Hear what Che Guevara meant about the use of violence.

There are always laggards who remain behind but our function is not to liquidate them, to crush them and force them to bow to an armed vanguard, but to educate them by leading them forward and getting them to follow us because of our example, or as Fidel called it ‘moral compulsion.’ (Speech “From somewhere in the world”)

This Sri Lanka Tamil ‘story’ is a tragedy especially for the Tamils; also for the world of humanity. Most people not directly involved, however, do not react because they don’t know what they can do. There are so many tragedies going on at the same time. Cynical brutality is constantly unleashed by major capitalist enterprises and their governments in the ‘first’ world, much of the former ‘second’ world as well as by national capitalists in the ‘third’ world. We live in what I call the Permanent War Age. Brutality—surveillance—suffering is the norm.

In those countries where there is little brutality, in comparison, and no aggressive war-making (I speak here of the governments of Cuba and other ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America—countries) the leaders see the necessity of having political ties  with some war criminal governments, such as Sri Lanka. I gather that this leads them to ignore their moral solidarity principles and abandon the oppressed Tamils.

On this July 26 day of celebration, I call upon the Cuban government, as well as all members of the ALBA alliance, to return to the moral principles expressed by Fidel and Che and do the right thing by the Tamil people. Call for an independent international investigation into the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government, and use your moral clout, your revolutionary record to demand an end to the genocide against this people.

If morality does not become integral to our struggles, I’m afraid we are headed for a worldwide moral collapse, which is already underway due to the intrinsic immorality of capitalism and its imperialism; the foundering of contemporary socialism; and the rise of fascism throughout much of the world.

But, in the 1980s, I quit politics. I was fed up. The Left was impotent and inept. They didn’t want to change things. They were content with theater. Bad theater at that: dorks on stilts, boring speakers, stupid slogans, the same old chants. “The people, united, will never be defeated!”

Except—we were defeated. We didn’t even fight.

Our protests were poorly attended. The media ignored us. And we always lost. Even the Democrats didn’t care about us or our opinions. By the time Bill Clinton won in 1992, the progressive wing of the party was good for one thing: voting Democratic.

Along with millions of others, I drifted away.

Now, finally, for the first time in decades, I am excited.

We can change everything. Here. In America. Now.

People are rising up in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Patriotic Afghans, Iraqis and Yemenis are fighting puppet dictators propped by U.S. military occupation. They demand an end to violent, corrupt governments that serve themselves but not their citizens. People in the Middle East and European countries such as Greece refuse to accept systemic poverty and unemployment so that a tiny slice of corrupt, well-connected elites can continue to amass wealth.

Why just in other countries? Why not here?.0

Why can’t we have a Tahrir Square?

Lord knows we need one.

Here in the United States, corrupt politicians and their corporate overlords have raped the wealthiest nation in the history of civilization, reducing one out of five Americans to unemployment as the income of the rich skyrockets. They tell us our schoolchildren must do with less, that we cannot afford to see doctors when we are ill; meanwhile they start prolonged, seemingly endless wars of aggression against nations that posed no threat whatsoever: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Yemen.

Did you know that Egypt and Tunisia had lower unemployment and disparity of income than the United States?

Organizers are calling a demonstration planned for October 6, 2011 in Washington’s Freedom Square “the biggest story on the progressive sphere of the Internet tomorrow.” October 6th marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

This, they say, will not be the usual sad protest demonstration in which people show up, chant slogans, march around, then pack up their signs and go home.

[Full disclosure: I have endorsed October 6th and will attend.]

The idea behind October 6th is simple: to recreate Tahrir Square two blocks away from the White House.

“We are not packing up and leaving this time,” says Tarak Kauff, one of the October 6th organizers. “We are preparing to stay as long as we possibly can or until some basic demands are met. If we are driven out, we will return.”

In other words, clear your calendar for the 6th, the 7th, the 8th…however long it takes for the Obama Administration to yield to key demands, including immediate withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and the other wars. Participants are being asked to sign a pledge to attend.

“Previous demonstrations were one-day events which were simple for the Administration and Congress to ignore,” Margaret Flowers, another organizer, told me. “The large demonstrations usually happened on weekends when there was little going on in Washington. “This is different because it is an occupation that begins on a Thursday, a day of business, and will continue.”

They will keep the heat on. “We intend to stay and to have waves of nonviolent civil resistance. The time for symbolic actions has ended. Too many people are suffering and dying here and around the world because of the policies of this nation. The planet is suffering because of the policies of this nation. This government has demonstrated that it is incapable of acting in the best interests of the people and planet. We say that this is unacceptable and we will stay and resist until this changes,” Flowers said.

All the participating groups have pledged to remain nonviolent. However, it is not hard to imagine the Washington police or other state security apparatus reacting brutally to the occupation of part of downtown Washington by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Hoover crushed the Bonus Army. Antiwar demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were beaten. Chinese authorities refused to tolerate the occupation of Tiananmen Square. We have seen dissent crushed in Iran, Bahrain and Syria.

A real demand for real change? The system will view that as a threat.

Flowers: “If the police respond violently, we will do our best to maintain a nonviolent response. If we responded with violence, it would reinforce the police violence and they have weapons, so more people would be hurt. We do not want that. It will be very unfortunate if the police and others working for the security state choose violence. But that is a possibility as we are seeing in this country and around the world. Empires have a history of violence. We want a different kind of society—one that is peaceful, just and sustainable. That is the kind of society we intend to model during our occupation.”

Unlike previous demonstrations, which tended to center around one issue like globalization or gay rights, October 6th is an attempt to unify the American Left into a holistic attack upon the main cause of most of the problems we face: the hegemony of big business that is the inevitable culmination of late-stage capitalism.

Tarak Kauff: “October 6 is…a call for people to stand up to, and resist the root cause not only of our global war-making for profit, but of near catastrophic ecological disaster, pollution, an austerity budget cuts that will devastate the poor and working class, lack of adequate health care and just about every social ill you can think of. What’s the root cause? You got it before I can say it. That’s right, the corporate state.”

October 6th has lit up the leftie blogosphere. If things come together, it could be The Big One: the major event that marks the beginning of the end of the two-party trap and a political system that extracts wealth from the poor and middle-class for the benefit of the wealthy.

Organizer Kevin Zeese adds: “I expect that we will be staying, and not just for the 7th and 8th. We will be working through various scenarios on what will happen depending on how the government responds. In similar events around the world there have been a range of actions and protesters have had to adjust depending on them. Our intent is to stay until we are satisfied with the response.”

“History is not a fairy tale you read to your children at night,” reads the mission statement. “It is not something someone else did in another place. History is right here and right now, in front of you.”

Many regimes in the Middle East find themselves embattled. I see little reason but to dissent from most of the regimes in the Middle East, but this holds pretty much elsewhere in the world.

Freedom of political determination by a people is a progressive principle, and people should be free to make such determination by themselves without outside interference.

This is not a principle respected or adhered to by either the United States regime or the Israeli regime. They are behind or deeply complicit in much of the mayhem, carnage, upheavals, repression, and war crimes that occur in the Middle East.

Arabs and other peoples of the Middle East are aware of the destructive and adversarial role of the US and Israel to their aspirations.

Therefore, I was surprised by the recent essay of leftist writer, Ahmed Amr, whose pieces on the Middle East and other topics I usually find myself in agreement with.¹ While I find myself in sympathy with Amr’s argument for supporting democracy in Syria, I find myself at odds with some of the argumentation by which he calls for the establishment of democracy in Syria.

Amr begins by envisioning a future where “Syrians join the ranks of free nations.” I wonder: which are the free nations that Amr refers to and what defines a free nation? I suppose the free nations are those that can vote for their “representatives.”²

He talks about “a despotic regime that was destined to collapse.” I have no love or respect for the Assad regime. It has been in place largely because it enjoys control over the state’s levers of violence, and it has no electoral legitimacy, although winning an election hardly confers much legitimacy in the world of today.

Yet, Amr’s essay implies that elected governments carry credentials of legitimacy over and above that of governments that do not have electoral credentials. I do not grant that such a notion is necessarily so. I do grant that it is the ideal, but only when elections function as a part of genuine democracies. It is facile to talk of free nations and democracies and elections in an über-capitalist world where money preponderantly controls the state and corporate media, where money propels the contrived messages of corporate-backed candidates, where so-called free nations aggress with impunity nations with regimes that do not submit to western capitalist dictates.

And what is this “price of liberty in Syria”? Again, freedom to vote is a kind of liberty, but to use the word liberty so casually is to impart that the mere overthrow of one regimes brings about liberty. Amr’s reference to Arab Spring needs to be examined, and more so the notion that the Arab Spring is revolutionary or bringing liberty to the Arab lands.

Amr writes, “The Syrian rebels are facing a diabolical regime that not only has a monopoly on violence but has forty years of experience in making liberal use of its exclusive franchise to torment its people.” The regime is – if not diabolical – definitely regressive. Progressivist principles do not support regimes that wield power without the informed and unmanipulated will of the people.

There are Amr’s words: “Arab regimes are like Mafia families…,” “Assad’s gang,” “the Godfathers of the House of Saud,” “the theocrats in Tehran.” He notes these regimes have “secured an unofficial détente with Israel.” In this essay from Amr, the Arab regimes are portrayed in words as gangsterish while the Zionist regime is referred to simply as “Israel.”

Amr even takes a potshot at the resistance in Lebanon. He accuses Hizbollah, without evidence, of doing the bidding of Damascus. His lack of solidarity with the Lebanese resistance is surprising. He also points fingers at other Arab regimes’s support for “stability” in Syria. Is “stability” a bad thing? Or is instability preferred?

Amr presses his opposition to the Assad regime through accusative rhetoric; hence he writes of the “banal business of a brutish dictatorship,” “Syria’s Machiavellian genius,” “the ‘savage atrocities’ of Assad’s goons … demented psychos capable of all sorts of depravity,” “the infamous Shabiha, a shadow militia of Baath Party goons.” But of the imperialist forces? Well, Amr refers to the “international community…”

He takes a potshot at Sudan’s Bashir and seemingly confers legitimacy to the International Criminal Court, what many progressives argue has become a tool of imperialist regimes.³

He writes of “unarmed Syrian rebels bearing their chests to the guns of a despotic regime.” Amr fails to enlighten readers just who these rebels are. He fails to tell readers why progressives should support these rebels (aside from Amr’s criticism of Assad as a despot, which is true enough). Are the rebels free of despotic tendencies? Can Amr assure readers of this?
Amr states, “For the Syrian uprising to succeed, new tactics are needed …” He suggests, “… turning out the lights every Thursday night at 9 pm and banging pots and pans till midnight,” “boycotting all state media,” later “hord[ing] some pita bread, cheese and olives and start[ing] a one week strike.”

I submit that Amr’s priorities are misguided.

There is no reason why Bashar Assad should be entitled to power. I prefer to see a genuine democracy in Syria. I prefer to see genuine democracy anywhere on this planet, but as far as I am aware, it does not exist. If it does not exist, then why would someone take potshots at one particular regime?⁴ Is it the worst regime in the world?

Is the Assad regime worse than the Zionist regime in Israel? Amr knows Assad does not even come close to the atrocities, racism, and humiliation that Israel metes out to its citizens. Is it worse than the rotating Democrat-Republican regimes in Washington? Assad is not gallivanting around the world trying to impose regime change and redraw borders.⁵ Is it worse than the Zionist-supporting regimes in Egypt (the border with Gaza is still not fully open, calling into question how successful the so-called revolution was in Egypt) and Jordan (a favorite dictatorship of the United States)? What of the other despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.?

The Middle East is in turmoil, is repressed, and is ruled by dictators primarily because of two intrusive, disruptive, meddling, and controlling entities: the regimes in Israel and the US.⁶ Why is Amr’s wrath not focused on the primary source of dictatorship and upheaval in the Middle East? Why does he instead focus on a state that is a recalcitrant and resisting pawn of more powerful adversaries?

The solutions that Amr proposes against the Assad regime play into the hands of Zionist and imperialist regimes. If, indeed, divided houses will fall, then Amr is calling for a vacuum to be created in Syria that most likely serve Zionist and imperialist interests. This is puzzling logic.

Self-serving rhetoric aside, Washington and Tel Aviv/Tall Abīb behave as enemies of the Arab peoples. For Arabs to defeat the powerful external forces arrayed against them, they require solidarity.

Therefore, let the peoples in the West begin to establish genuine democracy first at home before they might attempt to impose it elsewhere (and I would argue forcefully that is something that should never be attempted because one culture has no right to impose its ideals or institutions upon another culture without its blessing.) Amr would do much better to call for the overthrow of the despots in Washington by turning away from corporate media and starting a general strike to last until the military-industrial complex is gone for good.

After imperialist and Zionist power has waned, then Arabs can reform their systems of governance themselves.

1. See “Harnessing the Courage of a Syrian Rebel,” Dissident Voice, 14 June 2011.
2. Representative is an Orwellian term since the elected representatives in party politics — more often than not — do not represent their constituents but rather the party line which is subject to the caprice of the party’s corporate sponsors. This is what passes for so-called democracy in the minds of too many people.
3. “ICC tool of Western imperialism,” Press TV, 17 May 2011.
4. Amr does criticize several regimes in his extensive writing. I confine my comments to why he feels it necessary to direct so much vehemence against the Assad regime given the circumstances the region finds itself in.
5. See Kim Petersen, “A Bloody Border Project: Zionist-Imperialist Dogma from the Armed Forces Journal,” Dissident Voice, 5 June 2007 to get a feel for what lurks underneath Arab Spring.
6. Granted Europe, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa play major supporting roles.

The Syrian rebels are facing a diabolical regime that not only has a monopoly on violence but has forty years of experience in making liberal use of its exclusive franchise to torment its people. And if that isn’t enough of a deterrent against joining the uprising, a Syrian rebel also has to confront the reality that most of the regional players are more than willing to place their bets on the butcher of Damascus.

Arab regimes are like Mafia families and as a general rule they know the boundaries of their turf. Assad’s gang is in good standing with the Godfathers of the House of Saud, enjoys excellent relationships with the theocrats in Tehran and has secured an unofficial détente with Israel. Damascus can always depend on Hezbollah to do its bidding in Lebanon and Maliki of Iraq has expressed his support for ‘stability’ in Syria. Nabil Al-Arabi, the foreign minister of Egypt and the newly appointed secretary general of the Arab League, has also taken his place on the ‘stability’ wagon although he did take the extraordinary measure of recommending unspecified ‘reforms’ in Syria.

Even the Palestinians will look the other way for fear of incurring the wrath of the Damascus. If the slaughter in Hama still resonates with the Syrians, the Palestinians have not forgotten Hafez El Assad’s role in the Tel El Zaatar massacre.
The Assad clan has always had a talent for attracting the strangest of bedfellows. Just a few days ago, Walid Jumblatt, the uncrowned prince of the Lebanese Druze, showed up in Damascus to consult with the Syrian godfather on the formation of a Lebanese cabinet. Just for the record, the Jumblatt and Assad clans have a relationship that goes way back to when Kamal Jumblatt, Walid’s Father, was assassinated by none other than Hafez El Assad, Bashar’s daddy. It was nothing personal – just the banal business of a brutish dictatorship.

Even Turkey has to make allowances for Syria’s Machiavellian genius. It wasn’t so long ago that the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) had a safe haven in Syria. Perhaps that’s why Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, took three months to condemn the ‘savage atrocities’ of Assad’s goons.

Three months into the Syrian revolt and not a single Syrian diplomat has resigned to protest the carnage. Although there are credible accounts of a mutiny in Gisr Jisr al-Shughour, Syrian army officers remain loyal to the regime. Much of the slaughter is apparently the handiwork of the infamous Shabiha, a shadow militia of Baath Party goons that is a bit like Papa Doc Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes but operates with the discipline and ruthlessness of the East German Stasi.

As for the “international community,” they might work themselves into enough of a frenzy to pass some sort of Security Council resolution. But economic sanctions won’t deter the regime and there’s a very remote possibility of any kind of outside military intervention. Should Bashar suffer the fate of Sudan’s Bashir and earn himself a well-deserved indictment from the International Criminal Court, he might find a jail cell in The Hague a welcome back-up destination compared to the prospects of facing a lynch mob in Damascus. As for economic sanctions, the Syrian regime has already developed the requisite know-how for handling economic hardships – they just pass off the privations onto the Syrian masses.

Not a word of this will come as any revelation to any of the unarmed Syrian rebels bearing their chests to the guns of a despotic regime. Three months into the uprising, they know that the outside world has abandoned them and that they will have to finish this fight on their own. That takes raw courage – the unique madness that is born of utter desperation.
If we can’t join them in the fight, we can at least send them a little advice. This struggle will be won by the side that can endure the most pain for the longest period of time. While it’s true that the Syrian rebels have already succeeded in mauling the regime’s legitimacy, the Assad clan didn’t enter this battle with any legitimacy worth quibbling about. They will not abandon power out of embarrassment.

But none of this means that the rebels don’t have a few aces up their sleeves. Assad has only so many armed thugs and the rebels own a powder keg of twenty million disgruntled but unarmed citizens. So far, the regime has been able to mow down protesters in Deraa on Friday and then relocate them to Jisr al-Shughour a few days later. Their strategy is to make examples of the most rebellious towns. That also helps to explain why they detain demonstrators, torture them and release them to spread the message that Assad’s goons are demented psychos capable of all sorts of depravity.

For the Syrian uprising to succeed, new tactics are needed because Facebook pages and taking bullet wounds to the skull won’t do. I suggest turning out the lights every Thursday night at 9 pm and banging pots and pans till midnight. While you’re at it, ignore the messenger and kill the message by boycotting all state media, especially state owned newspapers. That’s phase one. Once you get a critical mass of participation, horde some pita bread, cheese and olives and start a one week strike. Don’t leave your homes. Don’t go to work. Close your shops and keep your kids out of schools. And, whatever you do, don’t go to mosques or church services. Leave your places of worship empty and make your homes citadels of liberty. Then take to the streets and see if Doctor Bashar still has any ammunition to confront the courage of a Syrian rebel.