GEORGE GALLOWAY: EGYPT REVOLUTION: "MUBARAK YOU ARE PERSONA NON GRATA IN...

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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

Mark Twain's tribute to the French Revolution

'The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.

There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.'
From Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), quoted here

THE CHINESE REVOLUTION

Marxism
an instrument of analysis and criticism
approaches the revolution as a revolutionist
only a revolutionist
equipped with the scientific method – is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution
The element of will is indispensable for penetrating the secrets of nature and society
a revolutionist, if he has a serious attitude toward his task, is obliged with strict conscientiousness to analyse the structure of society, its functions and reflexes.
To understand the present war between Japan and China one must take the Second Chinese Revolution as a point of departure
we meet not only identical social forces
the same personalities
Chiang Kai-Shek occupies the central place
the real task of the second world war
to divide the planet anew in accord with the new relationship of imperialist forces
The principal arena
the basin of the Pacific
most important object
will be China
the world war will not produce the final decision:
it will be followed
by a new series
of revolutions

not only the decisions of the war but all those property conditions which give rise to war.
it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries
English Revolution
French Revolution
subjecting it to the laws of free competition
seemed to be the laws of “common sense.”
the Puritan revolution draped itself in Biblical dress
incapacity to understand its own significance
French Revolution
influence on progressive thought in the United States
guided by formulas of pure rationalism
Common sense, which
esorts to the mask of Biblical prophets, or secularized common sense, which
as the product of a rational “contract,”
real society of history has not been constructed, following Rousseau, upon a rational “contract,”
nor
Bentham
the “greatest good,” but has unfolded “irrationally
on the basis of contradictions and antagonisms.
For revolution to become inevitable class contradictions have to be strained to the breaking point

“Irrational” does not, however, mean arbitrary
Revolutions
have a logic of their own
not the logic of Aristotle
less the pragmatic demi-logic of “common sense
It is the higher function of thought: the logic of development and its contradictions, i.e., the dialectic.
a well-to-do society, unused to convulsions and habituated to uninterrupted “progress,” is incapable of understanding the dialectic of its own development
History is preparing to give Great Britain as well as the United States serious lessons in the dialectic.
deduce the character of the Chinese Revolution
from the living structure of Chinese society and from the dynamics of its inner forces
the march of events
their social mainsprings
the uncompleted Chinese Revolution is “bourgeois
it is necessary to check it in the light of a concrete sociological analysis
What are the classes which are struggling in China?
Colonial and semi-colonial – and therefore backward – countries
differ extraordinarily
from one another
in their degree

The Eighteenth Brumaire

On December 2 1851, followers of President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar — the day the first Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself dictator by a coup d'etat.

In this work Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifest themselves in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content. The proletariat of Paris was at this time too inexperienced to win power, but the experiences of 1848-51 would prove invaluable for the successful workers' revolution of 1871.

See Chapter 6 for a succinct time line of the

The Paris Commune.Lenin, V.

http://www.marxist.com/18th-brumaire-ahmadinejad.htm

DANGL ON BOLIVIA

leftist Congressman Gustavo Torrico,
Torrico was meeting with members of the Bolivian Workers Center, one of the largest unions in the country.
one of the key reasons for the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the party he and indigenous President Evo Morales helped construct.
"We choose political ideas from below and move those politics upward,"
"Social organizations are important to us because they are our essence. Without social organizations, we would not exist."

he said.
this dynamic relationship with
powerful unions, social organizations and movements that led to the December 6 re-election of Morales with 63 percent of the vote,
MAS more than two-thirds control of both houses of Congress,
coming months
to "accelerate the process of change."
first four years
various indigenous,
movements were pivotal in defeating
right-wing destabilization efforts, passing land reform legislation, radicalizing government policy and ushering in a new progressive Constitution.

At the same time, defending the MAS against the oligarchy and right wing often took precedence over self-criticism and internal debate; those who seriously questioned the MAS were sometimes labeled allies of the right and sidelined.
with opposition parties extremely weak and divided,
internal censorship will, hopefully, be swept aside to allow for more vigorous analysis of the MAS from the inside out.
Bolivian sociologist Oscar Vega
state-run newspaper Cambio (Change)
"It's no longer a matter of supporting and defending the [MAS] vision of change, but democratically constructing the change through participation, debate and consultation."
demands from party members
calls to radicalize economic measures, make the management of ministries more participatory and delegate power away from Morales and toward a less centralized system of decision-making.
landslide victory
two-thirds majority in Congress will allow
new legislation
regularly
blocked
by the right during
first term
MAS
to pass 100 new laws

to apply a broad spectrum of changes in the new Constitution--a document rewritten in a constituent assembly and passed in a national referendum in January.
but land reform, expansion of indigenous rights and participation in government, and the fight against corruption
securing more state control over natural resource development and exploitation and directly redistributing the wealth from nationalized gas reserves to impoverished sectors of the population through such programs as stipends to students, mothers and the elderly. New revenue from state-run industries will also enable the MAS to continue improving roads and expanding access to basic services, education and healthcare.
three days after election day, the government seized a forty-eight-square-mile ranch from right-wing political opponent Branko Marinkovic.
National Agrarian Tribunal asserted
land had been fraudulently obtained from the Guarayo indigenous communities
it will be returned to the Guarayo

The Constitution mandates
pass five key initiatives within the first nine months of its operation,
Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network in Cochabamba,
"These include regulation of the electoral court and policy, a framework to implement autonomy and decentralization measures, and defining the role of the Judiciary and Constitutional Tribunal." Decentralizing and granting autonomy to right-wing-led departments will likely remain controversial, even considering the weakness of the right.
"The Morales government will face significant obstacles
As an umbrella for social movements, unions and other interest groups with diverse and often conflicting demands, the MAS government will be under considerable pressure from its supporters to make key concessions denied for decades, and sometimes even centuries. There is no guarantee that these groups will give blanket support to MAS legal proposals."
more complex issues

"law to reconcile indigenous 'community' justice systems and the traditional legal system and determine jurisdiction."
the enormous process of decolonization--reversing 500 years of exploitation and marginalization of indigenous people and culture--could take decades of work.
implications of Morales's re-election can't be understated
given the current political climate in Latin America
cooling of US-Latin American relations under the Obama administration
signing of a deal to establish seven new US military bases in Colombia and Washington's devastating role in the coup and electoral farce in Honduras, the re-election of Morales is a signal that the leftward shift
unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.
Morales's re-election bolsters the left alliance
includes Hugo Chávez
Rafael Correa
more moderate leaders in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay--which, in turn, strengthens the pushback against the Washington Consensus and US military aims in the region.

"The historic landslide election in Bolivia has to be seen in relation to the coup in Honduras,"
"The right tried nearly the same exact destabilization campaign against Morales in 2008 that they then executed against Manuel Zelaya in 2009--with exact opposite results."
Morales denounced a violent right-wing civic coup attempt against his government in 2008,
Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup on June 28 of this year.
"The fact that Morales not only withstood the onslaught but recovered with a resounding win at the polls--leaving the opposition shattered--has to serve as a warning to those who see Honduras as the first step in a larger push to use undemocratic means to roll back the democratic left."
economic analyst Carlos Arce of the Center for the Study of Labor and Agrarian Development, told me that the MAS is turning itself into the new Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, a political party that came to power during the transformative revolution of 1952
maintained
for twenty years

"This 60 percent support in the elections is mathematically the same number of people who identify with the MAS in the national census," Arce said, referring to the roughly 60 percent of the population that identifies as indigenous and around the same percentage that lives under the poverty line. "The MAS could stay in power as long as the population doesn't change."

JOHN ROSS ON REVOLUTION

Mexico is wracked by the deepest economic contraction since the Great Depression; millions are out of work (one estimate calculates real unemployment as 40%), 72,000,000 out of 107,000,000 Mexicans live in and around the poverty line
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's (EZLN)
The "Sexta" called for the writing of a new revolutionary Mexican constitution in 2010, a process to be accompanied by prolonged social struggle.
At a meeting of "Otras" from eight states and the federal district this past March in Tampico, Tamaulipas, activists considered the prospects for renewed revolution in the coming year.
Carlos Montemayor, the nation's top scholar of guerrilla movements, even declared the 2010 timeline to be a "trap"
Subcomandante Marcos, born Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente,
has been missing in action
briefly last New Year's at the rebels' Festival of "Digna Rabia" ("Rage with Dignity") in Chiapas.

the phantom of 2010 provoked more speculation than in Chiapas
Governor Juan Sabines and his Secretary of Government Noe Castanon never weary of warning of "a social explosion" in the coming year. Many like La Jornada's veteran Chiapas correspondent Hermann Bellinghausen see their dire pronouncements as paving the path for the increased criminalization of social protest that has marked the Calderon years and a pretext for further militarizing an already militarized state.
San Cristobal de las Casas Bishop emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz.
Bishop Ruiz was the government's favorite villain, condemned as "Comandante Sammy", the real face behind the Zapatistas' ski-masks.
federal troops raided a ranch near Frontera Comalapa on the Guatemalan border
Three men taken into custody were pictured as "guerrilleros" and claimed that they had been trained by one "Comandante Uerto" of the "Kaibiles", a dread unit of the Guatemalan Army that functions as a death squad

the Chiapas press
suggested that the three were members of either the OCEZ (Emiliano Zapata Campesinos Organization) or the OPEZ (Emiliano Zapata Proletarian Organization) depending on which mendacious journalistic vision the reader swallows.
newspapers like Cuarto Poder
finger Diocesan priest Juan Hurtado Lopez in Altamirano in the Zapatista zone of influence, for calling for armed revolt in 2010 from his pulpit,
Cuarto Poder accuses the priest of Nueva Galicia of preaching revolution
Ricardo Lagunes, a lawyer for the Diocesan Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center founded by Bishop Ruiz was beaten by thugs in Jotola down in the hot lands, September 18th.
September 29th arrest of veteran social activist Juan Manuel Hernandez, universally known as "Chema", a founder of the OCEZ and the House of the People ("Casa del Pueblo")
in the central valleys around Venustiano Carranza.

Chema, a longtime lightning rod for that community's recovery of 14,000 hectares from local ranchers, is a fiery indigenous leader whose political leanings are said to tilt more to the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) than to the EZLN.
Governor Sabines's plans to build a super highway that will divide up Zapatista autonomous villages has also increased their vulnerability and the rebels may well consider that a second edition of 1994 in 2010 would be political suicide.
A more likely theater for revolution would be Oaxaca and Guerrero,
confrontations between the military and unidentified guerrilleros were reported in the Guerrero sierra where 40 years ago Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor rose against the mal gobierno.
Popular Revolutionary Army which made its debut in 1996 with a series of murderous attacks on the military along Guerrero's Costa Grande and whose cadre are thought to be drawn from Cabanas's descendents

(the EPR is now based in Oaxaca) and the ERPI or the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People, active in the Sierra and Costa Chica regions of Guerrero. Long incarcerated (ten years) ERPI founders Jacobo Silva and Gloria Arenas were recently released from prison and pledged allegiance to non-violent social struggle, aligning themselves with the Zapatistas' Other Campaign.
Other actors in the mix include the Armed Forces of Popular Revolution (FARP), the Villista Army of the Revolutionary People (EVRP), the December 2nd Revolutionary Organization (OR-2nd), The Viva Villa Collective (CVV), the Justice Commando-June 28th (CJ-28), the Democratic Revolutionary Tendency (TDR), and the Triple Guerrilla National Indigenous Alliance (TAGIN.)
While most of these "focos" express a Marxist-Leninist orientation, a handful of anarchist cells take credit for at least ten bombings at Mexico City banks and auto showrooms in September -

In the 1960s and '70s, urban guerrilla bands thrived in northern cities like Monterrey and Torreon, heisting banks and kidnapping industrialists. Indeed, the roots of the EZLN are firmly planted in those two northern cities. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation grew out of the Monterrey-based Forces of National Liberation (FLN)
The seven northern border states are the bloodiest battlefields in Felipe Calderon's ill-conceived war
The coalescence of radical forces and the drug gangs could create a climate propitious for revolutionary violence in 2010.
Similarly, one scenario for 2010 proposes coordinated risings in the cities and countryside throughout Mexico. Does the Mexican left have the numbers and organization to pull off simultaneous insurrection?
One subplot for 2010 projects indigenous rebels seizing sacred sites like Palenque and Teotihuacan this January 1st

El Insurgente, the EPR's theoretical journal, reminds readers that revolutions are a "coyuntura" (coming-together) of objective conditions such as economic collapse, repression, natural disaster, and the hunger of the people, and subjective forces - i.e. the revolutionaries themselves. Revolutions only happen when revolutionary forces are ready to carry them out. The EPR's conclusion: although objective conditions in 2010 are overripe for revolutionary upheaval, the objective forces lack cohesion and consolidation. In other words, don’t count on a new Mexican Revolution in 2010.