Subjects Archives: Revolutions

  • Notes on the Tunisian Revolution

    From day one it was clear this was a revolution that was not about bread only, it was also against dictatorship and corruption.  The revolution was supported by all segments of society.  Poor, middle class, and even upper middle class.  Especially the middle class showed its claws in the last days in Tunis.  Many friends […]

  • Support Grows for Hunger Strike by Lucasville Uprising Prisoners on Death Row Protesting Their Harsh and Inhumane Treatment

      Monday, January 3, three inmates on death row at Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) started a hunger strike to protest the conditions of their confinement.  Keith LaMar, Siddique Abdullah Hasan (Carlos Sanders), and Jason Robb received death sentences following the rebellion in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, OH.  They have been held at […]

  • Fintan O’Toole’s Own Cultural Revolution

    Fintan O’Toole.  Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic.  Faber.  £12.99. Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote — say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist narco-terrorist. […]

  • Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism

    Once I went to May Day.  I never got workers’ festivities.  The day of work, are you kidding?  The day of workers celebrating themselves.  I never got it into my head what workers’ day or the day of work meant.  I never got it into my head why work should be celebrated.  But when I […]

  • Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa Rescued by Armed Forces

      From the Carondelet Palace, President Correa expressed his condemnation of the attitude of police.  He congratulated the people for their courage.  With such loyalty no one can defeat us, he said.  He thanked the world leaders and organizations that expressed their support for the government.  He declared that Ecuador will not submit to anyone. […]

  • Piedad Córdoba and her battle for peace

    Three days ago the news was made public that the Attorney General of Colombia, Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado, had removed the eminent Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba from her post and barred her from political office for 18 years, because of her alleged promotion of and collaboration with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Faced with […]

  • What They Want is Venezuela’s Oil

    Yesterday I said what I would do if I were Venezuelan; I explained that it was the poor who were most affected by natural disasters and I gave the reasons why. Further on, I added: “…where imperialism dominates and the opportunistic oligarchy receives a lucrative slice of national goods and services, the masses have nothing […]

  • The Revolutionary Road in India

      The editors of Aneek have asked us to present, in brief, our stand regarding what we think is “the correct path” towards equality, cooperation, community, and human solidarity, that is, socialism in India.  The struggle for socialism is going to be long, hard, and violent, and I, for one, cannot imagine a socialist India […]

  • Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution

      To suppress the most articulate voice of the Indian revolutionary movement, the state indulged in the brutal assassination of Cherukuri Rajkumar, popularly known as Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey, on July 2.  Azad was supposed to meet a courier at Sitabardi in Nagpur, Maharashtra […]

  • What Difference Does a Revolution Make?  A Preliminary Contrast of India and China

    I. Commonalities At the time of their casting off of colonialism — India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949 — the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics.  Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of […]

  • Revolution and Public Debt: Britain and France

      David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789.  xii + 210 pp.  Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.  Tables, figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index.  $60.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 0-521-80967-3. In 1989, Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article in the Journal of […]

  • Après moi, le déluge: War, Debt, and Revolution

      Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  x + 415 pp.  Notes, bibliography, and index.  $39.95 U.S.  ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems.  First, […]

  • Youth Politics and Revolution

    Speech at the youth panel at the Compass conference “A New Hope,” 12 June 2010. Not every generation gets the politics it deserves.  When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time […]

  • Portugal: The Unfinished Revolution

      Ronald H. Chilcote.  The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.  xix + 316 pp.  $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-6792-4. The Portuguese Revolution that brought regime change on April 25, 1974, did not bring about a revolution: the popular revolutionary elements that tried to move the […]

  • Position Statement of Old Revolutionaries on the Present Upsurge of Worker Action in China

      Translator’s note: “Regarding the present upsurge of worker action in China, liberals have used their discursive power in the overseas media to frame the strike wave as a tale of workers’ struggle for ‘independent unions,’ as if this were a repetition of Solidarnosc.  What do Chinese workers want?  What is the direction of the […]

  • Egyptians Protest Israeli Raid

    Ian Lee: Demonstrators demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Egypt. Today’s protest also landed on the same day as the Shoura Council election. Protesters and the political opposition were eager to tie the two events together.

  • South Africa: An Unfinished Revolution?

      The Fourth Strini Moodley Annual Memorial Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 13 May 2010 I In her historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the Great French Revolution through an illuminating character analysis and synthesis of three of that revolution’s most prominent personalities, viz., Maximilien Robespierre, Georges […]

  • What “Populist Uprising?” Part 2: Further Reflections on an “Astroturf Movement”

    The much-ballyhooed Tea Party “movement” that has arisen to absurdly accuse the corporate and imperial Barack Obama administration with “socialism,” “favoring the poor,” and other “radical leftist” crimes claims to be a decentralized, independent, “grassroots,” and popular/populist uprising against concentrated power.  Contrary to that claim, Part 1 of our report presented recent polling data showing […]

  • Reason, Faith, and Revolution

    Christianity Fair and Foul The Limits of Liberalism Faith and Reason Culture and Barbarism . . . Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?  Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism or […]

  • What “Populist Uprising?”Part 1: Facts and Reflections on Race, Class, and the Tea Party “Movement”

    The right-wing Tea Party “movement” has recently grabbed attention in the dominant media again.  On Tax Day last April, it garnered headlines by rolling out its standard high-decibel complaints against “big government,” deficits, taxes, and the supposed “radical” agenda of “Obama, Pelosi, and Reid” and the rest of the Democratic Party.  As usual, the Tea […]