Tag: uprising

Reposted Content

Alain Badiou – Tunisia, Egypt: The universal reach of popular uprisings

The wind of the east carries away the wind of the west

Until when the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, will continue to give lesson in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see some well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a moth-eaten Paradise, offering their services to the awe-inspiring Tunisian and Egyptian people, in order teach these savages the ABC of “democracy?”

What pathetic persistence of colonial arrogance! In the situation of political misery that we’ve been living for the last three decades, is not evident to surmise that it is us who have everything to learn from the popular uprisings of the moment?

Don’t we have the urgency to give a close look to everything, that, over there, made possible, by collective action, the overthrow of oligarchic and corrupt governments, who — or maybe especially — stood in a humiliating position of servitude to the Western world?

Yes, we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. For they give life, with the genius of their own inventions, to those same political principles that for some time now the dominant powers try to convince us of their obsoleteness. And in particular the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals.

Continue reading “Alain Badiou – Tunisia, Egypt: The universal reach of popular uprisings”

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Violence and Street Fighting: Who Says It Alienates the People? (Kasama Project)

[Part of our series on military strategy in imperialist countries.  Originally posted here.]

by Mike Ely

An anarchist wrote in a neighboring thread:

“i find it a little odd the way Marxists in the US always associate militant action with anarchists almost exclusively.”

That is a misunderstanding. I think you are talking to the wrong Marxists. The experience of the Maoist movement in the U.S. (to take just one example) is closely tied with many forms of militancy — starting with the Black Panther policies of armed self defense, and then also with the militant combativity of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). And denoucing militancy is (in my view) associated with very particular currents within the Left — whose strategic errors are closely tied up with those tactical views..

Learning and Practising Street-Fighting in 1968

Zengakuren 1967

While in high school, those of us attracted to SDS took classes at a local “Free University” in radical theory and the street fighting snake dances of the Japanese Zengakuren.

In Washington Square park squads of us practiced — using 5 foot cardboard tubing from the garment district — in how to unhorse “cossacks” sent against us. Over and over we would organize anti-imperialist feeder marches to the growing antiwar parades — and march in ranks through the main streets of Manhattan without permits, defying and confronting the cops. Continue reading “Violence and Street Fighting: Who Says It Alienates the People? (Kasama Project)”

RI Articles & Statements

North Africa and the Middle East: Support the revolts and prepare for revolution

A statement from the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative (Canada)
February 14, 2011.

When the young Tunisian produce merchat Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze after having his livelihood taken from him by Tunisian authorities, he sparked a rebellion amongst a stratum of youth, students, the urban unemployed, and petty-bourgeois, first in Tunisia and then all across the Arab world. But Bouazizi was himself merely a rallying point, the final trickle of indignation sufficient to allow the fears of Tunisians to be overcome by their yearning for liberation. The Tunisian revolt, followed by the flight of Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, emboldened the Arab masses to emulate Tunisia’s example, igniting all of North Africa and the Middle East in rebellion.

The domestic and international situations that have conditioned these revolts are the depressed economic conditions in most of the Arab world, subordinated as it is to the geopolitical interests and economic dictates of imperialist globalization, which includes the defense of Zionist aggression and expansionism. The protests and rebellions throughout the Middle East – from Tunisia, to Algeria, to Egypt, to Jordan, to Yemen, to Gaza, and beyond – have been triggered by decades of pro-imperialist, feudal, dictatorial, pro-Israel, and bankrupt antipeople policies. As the Arab revolts unfolded, the news outlet al-Jazeera began to release the leaked “Palestine Papers”, thousands of diplomatic documents from the past decade of the Israel-Palestine conflict. A brief glance at only a few of the thousands of documents reveal unequivocally how treachourous and pro-Israeli is the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and the entire Palestinian Authority. These documents have offered the Arab masses and the whole world yet another opportunity to observe how U.S. imperialism, Israel, and comprador ruling classes like Mahmoud Abbas and Co., conspire against the interests of the masses in the geopolitical and economic interests of imperialism. Continue reading “North Africa and the Middle East: Support the revolts and prepare for revolution”