Potential for Spread outside of the 'Arab World'?

[Rusty Shackleford]

first off, is there a better term than "Arab World"? Middle East doesnt cut it since it includes north africa as well.

Anyways.

What is the chance of this spreading deeper into Africa or in to Europe?


Berlusconi could have had his Ben Ali moment but the protests petered out after the vote of no confidence(which he survived :cursing:).

Papondreou is sitting pretty as capitalism still is in control in Greece.

Cowens government isnt going to survive

And austerity measures are being pushed on Spain and Portugal.

Is there anything in Africa to mobilize against?

[Rakhmetov]

Looks like the revolution will be fighting on two fronts, namely Latin America and now the Middle East. Chavez needs to send aid to Egypt. Castro too. They should send whatever they can. :cool:

[Proukunin]

I think once the rest of the world has caught on, The US may be last but I believe we'll have a popular front.

[Sasha]

Looks like the revolution will be fighting on two fronts, namely Latin America and now the Middle East. Chavez needs to send aid to Egypt. Castro too. They should send whatever they can. :cool:


:lol: chavez has been quite cozy with mubarak....

anyway, to answer the OP, i think its very telling that the chinese goverment is trying to silence any mention of egypt.
i think that first and foremost this wave of uprisings threathen the regimes in poor and/or opressed countries with an demographic that show an big dominance of 20/30 year olds and favor liberal representative democracy.
so outside of the midl east (iran etc) i would say china, greece, burma, maybe mexico and countries like those are the first where regimes need to start worying

[Rakhmetov]

The House of Saud will fall like a House of Cards. :)

The U.S. can not rely on any overt military action as in the past. If it did then not one U.S. embassy would be left standing in the Middle East/Arab World. The empire is on a downgrade. There should be a chain reaction real soon in nearby Saudi Arabia.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

What is the chance of this spreading deeper into Africa or in to Europe?

Berlusconi could have had his Ben Ali moment but the protests petered out after the vote of no confidence(which he survived ).
Papondreou is sitting pretty as capitalism still is in control in Greece.
And austerity measures are being pushed on Spain and Portugal.

Is there anything in Africa to mobilize against?

Researching my article on Nichi Vendola, I came to the conclusion that there's a kind of "class" commonality in the Mediterranean basin that could well lead to some serious threats to the neoliberal order in Europe. Your last line suggests that my analysis would not impress "Northern" Marxists committed to an industrial narrative, but hey, facts is facts and we'll see how the facts turn out...

[Rusty Shackleford]

Researching my article on Nichi Vendola, I came to the conclusion that there's a kind of "class" commonality in the Mediterranean basin that could well lead to some serious threats to the neoliberal order in Europe. Your last line suggests that my analysis would not impress "Northern" Marxists committed to an industrial narrative, but hey, facts is facts and we'll see how the facts turn out...


what?

i was curious about Africa as well because it is something i know(and hear) little about.

[Rakhmetov]

Lenin was right when in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism he said that the real revolutionary energy was not in the advanced industrial countries but in the backward underdeveloped portions of the globe.

By James E. Connor

Between 1900 and 1917, Lenin spent less than 2 years in Russia. The rest of the time he wandered restlessly through European exile, confronted by the same evidence of prosperity and lack of polarization that had earlier disturbed socialists in the West. Moreover, during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, the European economy was not stagnant … and it was becoming increasingly obvious that polarization and impoverishment, the twin preludes to revolution, were not about to occur. With each passing year, therefore, revolutionary Marxism stood in need of revision. Without substantial alterations, the theory was in imminent danger of becoming an entirely irrelevant dogma.

War World I provided an impetus for revision. When hostilities commenced, workers all over Europe rallied to their respective flags, cheering the mobilizing armies and enthusiastically volunteering for military service. Almost to a man, socialist deputies in the parliaments of the belligerent countries voted for war credits. Yet Marx had asserted that workers had no country. The socialist movement, he claimed, was international in character because exploitation of the proletariat was an international phenomenon. Nationalism was merely a fig leaf by the bourgeoisie to cover the naked class bias of the state. Workers had no interest in wars between bourgeois nations, and they would not participate in them. But by 1914 participate they did----with a fervor that matched any class on the continent.

Why had Marx’s predictions failed? Why had a major war broken out? Why had the proletariat behaved so chauvinistically? If Marxism was to retain any pretensions to intellectual vitality, it had to offer serious answers to all of these questions.

Lenin perplexed by these issues went to work to find answers and presented his results in 1916 in a book entitled Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Lenin noted that the monopolistic practices that emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century had resulted in the creation of great industrial combinations which were strong enough to suppress competition and ensure stable profit levels regardless of market conditions. The process of monopolization was paralleled and greatly aided by the concentration of enormous amounts of capital in a few large banks. In order to operate efficiently, industrial monopolies required guaranteed reserves of raw materials, as well as markets for their products. Financial institutions, on the other hand, continually had to seek profitable outlets for their capital. Both groups solved their problems by turning to the undeveloped areas of third world. At first privately, and later through their respective governments (which they controlled) the industrial and financial monopolies began to dominate and exploit vast areas of Asia, Africa, and South America. The particular style of domination varied with the circumstances of the countries and the industries concerned. In some cases it took the form of out-
right colonization; in others of unequal agreements between powerful western nations and weak backward countries; and in still others of an informal agreement between great powers over spheres of influence. But no matter what the form, the results were the same: the monopolies extracted huge quantities of “super profits” from the colonies and employed these funds to counteract, at least temporarily, Marx’s law of falling profit in highly developed economies. The wealth that poured into the mother countries from the colonies was used to fatten the purses of the bourgeoisie and to bribe certain important segments of the working class. These super profits were the reason why Marx’s predictions of growing impoverishment and polarization had not been fulfilled in western Europe. The European proletariat had not been radicalized, Lenin argued, because for the last thirty years real exploitation had been taking place in the least, rather than in the most, advanced areas of the globe.

Thus colonial acquisition was the key to the survival of capitalism. Without the economic cushion of super profits, the
bourgeoisie could not hope to forestall social revolution. Yet not all of the powers were equally endowed with colonies. Britain and France, for example, acquired theirs at an early date, while Germany entered the colonial competition only after almost all of the worthwhile territory had been claimed. The tardy powers then had no choice but to press for a redivision of
the colonial status quo. It was this pressure for redivision that had brought on the World War and which would continue to bring on wars so long as the imperial order flourished, that is, so long as capitalism survived as a social system.

Using the concept of imperialism, Lenin had no difficulty in explaining the patriotic fervor of the European proletariat. Those workers who had been bribed by the colonial super profits
clearly had a stake in the process of redivision. They constituted a kind of labor aristocracy which, in typical “opportunistic” fashion, sought its own comfort at the expense of the world revolution. Their behavior, although scandalous, was not surprising in men who had supped on scraps from the capitalists’ tables.

Although imperialism had delayed the fulfillment of Marx’s predictions, it had not, Lenin argued, rendered them permanently invalid. As colonies matured economically, the profit rate would fall just as Marx had forecast. Even before that point was reached wars would debilitate, perhaps even destroy some of the present capitalist powers and reduce their holdings to semi-colonial status. In certain areas, successful anti-colonial revolution would cut off the flow of funds to the surviving powers. All of these factors would tend to bring about the end of the imperialist epoch. Lenin thus envisioned the Marxian struggle, with its implications of impoverishment and polarization, reproduced on a gigantic international scale. An increasing number of exploited proletariat nations would confront a handful of the richest and most powerful imperialist states. The result of this process would be analogous to that which Marx had predicted for individual capitalist countries: a proletariat revolution, now of worldwide dimensions, would overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish the classless society. Whereas Marx had forecast
the proletariat revolution would successfully supplant the bourgeois ruling classes in the advanced capitalist states, Lenin, on the other hand, observed that in the era of imperialism the energy for revolutionary uprising lay predominantly in the backward and exploited countries of the world. The flow of super profits from the backward countries had to be stopped (preferably by Third World revolutions) in order for the revolution to take place in the advanced capitalist countries.

There can be little doubt that Imperialism was Lenin’s most ambitious and impressive performance as a theorist. He incorporated the significant events of his age into a Marxian framework, while at the same time substantially altering and expanding that framework. By invoking the notion of proletariat and bourgeois nations, Lenin shifted the attention of Marxists away from Europe and focused it on these backward regions. Here, he implied was where the energy for social upheaval was stored;
here was the stage on which much of the great revolutionary drama would be played out.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

what?

i was curious about Africa as well because it is something i know(and hear) little about.
I was responding to a sentiment that's palpable on this blog, that the Tunisian and Egyptian events may be the "wrong" kind of revolution, they don't fit the theory. My sense is, that this sentiment is fully justified. So when you say there's nothing to "mobilize against," perhaps I misunderstood you as saying that sub-Saharan nations did not have the "correct" class constellation of opposing forces. Sorry if I misread.

Incidentally, your doubts about the term "Arab World" are fully justified, since one underreported aspect of the Algerian strife is the demands of the autochtonous, pre-Arab population.

[Rusty Shackleford]

not to mention berbers, bedouins, sulfardic jews and persians.

what i meant with "mobilize against" is that are there any governments in the continent of Africa that are as unpopular as the ones of Tunisia and Egypt?

[Blackscare]

are as unpopular as the ones of Tunisia and Egypt?

Yes.

[Rocky Rococo]

In Sudan today:

Hj5-Z9EkgTo

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

not to mention berbers, bedouins, sulfardic jews and persians.

what i meant with "mobilize against" is that are there any governments in the continent of Africa that are as unpopular as the ones of Tunisia and Egypt?

Kabyles, the dominant non-Arabic group in Algeria, are Berbers. The issue isn't the ethnic makeup but the fact that they've long been agitating against cultural and economic repression within Algeria, and hence form a strong element of the uprising there.

PS - my partner may be "sulfardic," but she smells pretty good to me...:D

[Rakhmetov]

New article by Alan Woods

http://www.marxist.com/international-implications-of-egyptian-revolution.htm

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

PPS - Just in passing, Morocco is not only ready for this, there's been major, unreported clashes for a while back, now. This one might be considerably more violent. Can't wait to see the Eurotrash catching the next plane out of Essaouira or Marrakech...

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Here's a basic answer to your question about Africa and the possible similarities between Tunisia and Ivory Coast, Sudan, etc.

http://www.herodote.net/articles/article.php?ID=1232

Not to worry if your French isn't up to it. Very basic.

[black magick hustla]

Lenin was right when in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism he said that the real revolutionary energy was not in the advanced industrial countries but in the backward underdeveloped portions of the globe.
egypt and algeria (i dont know about tunisia) are not "backward". they are relatively modern countries with a good amount having cellphones and maybe not so much internet in their houses but their are internet cafes and stuff. in fact, class struggle seems to be the strongest in relatively modern countries, not so much in countries that are miserable, like a lot of sub saharan africa. i think its a bit racist (but ill forgive you because i think you just dont know) to call places like egypt "backward". the whole first/third world division for all intents and puproses is a bit worthless because there are a lot of gradations of what being third world means.

[Quetzal]

http://www.seismologik.com/journal/2011/1/27/are-we-witnessing-the-start-of-a-global-revolution-north-afr.html
(http://www.facebook.com/update_security_info.php?wizard=1#%21/notes/francesco-ocsecnarf/are-we-witnessing-the-start-of-a-global-revolution-north-africa-and-the-global-p/10150120759813900)

[Artemis3]

I heard this King from Morocco did a secret trip to France, apparently worried about the situation... Consider the occupation of Western Sahara and the inhuman treatment to the Saharaui people for decades, and the severe censorship about the situation there...