Or we can draw a parallel between Nepal and the Philippines today. Just this year, Arroyo, highly unpopular especially since last year's rigged election scandal <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pugh230705.html>, briefly seized emergency powers: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pugh030306.html>. Though she was made to retreat by people's demonstrations, the conflict is far from over.
The thing is that capitalist development has passed by many parts of the world. The World Bank says that "70% of the world's poor live in rural areas." Notwithstanding migration and urbanization, capitalism has continued to fail to modernize social relations and conditions for denizens of such areas. They are usually excluded from electoral politics as usual also. Thankfully, in Asia and Latin America, revolutionaries who would like to change that still largely come from some kind of socialist current, whether the Communist Party of the Philippines, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), MAS and COB in Bolivia, or the Bolivarians in Venezuela.
Folks in Central Asia and the Middle East are not so lucky. If any opposition exists at all, it tends to be Islamist of one kind or another. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>