The people’s democratic revolutions started with Tunisia early this month and spread to Yemen and Egypt now. No doubt, it will spread to other countries, possibly China, U.S. and Europe. The root cause of the global people’s revolution is the worldwide financial and economic crises – especially severe mass unemployment and hopeless pauperism that met oppositions first in Greece, France, then in Spain, and Italy and other European countries.
It is a long over-due people’s task. They used to engage in periodic resistance against the capitalist order roughly in accordance with the periodic economic crises. Since Ronald Reagan’s counter-revolution 30 odd years ago, large-scale resistance halted, people of the world have suffered undemocratic and dictatorial rule of capital but tolerated it for a deteriorating but not abject-as-yet economic livelihood until the Great Financial and Economic crises hit them head on. When old sufferings intensified and new ones struck hard, people could no longer tolerate the dual blows and revolted spontaneously even without palpable organizational activities. People’s democratic struggles point obviously to the capitalist plutocracies - especially the corrupt, inept and bigot leaderships – benefited by the tried and true divide and rule schemes for very long times.
People can force corrupted and dictatorial leaders such as Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak to exile out of the countries, the revolutions, nonetheless, need to continue to “clean houses” of the entrenched bloc of plutocrats whose deep-rooted socio-political influence and ruling power have remained intact. If the revolutions stop, the ruling classes of the various countries with the help of the U.S. and other reactionary powers will restore “order” of what they have lost to the revolutions and bloodthirsty class reprisals against the revolutions will be not only possible but also very probable.
All political struggles are class struggles and all class struggles are political struggle.
People’s revolutions must be organized, led and politicized as well as ideologized, if people want to consolidate their victorious fruits in the short run and fight the ruling class to the end of final victories in the long run. Working class has proven that it occupies a strategic place in the production process, possesses a unique capacity to acquire a talent for organization and cohesion in action, which is incommensurable with that of any oppressed class in the past. (Ernest Mandel)
People’s democratic revolutions will have to invite and welcome the working class to lead. Now working class must have a revolutionary party, serving as a consultant and educational taskforce of the class, not so much as the command headquarters or electoral party participating the bourgeois democracy but as an organizational, arousing, information-broadcasting, theoretical, training, representative and loud speaking mass organ for the working class as a whole. The leadership of the working class or the national revolution-committee must originate from its own ran-and-file, elected, accountable and recallable. The interconnections and relations between the committee and the party are that the committee leads and the party advises, criticizes and rectifies the committee’s mistakes.
China that many people adore very much recently must be in trouble a great deal more by the January Storm, because the China is abominably an enlarged Tunisia or Egypt. Anything that caused their peoples to revolt exists more seriously and sturdily in China and the enmity of the working majority towards the bureaucratic and comprador capitalist minority can only be more not less than in these two countries. A people’s democratic revolutionary situation now exists in China and a gloomy economic situation there threatens an early than expected breakout.
After the Middle East countries change colors of politics and China in turmoil, the U.S. would lose its enormous natural and labor power resources in economics and leadership in politics. Domestic discontentment would rise and revolt would be quite conceivably comparable to these other countries in both of the intensity and depth.
European countries will most likely follow the example of the U.S. than either the Middle East or China in invoking the specter of revolution.
Again, let us hail the Great January Storm and Day of Wrath!