Tag: revolution

As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to propose viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalized repression.

Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.

To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis, in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or its collapse.

There used to be a rule of thumb that any successful family business would fail by the third generation as the hardworking founder was...

Machine politicians in Los Angeles and Philadelphia acted to preserve the status quo that's enriching them Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, by ordering police...

The greed-is-good community spent Thursday walking the streets they supposedly own as "masters of the universe" with their heads down and their proverbial tails tucked deeply between their legs.

Investment bankers and stock traders clicked the locks shut on their Range Rovers and BMWs as they drove between protesters and police in cities across the United States, and clambered on foot over the barricades separating them from the once voiceless poor and middle-class.

"I don't know when I'll get home," one well-dressed professional shouted into his iPhone Thursday evening from a press of Manhattan protesters who had been blocked from marching south to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sympathetic protesters asked the man in the expensive overcoat and suit if he had wandered into the standoff with police by accident on his way home.

"I'm a marcher," he responded, drawing laughs. "I'm a marcher and I'm heading home. I'm multitasking."

More than 50,000 Americans filled the streets Thursday in response to a coordinated crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protest camps earlier this week by big-city mayors seeking to defend the political machines that brought them to power... (Continued)

The New York Police Department cleared pro-democracy protesters from Zuccotti Park in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday morning in an attempt to stifle a fast-growing...

Moammar Gadhafi was killed Thursday by fighters belonging to the popular uprising his murderous antics spawned among the 99% of the Libyan population that...

You have to laugh at the latest nonsense from the fringe-right about the riots now occurring in Europe, which some Washington, D.C., lobbyists and...

The opposite of one extreme is not the opposite extreme – it's moderation. Unfortunately, that axiom seems to have escaped the U.S....