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Saturday 28 January 2012

ईरान के लिए 13 हजार किलो का बम बना रहा अमेरिका!

ईरान के लिए 13 हजार किलो का बम बना रहा अमेरिका!


वॉशिंगटन. अमेरिका समेत पश्चिमी देशों के सख्त ऐतराज के बावजूद ईरान अपने परमाणु कार्यक्रम को आगे बढ़ाने की जिद पर अड़ा है। इसे देखते हुए अमेरिका ने ईरान पर आर्थिक प्रतिबंध वगैरह लगाने के बाद अब सीधी लड़ाई की तैयारी शुरू कर दी है। इसके तहत अमेरिकी सेना ने 'बंकर-बस्टर' नाम का 13600 किलो वजन का अब तक का सबसे बड़ा पारंपरिक बम बनाने की कवायद तेज कर दी है। 
 
अमेरिका एक जंगी जहाज को हमले के बेस के तौर पर तैयार कर मध्य पूर्व के नजदीक समंदर में भी भेजने वाला है।  अमेरिकी सेंट्रल कमांड की मांग के बाद अमेरिकी नौसेना ने अपने पुराने जंगी जहाज को 'मदरशिप' के तौर पर तैयार कर रहा है। इसका इस्तेमाल नेवी सील का कमांडो दस्ता अपने लिए 'तैरते बेस' के तौर पर कर सकता है।  
 
अमेरिका ने बंकर-बस्टर बमों से ईरान पर हमला कर जमीन के नीचे चल रहे परमाणु हथियारों को तैयार करने के कारखानों को तबाह करने की ओर तेजी से कदम बढ़ा दिए हैं।  अमेरिकी अख़बार 'वॉल स्ट्रीट जर्नल' ने अमेरिकी अफसरों के हवाले से अपनी रिपोर्ट में कहा है कि ईरानी परमाणु ठिकानों पर हमले के समय वैकल्पिक योजनाओं को अंतिम रूप दिया जा रहा है। 
 
अमेरिका ने यह कदम तब उठाया है जब अमेरिकी रक्षा मुख्यालय पेंटागन के युद्ध विशेषज्ञ और नियोजक इस नतीजे पर पहुंचे कि उनका सबसे बड़ा पारंपरिक बम ईरान में जमीन के नीचे बहुत ज़्यादा गहराई में बने परमाणु कारखानों को तबाह नहीं कर सकता है।  'वॉल स्ट्रीट जर्नल' ने अमेरिकी अधिकारियों के हवाले से लिखा है कि अमेरिकी रक्षा मंत्रालय ऐसे 20 बम तैयार करने में 16 अरब रुपये खर्च कर चुका है। वहीं, पेंटागन को अभी इन बमों को ज़्यादा घातक बनाने के लिए करीब 4 अरब रुपये और चाहिए। पेंटागन संबंधित अधिकारियों को इस बारे में जानकारी दे दी है।

अमेरिका ने कहा- चीन दुनिया के लिए खतरा

दावोस. अमेरिका को चीन की रणनीतियों से अंतरराष्ट्रीय कारोबार में खतरा है। चीन अपनी मुद्रा की कीमत को वास्तविक कीमत से नीचे रख रहा है। अमेरिका की चिंता की सबसे बड़ी वजह यही है। दावोस में वर्ल्ड इकॉनमिक फोरम में हिस्सा ले रहे अमेरिका के वित्त मंत्री टिमोथी गीथनर ने बात मानी है।  गीथनर ने साम्यावादी देश चीन की आर्थिक नीतियों की आलोचना करते हुए कहा, 'अपने आर्थिक ढांचे की वजह से चीन विश्व व्पापार के लिए मजबूत और अलग किस्म की चुनौती पेश कर रहा है।' 

 

फोरम में गीथनर ने कहा, 'चीन के आर्थिक तौर तरीके उसके कारोबारी साझेदारों के लिए बेहद नुकसानदेह रहे हैं। इसमें सरकारी उद्योगों के लिए सब्सिडी, ऊर्जा की अजीब-ओ-गरीब कीमत, पूंजी और जमीन से जुड़ी नीतियां शामिल हैं।'  चीन ने कारोबारी साझेदारों की कीमत पर अपने उत्पादन क्षेत्र को विकसित किया है। इसके लिए चीन ने अहम सामानों के आयात पर सब्सिडी देने और एक्सचेंज दरों को सामान्य से नीचे रखने जैसी नीति पर अमल किया है। ऐसी नीतियां न सिर्फ कारोबारी साझेदारों के लिए नुकसानदेह है बल्कि दुनिया में व्यापार के वजूद के लिए खतरा है।

The Economist on the failed coup in Bangladesh


The army claims to have thwarted a coup 

The Economist - Jan 28th 2012 

IT WAS, says Gowher Rizvi, a close adviser to Bangladesh’s prime minister, “very quickly nipped in the bud”. He was talking of a coup plot foiled by the army. The schemers—16 were involved, and some are on the run—included disgruntled mid-ranking officers, retired officers, and others abroad. He claims investigators found a list of prominent people to be assassinated, and another list of generals expected to be “potential partners”.
Bangladesh has faced dozens of coups, failed or not, in its 40 years. But for an army spokesman to give details of one, on January 19th, was unusual. He named the plotters and blamed them for inducing others to revolt (by passing on provocative e-mails and posting on Facebook). The conspirators, he said, shared extreme religious beliefs.
The official view is that dogged opponents of Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s elected regime must now be rooted out, especially from the army. These include Islamists—many supposedly recruited to the army in the early 2000s—and those who oppose ongoing war-crimes trials (over killings during the secession war of 1971).
Mr Rizvi says the government’s legitimacy is assured and reports “absolute calm” in Dhaka, the capital. The army’s discipline looks admirable, he says, encouraged by a popular desire (in contrast to a few years ago) for men in uniform not to meddle in politics.
The equanimity is not shared by all. Many normally garrulous Bangladeshi commentators this week shunned requests to talk. A wide presumption exists that phones are bugged. Speak to one of the men accused of leading the plot, who is in hiding abroad, and a murky picture emerges. Ishraq Ahmed concedes that the arrested men are his friends, but denies religious extremism (indeed, he complains that the authorities have seized his painstakingly collected cellar of wines, Armagnacs and malt whiskies). He says the government “can show no troop movements, no guns, anything” to prove the plot.
Mr Ahmed is a former high-ranking officer from a liberal family. He says he fought “with great responsibility” for Bangladesh’s independence. Now he and other nationalists are merely trying to oppose what they see as a coup-by-stealth by Sheikh Hasina, who is letting Bangladesh be “turned into a Bantustan” run by India.
He makes many claims. Among the more plausible and specific is that spies from India’s Research Analysis Wing (RAW) operate in the country. He claims, too, that for two years RAW has had an office within the headquarters of Bangladeshi Intelligence in Dhaka and a “direct submarine cable for communications” back to India. He claims that Indians conduct electronic surveillance in the country and kidnap suspects from Bangladeshi cities. Indian prodding, he adds, encourages the government to crack down on “anyone with beards. Any practising Muslim is vilified and portrayed as Taliban.”
Mr Rizvi denies all this, saying he is “totally unaware of any Indian presence in Bangladesh”. Yet he accepts that many are uneasy about Bangladesh’s rapprochement with India under Sheikh Hasina. Bangladesh has also met Indian demands to root out Islamists’ training camps, and he concedes that some individuals—though not Bangladeshis—are taken over the border for prosecution in India.
Fractiousness will grow ahead of a general election in 2013. Returned to power three years ago, Sheikh Hasina has seen her popularity slump from 81% to 39%, according to an opinion poll published by the Daily Star on January 8th. More telling, 74% say they oppose her constitutional meddling last year, which changed how elections are organised. That may bode ill for stability. Mughal kings struggled to rule the territory over four centuries ago, lamenting that Bengal was “a house of turbulence”. Little has changed.
http://deshcalling.blogspot.com/2012/01/turbulent-house.html

Gujarat dalits refuse to shift youth’s body from police station

DNA
Gujarat dalits refuse to shift youth’s body from police station

A white Maruti Van entered Sanand police station on Wednesday morning and two youths got out of the vehicle. They brought out the body of Atul Rathod, the 25-year-old dalit youth who was killed on Tuesday in Rethal village of Sanand taluka, allegedly in a fight with a group of darbar youths.

A large number of women, weeping and wailing, entered the police station premises soon after and they were followed by a large number of dalits, all angry with the functioning of the Sanand police.

They placed Atul’s body outside the officers’ room at the police station which was now thronged by more than 200 dalits, shouting slogans against the police department and demanding the arrest of the culprits.

The angry people started shouting slogans against the police, which forced the officers to seek shelter in their rooms for some time. Nothing could be more illustrative of the Sanand police’s failure to act against the criminals in the area than the officers’ attempt to hide in their rooms.

When some dalit youths wanted to ransack the police station, some elderly people of the community tried to keep them calm and non-violent in their agitation against police inaction.
A flurry of meetings followed at the police station. Dalit leaders of Rethal village had a meeting with DySP, RK Patel. This was followed by a meeting between the leaders and the superintendent of police, Ahmedabad rural, RR Bhagat.

Eventually, Ahmedabad collector Vijay Nehra arrived and held a meeting with the Dalit leaders at the police station. His meeting was followed by a meeting between the leaders and the IGP, Ahmedabad range, GS Malik.

There was just one thing common to all these meetings. Every officer tried to persuade the leaders to remove the dead body from the police station.

But the Dalit leaders demanded two things. First, arrest the people who had killed Atul and, secondly, suspend the police officers who had failed to act responsibly during the incident.
The dalits allege that the police had done absolutely nothing to arrest the culprits. "They did not even bother to raid their houses or ask their relatives about their whereabouts. They want us to remove Atul's body but don't want to arrest the people who killed him," alleged Vashram Rathod, the paternal uncle of the deceased. Meanwhile, dalit youths brought two slabs of ice and put the body on it. Family members, relatives, friends and well-wishers stood around weeping and mourning the whole day. The family members also attended the meetings with different officers in the police inspector's office.

The dalits also demanded the suspension of police officers who had failed to respond following the clash between dalits and darbars on Tuesday in which Atul Rathod was killed. The three people named accused in the case are Yuvrajsinh Rajput, Bharatsinh Rajput and Jabbarsinh Rajput.

The people injured in the incident are Valji Rathod, Manu Rathod, Ramesh Cheu, Khodabhai and Ishwar Khoda. Talking to DNA, a Dalit and victim of the caste system, Shankar Shenva, said Dalits from several villages had now united against the atrocities of the upper caste people in the taluka. They had demanded prompt police action against those responsible for atrocities on dalits.

Rebellion and reaction

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20120210290200400.htm

COVER STORY

Rebellion and reaction
AIJAZ AHMAD
The mass uprisings of 2011 in the Arab world and in the Euro-American zone may have entirely different outcomes as the neoliberal framework crumbles.
DYLAN MARTINEZ 

Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 11: Egyptians celebrate Hosni Mubarak's resignation and the end of his 30-year rule. Trade unions played a big role in the 2011 protests through strikes and organised participation in demonstrations. In fact, getting workers back to work in an economy that had stalled badly was a major impetus for the military to let go of Mubarak and then to outlaw strikes.
ON a global scale, the year 2011 was notable for two contrasting but interrelated features: a deepening economic crisis, especially in the core capitalist countries, and, on the political plain, a vast pattern of protests, strikes and mass uprisings in the Arab world as much as in the Euro-American zones but also enveloping countries as far-flung as China and Chile.
The centre of the economic crisis has now shifted from the United States to Europe, the much brandished U.S. recovery is grinding to a halt, the currency war between the dollar and the euro is in full bloom and an eventual collapse of the euro cannot be ruled out. As has been the case since the onset of the crisis in 2007/8, Asian economies have remained robust on the whole even though the rates of growth are slowing down. However, if the growing economic distress in Brazil is any indicator, China, India and the countries that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are also likely to experience considerable contraction if the European Union crisis deteriorates very much further, which it most probably will. Prognosis for 2012 is dire.
This essay is not about the economic crisis but about some of its fallout. This writer has written on the political coordinates of the economic crisis previously (“The Political War”, Frontline, September 9, 2011) and may return to it in the future. Here, the focus is on the strikes and the uprisings – the intertwining of revolutionary desire and counterrevolutionary strategies – but this too with a focus on the principal nodes, primarily in the Arab world and Europe.
The Arab revolt: Beginnings
When does a year begin, politically speaking?
One might plausibly say that 2011 began on December 17, 2010, when police confiscated the vending cart of Mohammad Bouazizi, an unemployed college graduate in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Forced to vend fruits and vegetable, the young man registered his rage by immolating himself. Three issues were condensed in that one death: police brutality that was the hallmark of a ferocious dictatorship; widespread unemployment among Tunisian – and, more generally, Arab – youth; and the hideous contrast between fabulous wealth of the ruling class and rampant poverty among masses of people in every country that has been a victim of the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism, globalisation and so forth.
Parenthetically, it might be noted that in Tunisia itself there have been 107 documented attempts at self-immolation during the first six months after the overthrow of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali dictatorship (first six months of “the Revolution”) but those have gone largely unreported because such reports impinge upon the myth that there has been a “revolution” and, above all, the myth that “democracy” will somehow exorcise the ghosts of popular suffering. In other words: Bouazizi became a symbol, the dictatorship fell, but issues of neoliberal devastation and rampant unemployment remain.
SALAH HABIBI/AP 

TUNIS, JANUARY 28, 2011: Demonstrators hold up a poster of Mohammad Bouazizi, an unemployed graduate in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid who had been forced to sell fruits and vegetables. When the police confiscated his vending cart on December 17, 2010, Bouazizi registered his rage by immolating himself. His death became the rallying point for what went on to be called the Arab Spring.
And when does a year end, politically speaking?
No one could have foreseen that the local demonstrations that erupted in a remote Tunisian town in December 2010 would help ignite the biggest mass uprising in the modern history of the Arab world, from the south-western corner of the Mediterranean to the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. Nor could one have foreseen, even in the middle of 2011, well after two dictatorships had fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, that what had begun as wholly secular uprisings of techno-savvy youth and impoverished masses, with impressive mobilisations of trade unions and the working classes, would lead to a chain of Islamist electoral triumphs in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. Other fallouts have been worse. We have witnessed North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) “humanitarian intervention” in Libya that killed and rendered homeless scores of thousands of people, only to bring to the centres of power an odd assortment of marauding militias, some former members of the Muammar Qaddafi regime, as well as Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood groups. In response to the “Arab Spring, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and more generally the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), have now emerged as arbiters of the Arab state system. And, a full-scale internationalised civil war over the fate of Syria is picking up steam, as genuinely popular protests against the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime have been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood and its patrons in the Gulf kingdoms and Turkey, not to speak of a Syrian National Council composed of well-heeled Syrian expatriates promoted by the various chanceries in Ankara, Paris and Washington.
As one calendar year ends and a new one begins, the two key processes – the Islamist takeovers and the war over Syria – are still unfolding. The dynamics of 2011 are still with us. In sum, one finds hardly any correlation between the original causes and aspirations underlying these mass insurrections on the one hand, and, on the other, the deeply reactionary outcomes in country after country across the region. The one hopeful sign is that much of the paraphernalia of the entrenched dictatorships is gone and a new order can now at least begin its struggle to be born, albeit in highly inauspicious circumstances.
Protest goes global
There is a strong tendency to view these Arab uprisings in isolation from developments elsewhere in the world, notably Europe and the U.S., not to speak of earlier demise of dictatorships in countries as diverse as the Philippines and Chile, or the revolutionary upsurge in Venezuela and Bolivia. Just as the European strikes and protests of the previous year can be seen as a prelude to the Arab uprisings of 2011, the historic Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that arose later in the year was inspired partially by the Tahrir Square uprisings in Egypt; the massive Spanish movement of the indignados (the angry ones) that erupted on May 15 was also an equal inspiration for many in the U.S. movement. The Chilean student uprising that also began in May was then followed, on August 24-25, by a general strike and the largest mass protest since the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship. A later student demonstration witnessed the astonishing sight of 2,500 professors arriving from all over the country in a 55-bus caravan. The Chilean strikes were followed by sizeable student protests in a number of Latin American countries and are themselves analogous to the Greek student movement which held a hugely popular commemoration, on November 17, 2011, in memory of the famous Polytechnic Uprising on November 17, 1973, that paved the way for the fall of the military dictatorship the next year.
If the Chilean students were demanding an end to the neoliberal structures of education put in place by the Pinochet dictatorship, so as to get free, high quality education for all sections of society, the Greek students were protesting against what they called the rise of “an economic and political junta”.
These sentiments were well summed up in a slogan coined by Occupied London: “Then with tanks, now with banks.” November was a particularly high point as OWS celebrated two months of its existence across dozens of cities in the U.S. and Canada; students started a week-long strike in all the major cities of Spain; while, in Italy, there were marches and even violent clashes with the police in Rome, Milan, Turin and Palermo. Even in Germany, the great heart of Bankers' Europe, students struck in over a dozen cities.
One of the striking features of these rebellions is the curious interplay between the broader rebellions on the one hand and the workers movements and trade unions on the other. In Tunisia, something like 75 per cent of the population is estimated to have participated in protests at one time or another, but it was the demonstration of 150,000 on January 12, in response to the call given by the UGTT, the Trade Union Confederation, which convinced the U.S. embassy and the Tunisian Armed Forces to let go of Ben Ali, the dictator. (According to information leaked by the French government, General Rachid Ammar, the chief of the Tunisian Army, was acting on the advice given to him by General William Ward, the then acting head of the U.S. Africom.) In Egypt, some 15 million people, about a sixth of the population, are said to have participated in the rebellions, and the role of the trade unions was by no means quite as central. However, for a great many who played leading roles in the rebellion of 2011, the militant strike wave of 2008 was a reference point. Egypt had, in fact, remained turbulent since those strikes, and unions and syndicates played a substantial role in 2011 too, through strikes and organised participation in the demonstrations, going on then to form dozens of new independent unions. These workers' strikes were particularly intense during the last two weeks of Hosni Mubarak's rule and getting workers back to work, in an economy that had stalled badly during the rebellion, was a major impetus for the military first to let go of Mubarak, then to outlaw strikes and unleash brute force against the striking workers after it captured power.
In other words, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings began as protests against the extreme forms of poverty, unemployment and acute price rise; they witnessed substantial working class and trade union participation; but they eventually got focussed on issues of dictatorship and civilian rule, so that the creation of the institutional framework of liberal democracy itself came to be seen as the absolute good. The militants' almost exclusive focus on obtaining liberal democratic freedoms and their relative lack of engagement with substantive issues of economic freedoms and redistribution of wealth made it easier for the much better organised Islamists to walk into corridors of power precisely through those electoral processes, while numerically very weak socialist groups were in no way prepared for electoral contests and the rest of the secular forces were largely trapped in the democracy promotion rhetoric that they had learned from Freedom House, etc.
The Euro-American zone
The dynamic of working class resistance to the neoliberal offensive feeding into mass rebellions has been clearer in the Europe of stable liberal democracies than in the anti-dictatorship uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, though with equally unforeseeable consequences.
SEBASTIAN SILVA/AP 

SANTIAGO, CHILE, AUGUST 9, 2011: During a students' protest demanding an end to the neoliberal structures of education put in place by the Pinochet dictatorship and free, high-quality education for all sections. The Chilean uprising was followed by sizeable student protests in a number of Latin American countries.
Spain, for instance, had its first general strike of this century in 2002, and a year before the eruption of the indignados in 2011 there had been another general strike so massive that half of Spain's labour force is said to have participated in it; as these movements erupted in the form that they did, one recalled that Spain was the country that had Europe's strongest anarchist movement in the 20th century. Within this century, Austria, France and Italy experienced mass strikes in 2003, and various such strikes have occurred in one country or another since then. Greece has lived in a virtually permanent state of strikes, uprisings and state repression since 2008, and while French strikes have been comparatively far more amiable they too have been persistent over the past three years. Even in London, the huge student demonstrations of November 2010 were followed by a march of 400,000 in March 2011, in the largest union-organised event in 20 years. The larger movements in Europe are youth driven, though, much as in northern Africa or in Chile. Which should cause no surprise. Unemployment of the educated in parts of even western Europe is beginning to remind one of the same phenomenon in Latin America and the Arab world. At the beginning of 2011, unemployment for youth below the age of 25 was over 20 per cent across the European Union (E.U.), but 26 per cent in Italy, 30 per cent in Greece, and 43 per cent in Spain, while the common European idea of education as a public good that was to be paid for collectively, not through individual “user fees”, is being given up in a wave of privatisations and so-called “austerity measures”.
Europe has been in the grip of creeping neoliberalism and an increasingly powerful financial oligarchy since the very inception of the E.U., and there has been a veritable financial coup d'etat over the last three years, whose poisonous grip keeps moving from country to country, from Latvia to Ireland, Greece to Spain, Portugal to Italy. Britain and France keep implementing more and more “austerity”– cuts in wages, employment, pensions, social services, and so on – pleading to their populations that without such “austerity” they too might face the fate of Ireland and Greece. Tiny little Iceland has so far been the only country that has refused this oligarchic diktat and saved its future on its own terms. The financial oligarchy seems to have decided that a neoliberal Europe can arise only if social Europe is consigned to the graveyard, and it has therefore launched the most sweeping attack on the European working class that this class has faced since the 1930s. What is being administered to parts of south-western Europe now is in fact a variant of the “shock therapy” that was administered to eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Younger members of the working and middling classes bear the full brunt of this attack and they are the ones most in rebellion.
Something structurally similar lies behind the OWS movement. There has been very little upward movement in the real wages of the American working population since the onset of neoliberalism in the late 1970s. The vast majority of the U.S. population has been able to keep up its standard of living over the past 30 years or so only by incurring more and more debt, mainly of three kinds: mortgage debt for purchase of new housing or against housing already owned; credit card debt; and student debt. It is estimated that $7 trillion in home equity – more than half of the aggregate home equity that existed in early 2006 – has now been lost and about 30 per cent of all homes with mortgages are still facing possible foreclosures.
Between 2007 and end of 2012, as many as 12 million homes – representing one in every four mortgages – will have been foreclosed. With such massive losses of property and savings, other kinds of debt still remain. Student debt now stands at roughly $1 trillion, more or less equal to credit card debt, and is set to rise sharply with escalating educational costs. For instance, students at Berkeley may pay a proposed $23,000 in tuition by the 2015-2016 academic year, up from $11,160 at present, which is itself four times more than the $2,716 in tuition fee 10 years ago. As a large number of families lose their homes, a substantial proportion of the U.S.' young population puts itself through college by incurring huge debts but without secure prospects of a job good enough to repay that debt and also live a decent life. The great slogan of the OWS – “We are the 99 per cent” – may sound rhetorical to the wealthiest stratum but it speaks directly to those who are swamped by these debts: housing mortgage, credit card, and student loans.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES 

AT A DEMONSTRATION against the Vietnam War outside the Pentagon in 1967. The mid-1960s saw many protests; 1968 in particular was a year of rebellions worldwide. But the idea of socialism was very much alive and well then unlike in the uprisings of 2011 where it had a microscopic presence.
This is a generation that has had to mortgage its own future for the sake, indirectly, of imperialist wars and Wall Street wealth, while the universities become mere corporate entities and the overall education system erodes, like much of the U.S. infrastructure. They want to defend their own future against corporate greed, and in doing so they speak to the fears and aspirations of countless other people. That is why thousands of occupations have mushroomed all across North America. They are hibernating for the winter, but they will have their spring, hopefully a better spring than the Arab Spring that is sought to be contained by Islamism, sectarianism, neoliberalism, militarism and NATO aggressions – a matter to which we shall return.
Revolution in search of a form
Cumulatively, all these movements of 2011, from Tunis to Santiago to Wall Street, bring two facts into sharp relief. First, and regardless of how other forces intervene to give the movements a different orientation, what is common among these transcontinental developments is a protest against neoliberalism and against the failures, on part of dictatorships and liberal democracies alike, to protect the people from the ensuing miseries; this is combined, then, in a loss of faith in the whole spectrum of actually existing political parties as such.
Second, even though every uprising tends to have unique characteristics and is usually unpredictable before it actually occurs, none can be treated in isolation, and the events of 2011 cannot be seen as unique eruptions, coming out of nowhere.
What, then, of the very form that most of these protests have taken, aside from the familiar form of the workers' strike? A couple of general points can be made to frame this question. First, the accelerated rate of the globalisation of capital has itself given an impetus to the widespread sense among the oppositional forces that protest too has to have an international dimension; hence the well-known slogan “Think globally, act locally” and variations thereof. Second, the very technologies that were invented to facilitate global movement of capital and the creation of a globally integrated battlefield (such as the empire of drones) also have had the spin-off effect of facilitating contacts of various kinds among far-flung protest movements, from building alternative media to information-sharing among individuals and groups in diverse countries, from fast upload of video and cellular phone images to the making of Facebook communities, and so on. Third, as I have been writing for some time, the collapse of the Soviet system on the one hand and the assimilation of social democracy into the neoliberal project on the other have meant that new generations, arising especially since the 1990s, have had to experiment with a variety of novel and not-so-novel forms until a revolutionary form can be found for an emancipatory project – let us still call it socialism – that is adequate to the conditions of the 21st century.
In these uncertain times, vast numbers of people feel more comfortable working in movements, networks, mobilisations on particular issues, etc., than with the historic forms of the political party, the trade union, etc. Not the least consequence of this situation is that with the decline of both communism and social democracy, the third great current descended from the 19th century forms of political radicalism – namely Anarchism – is now ascendant in many of the new movements, even in places where actual individuals may or may not be fully cognisant of the theoretical roots of their own thinking. This is particularly true of the Euro-American zones where many more are consciously anarchist by conviction. In Arab and Asian zones, these kinds of thinking or organising are imbibed more indirectly.
1968 & 2011 – the difference
If we start tracing the real genealogies of 2011 we might have to go all the way back to worldwide rebellions of some 40 years ago that have come to be associated with another year, ‘1968': wars of national liberation in a dozen Asian and African countries; the Cultural Revolution against “the headquarters” in China; Euro-American movements in opposition to imperialist wars (against the Vietnam War in the U.S.; against the Labour government's support for that war in Britain); growing scepticism and even opposition to the Soviet Union (against intervention in Czechoslovakia; sympathy for the Prague Spring); opposition to dictatorship (Pakistan; overthrow of the Ayub dictatorship); opposition to racism (American civil rights movement; race riots in Britain); opposition to right-wing educational authorities (campus rebellions in many parts of the world); opposition to assigned familial and sexual roles (still an ongoing process across the world); and, in many quarters across Asia and Europe, a certain affiliation with Maoism and the Latin American guerilla. Many of these aspects of ‘1968' came to be condensed in the French uprising, including the notable discordance between the militants and the French Communist Party (PCF), and ‘1968' is therefore associated in popular memory specifically with Paris. The uprisings of 2011 are very much in the ‘spirit of 1968' but with two historic differences.
First, the movements of ‘1968' arose within what has come to be known as “the Golden Age of Capitalism”, an unprecedented quarter century of increasing prosperity in countries of advanced capitalism, and in the heyday of national liberation and non-alignment in the Tricontinent; the political orientations of those movements were conditioned by those contexts of their emergence. By contrast, the movements of 2011 have arisen in a time of near-total defeat and disorientation of the socialist Left (except in Latin America), the worst economic downturn in the capitalist core in some 80 years, the most brutal offensive of finance capital in its neoliberal guise, and, specifically in much of the Arab world, long-standing and utterly corrupt dictatorships and monarchies at the state level, and – at the demotic level that often gets mistaken for ‘civil society' – a cultural crisis that often manifests itself in identitarian fantasies of deliverance through a combination of Islamism, free enterprise and Democracy Promotion. Hence the odd contrast between the Euro-American movements that have remained focussed on livelihood issues raised for the people by neoliberal triumph, and in the Arab world, a peculiar intersection between demands for institutions of liberal democracy on the one hand and the sweeping march of Islamism precisely through those institutions on the other hand. If anything, the issue of imperialism is even weaker in the Arab protests than in the American ones.
JAVIER SORIANO/AFP 

PUERTA DEL SOL SQUARE, Madrid, May 21, 2011: Spanish youth, furious over soaring unemployment, unleashed a massive movement of the 'indignados' (the angry ones). A year earlier, more than half the labour force participated in a general strike in the country, which had Europe's strongest anarchist movement in the 20th century.
Second, the idea of socialism – even the idea of a “better socialism” than what the Soviet model had offered – was very much alive and well in the movements of ‘1968', in both the Marxist and the libertarian forms. That idea has a rather microscopic presence in the movements of 2011 (though, again, not so in Latin America). What these new movements aspire for is a less savage, reformed capitalism, with more jobs, more secure and somewhat higher wages, and improved and cheaper education systems. In Arab movements, rising from under ferocious dictatorships, much libido is invested in ‘democracy' as an absolute horizon; in the West, there is nostalgia mostly for Keynes and, in a more diffuse form, for some pale shadow of Proudhon.
Even so, the uprisings of 2011 do stand, at least in their origins, in a substantive relation to the movements of the preceding decades, notably in Latin America. The most aggressive forms of neoliberalism came to Latin America before they came to many other parts of the world, and it was therefore logical that the first great protests against it would also materialise there. This is how Eric Toussant, eminent member of a number of European anti-globalisation movements, summarises some of the salient Latin American developments of the past decade:
After 20 years of neoliberal domination in South America, massive uprisings in several countries proved to be successful: the water war in Bolivia in 2000; the Indian uprising in Ecuador that overturned the neoliberal president (2000); the rebellion that overruled Argentine's neoliberal president (end of 2001) and opened onto a prerevolutionary crisis in December 2001 and on into 2002; the popular uprising in Venezuela in April 2002 to bring Hugo Chavez back to the presidency after a coup (April 11-13, 2002); the gas war in Bolivia in 2003 with the pro-Washington neoliberal president being overruled, and similarly the overruling of the pro-U.S. neoliberal president in Ecuador in 2005…. In the wake of such mobilisations, governments that at least partly broke off with neoliberalism and opposed the U.S. domination, launched political reforms and partly restored public control over natural resources (Venezuela from 1999, Bolivia in 2006, Ecuador in 2007). Yielding to popular pressure, the Argentine government, which was not particularly left-wing, implemented heterodox measures that contrasted with those taken by the PT (Workers Party) government in Brazil and by the Uruguayan Broad Front.
The creation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001 should also be seen as part of that Latin American process, even though many from the rest of the world played important roles in the materialisation of the process. Within the Euro-American zones, this new kind of radicalism can be dated back to the very impressive mobilisation against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Seattle (1999) and against the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the G-8 (in Washington in April 2000, Prague in September 2000, in Genoa in July 2001). In a sense, that wave of protests climaxed in the historic worldwide protest against the impending Iraq War in February 2003, which mobilised 12 to 15 million people from one end of the earth to another. That kind of mobilisation declined in the U.S. after the onset of the Iraq War in early 2003 even though several countries in western Europe, notably France, witnessed waves upon waves of strikes and protests. Latin America, of course, remained the home of radical movements throughout the decade. The Occupy movement thus announces the return of oppositional politics in the U.S., in the hands of a new generation, in an altered context and altered form of protest, but very much in the spirit of 1968, the Seattle mobilisation, and the concurrent Egyptian uprising.
MAYA ALLERUZZO/AP 

FOR OVER 30 years now, Egyptian armed forces have received over a billion dollars annually from the U.S. A part of the function of this largesse is to incorporate the upper layers of the military establishment into the neoliberalising big bourgeoisie of Egypt. Here, Chief of Staff Sami Anan (second from left) and other military officials at a Christmas-eve mass in Cairo.
Reaction, restoration and the global right
How have the insurrectionary movements fared in the outcomes until now?
History is Necessity, Hegel has taught us. In other words, historical outcomes do not coincide with revolutionary desire or insurrectionary will but are determined by possibilities inherent in – and limited by – the larger prevailing structures. In short, only the possible happens. The impossible does not. The great slogan of 1968, “Be Realistic; Imagine the Impossible”, captures the noblest of revolutionary desires but is also profoundly anti-Hegelian. The Leninist formula, reformulated in my own words, is more viable: imagine the impossible, remain true to your dream, act on that portion of the impossible that is possible.
At the most general level, the Arab movements of 2011 can be seen as the third wave of anti-dictatorship movements in the Tricontinent, following upon the earlier Latin American ones and then the Asian ones (the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan). In another dimension, and at least in their initial manifestations in Tunisia and Egypt, they were also uprisings against the intensification of neoliberal policies under Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak whose own families and close associates were seen to have accumulated enormous wealth through corruption and privatisation of public assets. This aspect was further accentuated by the spiralling food prices which rose even more sharply in 2010/11 than in 2008, when food riots had broken out in a host of Asian and African countries. However, in the actual unfolding of those rebellions, as they took the colouration mainly of urban middle class protest, the focus shifted away from neoliberal devastation to dictatorial forms of rule and the personal corruption of those dictators.
The secular character of the initial youth rebellions of Egypt and Tunisia also indicated revulsion against the depredations of Jehadi Islam that had caught many a youthful imagination in the recent past. However, that revulsion against extremist Islam in an age of identitarian politics itself led to a certain softening of attitudes towards the new ‘moderate' image that the Egyptian Brotherhood and the Tunisian Ennahda had cultivated for themselves, even as the Salafis decided to play by the liberal-democratic rules of parliamentary elections. In some other countries, notably Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria, the issue of extreme authoritarianism of the regimes was further complicated by the fact that their power base was rooted in sectarian (Bahrain, Syria, Yemen) or tribal minorities (Libya after Qaddafi's initial ‘nationalist' phase was over, but also Yemen). This minoritarian character was sometimes intermeshed with regional divides (in Libya most notably but also Yemen). The pressing issue of a radical redistribution of wealth was thus submerged everywhere under the weight of electoralism, Islamism, sectarianism, regionalism and a generalised hope that the U.S.-led ‘ international community' will bring them the gift of democracy and human rights.
REUTERS/HANDOUT 

THE SAUDI MONARCHY - and by extension all the monarchies banded together in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which now serves as a network of U.S. dependencies and military basing facilities - acts as the financial powerhouse in the Arab world, increasingly dictating economic policies elsewhere, and now as an outright interventionist force. Here, King Abdullah (left) of Saudi Arabia with the heads of other countries comprising the GCC before their meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on December 19, 2011.
Levels of state formation are also highly uneven across the region. Throughout most of its known history, Egypt has had a powerful central state, and this centralisation of power was only enhanced with the Free Officers' coup of 1952. The first Arab constitution was drafted in Tunisia, in 1861, under French tutelage, and after independence Habib Bourguiba took care to nurse the institutions of a modern state and civil society as well as a highly educated middle class. By contrast, countries such as Qatar and Bahrain are small, autocratic sheikhdoms, while Libya is so internally divided among its myriad tribes and regions that it gives the impression of being more of a tribal confederation than a modern state; in the latter decades of his rule, Qaddafi himself often appeared to be as much a buffoon as the very caricature of a wealthy Bedouin monarch. To a great degree, all the authoritarian rulers, including the Nasserist and Baathist ones, suppressed political institutions they could not control directly and prevented the emergence of a modern and civil public sphere, to the extent that the mosque was often the only widespread public institution where issues of social concern could be discussed and concomitant local organisations could be devised, often in the outward form of public charities. With the relative exception of Tunisia, virtually all these regimes adopted some variety of Islamism, to one extent or another.
In Egypt, Anwar Sadat used the Muslim Brotherhood methodically in his fight against the Nasserists and the leftists; Mubarak established a relationship of competitive collaboration with them, opening up great spaces for them in the educational and judicial structures, sometimes permitting them into Parliament and at other times denying them such rights in order to furbish his credentials as a defender of secular modernity against political Islam. With the relative exception of Tunisia and Syria, all regimes allowed tens of billions of dollars to be poured into the coffers of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Gulf countries, notably Saudi Arabia, which has been the patron saint of the Brotherhood ever since Nasser evicted them from Egypt in the 1950s; Sadat brought them back in the 1970s with much fanfare, in collaboration with Saudi Arabia and full U.S. backing. Every European country where the Brotherhood sought to establish its offices, from Switzerland to Britain, allowed such monies to come to them unchecked; this was also true of the Tunisian Ennahda after its leaders took up plush residence in European exile. Today, millionaires and even billionaires can be found among the core leadership of the Egyptian Brotherhood, and, in the new democratic dispensations that arose as a consequence of the ‘Arab Spring' all variety of Islamists have put these virtually unlimited funds to good use.
The Arab world has had an intense and uniquely different experience of colonialism and imperialism. The Maghreb, or western North Africa – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia – was colonised earlier by the French who devised different methods of ruling in the three countries. European pressure and then outright British colonisation of Egypt came very much as a Western project to thwart (successfully) Egypt's attempt, first undertaken under Muhammad Ali, to devise its own independent path into modernity. Much of the Arab East, the Mashreq, fell to the colonial powers only after the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman empire; the creation of Israel is also a specific result of that history. With the exception of Egypt and Morocco, all other Arab states are confections of colonial division and artefact. And, oil (later gas) has been the main solvent in all colonial, imperial designs since at least the 1940s (British obsession with oil is older). President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to commit the U.S. to eternal alliance with the Saudi monarchy – and by extension all the monarchies now banded together in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which now serves, all at once, as a network of U.S. dependencies and military basing facilities – as the financial powerhouse in the Arab world increasingly dictating economic policies elsewhere, and, most recently, as an outright interventionist force. It was the brutal action of the Saudi armed forces that suppressed the rebellions not only in Saudi Arabia's own eastern provinces but also in Bahrain. Troops from Qatar and the Arab Emirates worked in unison with NATO in Libya. Saudi and Qatari funding is now going to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, not to speak of the hundreds of fighters imported from Libya for infiltration into Syria, with the mediation of the GCC and the Turkish government, NATO's own Islamists.
Destruction of anti-imperialist Arab nationalism
The promotion of Saudi influence, the destruction of secular and inevitably anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, and the destruction of every Arab (or Irani, for that matter) armed force that may potentially pose a threat to Israel have been the primary objectives of the U.S. in West Asia. The Israeli victory over Nasserist Egypt was the first great turning point in these endeavours, and the subsequent regimes of Anwar Sadat and Mubarak cemented that equation. For over 30 years now, Egyptian armed forces have received well over a billion dollars annually from the U.S. so that the entire officers' corps is beholden to U.S. interests. A part of the function of this largesse is to incorporate the upper layers of the military establishment into the neoliberalising big bourgeoisie of Egypt. Virtually the whole of the Arab world has been secured in this fashion. Syrian and (non-Arab) Irani regimes have their own accommodative relationships with Israel, and yet, because of their own divergent national interests, they are still regarded as potential threats to Israel, and must therefore be harnessed. The ongoing Shia-Sunni sectarian divides in the Islamic and Islamising world fits neatly into these designs, so that regimes as different as those of Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Israel can now cooperate, under U.S. aegis, in utilising the genuine democracy protests against the Assad dictatorship for their own purposes, in unleashing the Muslim Brotherhood, and more generally preparing overt and covert armed intervention there.
LUCA BRUNO/AP 

MILAN, ITALY, DECEMBER 13, 2011: An elderly woman begs in a downtown area. The movements of 2011 arose in a time of near-total defeat of the socialist Left (except in Latin America) and the worst economic downturn in the capitalist core in some 80 years, among other factors.
The U.S. has had a very old relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, dating back to the days of the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower presidency, and the relocation to Switzerland of Said Ramadan, the Brotherhood's international organiser and conduit to various governments, intelligence services and Islamist organisations. We need not dwell on that past. As the ‘war on terrorism' (and on ‘Islamo-fascism' as Americans call it), progressed, with ambiguous results, there was a renewed policy distinction between Bad Muslim and Good Muslim, and a view now gained strength that the only way to really contain ‘Islamo-fascism' was to hand over the region to Good Muslims. Gulf monarchies were already among the Good Muslims, and the Brotherhood too had been in that category from time to time. Through the aegis of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. now began exploring the possibility of bringing together these two categories – Gulf monarchies for their kingdoms; the Brotherhood and its variants for the rest of the Arab world – into something of a hegemonic force for the region. This view was further strengthened with the emergence of an Islamist ruling bloc in Turkey, the historic home of secularism in the Muslim world, that was overturning the Kemalist legacy but with enthusiastic allegiance to NATO and neoliberalism.
This ‘Turkish model' was now ready to be implemented elsewhere. Could Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Tunisian variant of the Brotherhood that goes under the name of Ennahda, be made into another Recep Tayyip Erdogan? In the event, the Brotherhood was favourably disposed to the idea, having witnessed the brutal but successful suppression of Jehadi Islam in Algeria, the worldwide defeat of Al Qaeda and its affiliates (except, thus far, in Pakistan), and, by contrast, the peaceful Islamist takeover in Turkey through what Gramsci might have called a passive revolution. Could this not be done in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, too, the Brotherhood was to ask itself? That was the position also of those intellectuals of the Brotherhood, such as Tariq Ramadan, who are strategically located in the West. Once the insurrectionary storm erupted, Islamists in both countries devoted themselves to the task of winning the elections, with Saudi, Qatari, American and Turkish support, and in dialogue with elements of old regimes that were now crumbling.
On their part, the Egyptian Brotherhood issued public assurances that, once in power, it would abide by the treaty with Israel, the very lynchpin of U.S.-Israeli policies in the region, and it never raised a voice against the neoliberal economic model; indeed, the Brotherhood has always opposed workers' strikes and trade union militancy in the name of the ‘national economy'. Even the Egyptian Salafists have by and large fallen in line; in the Egyptian election results announced so far, the Brotherhood and the Salafists seem to have together made a clean sweep, winning 70 per cent or more of the seats. As for Ghannouchi, the U.S. was the first country he visited after winning a plurality in the Tunisian elections, and submitted due assurances.
Arab countries are tied together by older histories, language and, for the majority of the population, some variant of the Islamic belief. For the rest, there are vast differences among countries and, in some cases, between regions inside individual countries. Each country that came in the eye of the storm experienced a different outcome. Protests in countries like Algeria and Jordan fizzled out without much effect, though they too have very sizeable Islamic movements that live a semi-clandestine existence. Morocco experienced only minor protests, the king shrewdly introduced some constitutional amendments, and the Islamists won the elections anyway.
KOSTAS TSIRONIS/AP 

ATHENS, JUNE 10, 2011: Government employees protest against the spending cuts and tax hikes proposed by the Greek government. The financial oligarchy seems to have decided that a neoliberal Europe can arise only if social Europe is consigned to the graveyard, and it has therefore launched the most sweeping attack on the European working class that it has faced since the 1930s.
Tunisia had a genuinely peaceful liberal democratic transition with the emergence of a newly elected coalition government led by the Islamists but with a substantial presence of the centre-left that seems to have no distinct programme of its own for any Tunisian break with the neoliberal order. A milder, characteristically Tunisian version of Islamism is assured while Ghannouchi and his group are in the lead, but the party is full of much more conservative, Salafist-style elements, and it is far from clear what a leadership transition will bring; as late as the 1980s, Ennahda used to be a party of jehadi violence.
Pre-emptive counterrevolution
In Libya, there was rather little of the modern, democratic insurrection of the type we witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt; the rebellion was soon armed and infiltrated by the Western special forces; it had a far great regionalist element, accentuated further by tribal rivalries; and the emerging dispensation is even more Islamist than Qaddafi's own Islamic pretensions. The outcome was determined not so much by internal factors as by NATO intervention, and while Qaddafi had himself made a neoliberal about-turn some years ago, the new rulers are likely to pursue neoliberalism and pro-NATO policies with far greater devotion, if and when their rule gets stabilised (Aijaz Ahmad, “Libya Recolonised”, Frontline, November 18, 2011).
Unlike Libya, Syria is only partially a personal dictatorship, rests much more on a powerful party structure, a modern army largely loyal to the regime, a brutal but efficient intelligence network, and even a bourgeoisie whose fortunes have been largely tied to the regime, even though many business interests are also aligned with the opposition. Syria is also comparatively more modern and secular, and, demographically, a mosaic of religious and ethnic minorities, alongside an Arab Sunni majority. Muslim Brotherhood has a substantial presence, especially in cities like Homs and Homa, but nothing comparable to Egypt, and the prospect of a devout Sunni regime emerging in Damascus presses the various minorities to seek protection from the regime. Mass disaffection with the brutality and corruption of the regime is enormous, and Syria has a genuine, modern, secular, homegrown opposition inside the country, some of which may have ties with the expatriates who have made common cause with the French and the Americans, and are now asking for no-fly zones, “humanitarian corridors”, covert interventions, etc. Burhan Ghallioun, who has emerged as the titular head of this expatriate opposition, has publicly offered assurances that if the West brings his Syrian National Council (SNC) to power, Syria would break its alliance with Iran, revoke its assistance to Hamas and Hizbullah, and seek only a negotiated settlement with Israel over the Syrian territory of the Golan Heights which Israel has occupied and annexed. The Arab League, dominated by Saudi Arabia and other GCC cohorts, provides legitimacy to this expatriate opposition and to the Euro-American designs in Syria, as it did in Libya. What we are witnessing today is something of a social decomposition in what was once Arab world's most urbane corner.
In Egypt, the U.S. had three layers working for an outcome favourable to its interests. First, and over many years, a large number of Egyptian activists had been trained and co-opted into the democracy promotion project by such entities as Freedom House, Republican Democracy Institute, etc.; those who were thus trained included several of the individuals who emerged as highly influential figures in the youth rebellion, including some leaders of the April 6th Youth Movement and Wael Ghonim of Google. It would be foolish to infer that a rebellion of such proportions was simply the handiwork of these few dozen individuals. The training and financial sponsorship should be viewed more in the nature of contingency planning, that is, just in case an unstoppable anti-Mubarak movement materialises, a cohesive group of individuals, commanding the requisite material and technological resources, must be in place so as to guide the spontaneous outbreak in the desired directions as much as possible. This is not dissimilar to what was done earlier in several East European countries, and some of these Egyptian democracy activists were, in fact, trained in not only the U.S. but also countries like Slovenia. For a country so much under U.S. and Israeli pressure for generations, it was quite remarkable how little anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist agitation there was in the Tahrir Square uprising that brought down the U.S.-supported dictatorship.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP 

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 5: A march by "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators. There has been very little upward movement of real wages of the American working population since the onset of neoliberalism in the late 1970s. The vast majority of the population has kept up its standard of living over the past 30 years only by incurring more debt, mainly from mortgages, credit cards and student loans.
The other two props of U.S. power in Egypt, namely, the Army and the Brotherhood, were of course more substantial. So, the issue of Mubarak's dictatorship was resolved mainly by a military coup d'etat, and the issue of democracy is being resolved currently through the formation of an elected government dominated entirely by the Brotherhood and other Islamists. In public, elements of the governing military junta sometimes express concern about the future role of the Brotherhood, but this can be safely viewed as pressure tactics to get the Brotherhood to give public guarantees over the issues of Israel, neoliberal economy, and the sanctity of military ties with the U.S.
All in all, one can say that, with the partial exception of Tunisia where some gains have been made by way of making a liberal democratic order, what we have experienced across the region is something of a pre-emptive counterrevolution which has been, in most places – Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Syria – violent. This outcome reflects the existing balance of force, both in the military domain and in terms of the organisational capacities of the respective Islamist forces, not to speak of the vastly superior financial resources of the Right in general. This Right includes the emerging dispensation in Egypt as much as the dying one in Syria.
What, then, of Europe?
The European impasse
The E.U. as a whole, and the eurozone, which comprises of the majority of the countries in the Union, has always been a bundle of contradictions. The original idea of a common home for all of Europe was based on the vision of a social Europe in which the social safety nets of the type prevailing at the time in Scandinavian countries and the Franco-German zone would be extended to the whole of Europe, policies and common funds would be created for bridging the gaps between the richer and poorer zones of Europe, and the Union would march from being a mere union of sovereign nation-states to something of a federation with central institutions that would be increasingly answerable to a trans-European electorate.
DANNY MOLOSHOK/REUTERS 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los Angeles, November 28, 2011: A protest by students against rising tuition fees. Student debt in the U.S. now stands at roughly $1 trillion, more or less equal to credit card debt, and is set to rise sharply with escalating educational costs.
In reality, what has emerged is a travesty of that vision. By the time the Union really developed its main institutions, neoliberalism had become the entrenched ideology of the European ruling classes, shared equally by the social democrats and the historic parties of the Right. What emerged, first of all, was a Bankers' Europe in which the central financial institutions were answerable neither to electorates nor to the constituent national parliaments; the European Bank, for instance, is answerable only to its own members who are all representatives of Europe's major banks. Second, it became a highly lopsided union of wealthier and poorer – even far poorer – countries. Germany was the major financial and industrial powerhouse whose banks set the terms for the financial architecture of the union; which exported advanced industrial goods to the poorer countries of the E.U.; and which acquired vast and cheap labour reserves in the eastern zones after the collapse of communism. It is mainly the German, Scandinavian and French banks that came to dominate the weaker economies through debt. Meanwhile, the creation of a single currency deprived the weaker economies of the European periphery – the ones that import goods and bank finance from the more advanced core – the opportunity to create their own monies to cope with deficits and balance of payment problems.
The incorporation of social democracy into this neoliberal project of Bankers' Europe meant also that the European working classes who had looked to socialist parties for protection of their quite advanced social rights no longer possessed a political instrument to wage a winnable struggle against the bankers and their neoliberal political cohorts. The strike was now their only weapon, in countries where industrial economies were shrinking and their own unions stood midway between labour and capital. The fact that neoliberalism came to the European continent much later than it did to the U.S., Britain and elsewhere, meant also that it had far greater experience in dismantling the social state. That dismantling has been going on for some time, but the onset of the current crisis has been used to unleash processes that would destroy the social compacts thoroughly. That process is already far advanced in countries like Latvia, Ireland and Greece but is also getting extended to Spain, Portugal and even major European economies like Italy and France. Eventually, it will catch up with Scandinavia and Germany as well.
The defection of social democracy to neoliberalism is one aspect. Meanwhile, governments may now be appointed, in one country after another, not by reference to parliaments and electorates but at the behest of bankers, as has happened already in Greece and Italy where elected leaders were expected to resist the more extreme pressures from banks and the E.U.'s financial institutions. Not the least danger is the growing strength of parties of the Far Right across Europe, from Austria to Denmark, and from France to Hungary. Islamophobia and more generally campaigns against non-European immigrants feed into such mobilisations of the Far Right, which then presents itself as protecting the rights of “real” Europeans. Sections of the working class and the unemployed youth, having lost moorings in parties of the Left, are particularly prone to this radicalism of the Right. If Islam is an identity in the Arab world, anti-Islam is also an expanding identity in Europe.
Not all parts of Europe are hurting equally. German prosperity by and large continues. At the other end of the spectrum, collapse of basic incomes is so extreme for large sections of the population in a country like Greece that many families there are now compelled to give up their children to the care of public shelters because parents can no longer take care of them.
SIMON DAWSON/BLOOMBERG 

THE VISION OF a social Europe has given way to a Bankers' Europe in which the central financial institutions are answerable neither to electorates nor to the constituent national parliaments; the European Central Bank, for instance, is answerable only to its own members who are all representatives of Europe's major banks. Here, an Occupy movement's protest board outside the headquarters of the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany.
It is in the midst of all this that strikes and protests occurred all across Europe throughout 2011, at times on a massive scale. Manifestations of the public outrage have been various: strikes by workers, notably public sector workers; student strikes; mass rallies combining strikes and popular protests; and, as in the case of the Spanish indignados, just a mass outrage of gigantic proportions, led by the youth but inclusive of all sections of society. Political parties have either been the target of these mobilisations or have, at best, trailed far behind the masses.
In Europe, as in the Arab world, vast numbers of people are on the move but counterrevolution has the initiative. These are politics of the interim, when people have lost faith in their rulers but have found nothing to put in their place. One only hopes that such are the processes through which an iron of the future is forged. The articulation of an anti-capitalist alternative that is appropriate for our times is still far from visible.
Conclusion
And what have been the great gains of 2011?
In all the countries where these strikes, mass protests and insurrections have occurred, there is now a great global conversation, among the populace at large, on issues of human dignity and transitions from political to economic democracy. Latin America still remains the primary home of an insurgent Left for which issues of the nature and constitution of state power is itself the primary issue for transformative politics. In at least some corners of Europe, there is now a renewed debate over the very legitimacy of the fundamental structures of liberal democracy, the lamentable tie between domesticated workers' organisations and the corrupt political parties of the bourgeoisies, and the inability of all these to render any substantial degree of social and economic justice. Arab youth is in the process of learning, in a trial through fire, that liberal democracy is a mere premise, and a very precarious one at that, where the very procedures of its institutions, in a class-divided society, favour the rich, the powerful, the demagogic, the corrupt. And, if the Arab insurrections teach us yet again the central significance of the great narratives of national uprisings, the very mode of organising in the Occupy movements reminds us of the little narratives of politics in its immediate moorings: the public space of a park, this house confiscated by the banks, that dilapidated school deprived of the material means to educate its children; the vision of organising a million mutinies to light a single prairie fire. Attending to the whole, one has the feeling that one is hearing fragments of every language that the Left has spoken over the last 150 years.
This is how the grand, faltering experiment in changing the post-Soviet world goes on.

शर्तें मानो या सेवा छोड़ो: 35 करोड़ यूजर्स को गूगल की धमकी




नई दिल्‍ली. दुनिया के सबसे बड़े सर्च इंजन गूगल ने अपने उपभोक्‍ताओं को मेल भेजकर अपने सभी उत्पादों की प्राइवेसी सेटिंग में बड़े बदलाव करने की घोषणा कर दी है। इनमें जीमेल, यू-ट्यूब और गूगल सर्च भी शामिल हैं। नई प्राइवेसी सेटिंग 1 मार्च से लागू हो जाएंगी।
गूगल ने संदेश में कहा है, '1 मार्च, 2012 से नई गोपनीयता नीति और गूगल सेवा की शर्तें प्रभावी होंगी। ऐसा होने के बाद भी यदि आप गूगल का उपयोग जारी रखना चुनते हैं, तो ऐसा आप नई गोपनीयता नीति और सेवा की शर्तों के अधीन करेंगे।' गूगल के दुनियाभर में 35 करोड़ एक्टिव यूजर्स हैं।
 
गूगल ने अपने सभी जीमेल उपभोक्‍ताओं को भेजे मेल में कहा है, 'हम गूगल की 60 विभिन्‍न गोपनीयता नीतियों को छोड़ने वाले हैं और उन्‍हें एक ऐसी नीति से बदलने जा रहे हैं जो बहुत छोटी और पढ़ने में आसान है। हमारी नई नीति एकाधिक उत्‍पादों और फ़ीचर को कवर करती है, जो संपूर्ण गूगल में एक बहुत सरल और सहज अनुभव बनाने की हमारी इच्‍छा को दर्शाती है। यह सामग्री महत्‍वपूर्ण है इसलिए हमारी अपडेट की गई गूगल गोपनीयता नीति और सेवा की शर्तें अभी पढ़ने के लिए कुछ समय दें।'
 
कंपनी का कहना है कि इससे हमें उपयोगकर्ताओं की रुचि समझने में मदद मिलेगी। साथ ही उपयोगकर्ताओं को भी उनकी पसंद के विज्ञापन ही देखने को मिलेंगे। यदि कोई व्यक्ति जगुआर शब्द गूगल पर सर्च करता है तो कंपनी समझ सकेगी कि उसे कार देखनी है या जानवर। हालांकि उपभोक्ताओं के वकीलों ने नई प्राइवेसी सेटिंग पर विरोध जताया है।
 
उनका कहना है कि कोई भी उपभोक्ता कभी नहीं चाहता कि उससे संबंधित जानकारियां विभिन्न वेबसाइटों को दी जाएं। हर उपयोगकर्ता चाहता है कि वह इंटरनेट पर जो खोजे उसे वही मिले और उसकी निजता सुरक्षित रखी जाए। साइबर विशेषज्ञ जेम्स स्टेयर ने कहा कि गूगल को भले ही लगता है कि वह इस प्रयास के जरिए उपभोक्ताओं को बेहतर सुविधा दे पाएगी लेकिन यह नई प्राइवेसी सेंटिंग डराने और खीझ पैदा करने वाली है।
  


दलित लड़की से बलात्कार मामले में मदद के लिए पहुंचे एम्स के विशेषज्ञ

Saturday, 28 January 2012 17:36
भुवनेश्वर 28 जनवरी (एजेंसी) दलित लड़की से बलात्कार और हत्या के प्रयास मामले में मदद के लिए राज्य पुलिस की अपराध शाखा के बुलावे पर अखिल भारतीय आयुर्विज्ञान संस्थान :एम्स: के विशेषज्ञ ओड़िशा पहुंच गए हैं ।
अपराध शाखा के एक वरिष्ठ अधिकारी ने बताया कि प्रोफेसर एवं फॉरेंसिक मेडिसिन विभाग प्रमुख के नेतृत्व में चार सदस्यीय टीम में स्त्री रोग विज्ञान ्र डीएनए और एफएमटी क्षेत्रों के विशेषज्ञ शामिल हैं ।
अधिकारी ने कहा ्र ‘‘टीम के सदस्यों ने पुरी जिले के पीपली की 19 वर्षीय कथित बलात्कार पीड़ित का परीक्षण किया जो कटक में एससीबी मेडिकल कालेज के गहन चिकित्सा कक्ष में भर्ती है ।’’
अपराध शाखा के सूत्रों ने कहा कि परीक्षण चिकित्सा कानूनी उद्देश्य से किया गया जो जांच में उपयोगी  होगा ।
अपनी जांच के तहत अपराध शाखा पहले ही सभी चार आरोपियों का पॉलीग्राफ परीक्षण करा चुकी है । इस सनसनीखेज मामले के चलते पीपली से विधायक प्रदीप महारथी को राज्य के कृषि मंत्री पद से इस्तीफा देना पड़ा था ।
जिन चार आरोपियों का दो चरणों में पॉलीग्राफ परीक्षण किया गया ्र उनमें प्रशांत प्रधान उर्फ पासेई ्र सुकांत प्रधान उर्फ आबुआ प्रेमानंद नायक और बुना स्वाइन शामिल हैं ।

UTTAR PRADESH: ELECTIONS

NIRALA TRIPATHI
Dr Ayub, fourth from left, with Udit Raj and Apna Dal’s Anupriya Patel announces the formation of the Ettehad Front
UTTAR PRADESH: ELECTIONS
Mutiny Of Pawns
Of the many local outfits, some like Peace Party may make a dent


The Small And Big Of It
There are over 190 small parties in Uttar Pradesh registered with the Election Commission. Here are some of them who pose a challenge, even if minor, to the bigger ones:
  • The Peace Party: Muslim-led formation seeking support of other communities. May cut into Congress, SP votebanks.
  • All India Minorities Front: Claims to represent Muslim interests nationally, advocates negotiated solution to the Ayodhya issue
  • Shoshit Samaj Dal: Represents Dalit and backward Muslims, also known as Pasmandas
  • Apna Dal: The Kurmi interests. Has tied up with Peace Party.
  • Rashtriya Lok Manch: Amar Singh’s party is furthering the cause of statehood for Poorvanchal and is bent on playing SP spoiler. Supported by actress Jaya Prada.
***
Too many cooks do spoil the political broth. As it is, in the elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly, there will be many four-cornered contests between the main political forces; in descending order—the BSP, the SP, the BJP and the Congress. Besides, as many as 150 local parties have registered, up from 112 in the 2007 polls. (There are approximately 1,178 registered parties in the country, according to the EC).
Most of the small parties in UP failed to get even one per cent of the vote in the last assembly polls. These include formations like the Ambedkar Kranti Dal, All India Minorities Front, Moderate Party, Adarsh Lok Dal etc. Many of them push a particular caste or community card. For instance, the Shoshit Samaj Dal talks of a campaign for a Pasmanda revolution—that Muslims are divided into the Ashrafs (upper castes) and the Pasmandas (Dalits and backwards). Their basic contention is that the Ashrafs have long cornered all the benefits and pushed out and humiliated Muslims who belong to communities such as Julaha (weavers), Kunjra (vegetable sellers), Kalal (alcohol distillers) and Dhunia. Their slogan is, “Dalit-pichhda ek samaan/Hindu ho ya Mussalman (Dalit and Backward are one/ Hindu or Muslim).” They intend to field only OBC or Dalit Muslim candidates across the state. It’s an interesting platform but they are not considered serious players.
The new party on the block creating a ripple in political circles is the Peace Party. It actually represents a Muslim-led formation seeking the additional support of other communities on the lines that the BSP does. Muslims, after all, are the biggest group after the Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, close to 19 per cent. The Peace Party is only giving 22 per cent of the 230 seats it is contesting to Muslim candidates. Even among the Muslims, it seems to particularly attract the mbcs. Another significant fact about the Peace Party is that it is not a clerical outfit, like the Ulema Council from pockets like Azamgarh.
What makes the idea behind the Peace Party quite compelling is the personality of its leader, Dr Mohammad Ayub. He is a deeply religious man but not a maulana nor backed by any Jamaat or Jamiat-type quasi-religious group. Dr Ayub is someone who gave up the civil services to practise medicine and has built a 100-bed hospital that treats the poor free in his village Barhalganj on the Gorakhpur/Azamgarh border. His reputation as a surgeon who treats the poor for free has spread across the belt. Apparently, the man has performed an astonishing two lakh operations.
He is clearly a self-made man who now has other points to make. “Good people who want to fight the right battles should enter politics. I can be accused of anything but I have never been corrupted because I believe in my religion. That is why I gave up a posting in the customs service in Bombay. I could not live with the corruption around me. So I started to serve with my skills as a doctor,” he says.
 

 

Dr Ayub personally sees the Congress as the big enemies of the Muslims as they have “fooled the community”.
 

 
The fundamental appeal of the Peace Party for a section of the minority community lies in the argument that, instead of being included, they are being systematically excluded. Dr Ayub says the “first fraud” took place in 1950 when only Hindus were given reservation as Dalits. “A one-fourth opportunity was excluded for minorities,” he says adding that till now the backward Muslim was struggling to get a slice of the OBC quota. Now they have limited minorities to 4.5 per cent and asked Muslims to compete with far more educated communities like the Sikhs and Christians. “How can they compete? In reality, they are systematically eliminating Muslims from all opportunities and at the same time giving the BJP an issue,” he says.
In the Lucknow flat from where they function, there is a rush of hopefuls for Peace Party tickets. The fan is their symbol. The party is expected to get a section of the votes and in some seats it may not just be the Muslim ones; since a number of candidates are from other communities, they could break some upper-caste and OBC votes too. The Peace Party is primarily expected to be a spoiler for the Congress and the SP. They may win only a few seats but will be in the game and will capture some voteshare.
Dr Ayub personally sees the Congress as the biggest enemy of the Muslims as they have “fooled the community”. “They are more dangerous than the BJP,” he says. So what can the Peace Party achieve? Well, what isn’t helping the Congress is the fact that there is a coherent anti-Congress opinion being put forward by a section of articulate Muslims in the midst of an election when the grand old party is desperately trying to win back the minorities.
 

 

The Peace Party has given 40 seats to Raja Bundela’s Bundelkhand Party which can cause upsets.

 

 
The Peace Party has struck an alliance with Apna Dal, now led by Anupriya Patel. The party, founded by her father and late Kurmi leader Sone Lal Patel in 1995, had bagged four seats in the 2002 state polls. In 2007, however, the Apna Dal failed to win even a single seat, despite polling some 10 per cent of total votes wherever it contested. But it is seen as having indirectly defeated a few candidates as it did mop up some Kurmi votes. The question is particularly significant for the Congress, which is promoting Beni Prasad Verma as its Kurmi face. Beni is believed to be currently the leader with the easiest access to Rahul Gandhi, who is working hard at campaigning in UP. Now Union steel minister, Beni was once close to Mulayam Singh Yadav and is a veteran from the SP.
The Peace Party-Apna Dal front is certain to irritate the Congress and SP. The Apna Dal has also fielded mafia don and ex-MP Atiq Ahmed from Allahabad-West. The Peace Party-led front has also given 40 seats to the Bundelkhand Party led by TV star-turned-activist Raja Bundela and this could upset some calculations in that belt. In the Bareilly belt, they have an understanding with the Itihad Millat in eight seats.
There are also some old players of UP in the fray who refuse to go gently into the night. Remember Amar Singh, Mulayam’s best-friend-turned-foe? He has floated the Rashtriya Lok Manch party and along with Bollywood star and MP Jaya Prada is touring the state, particularly eastern Uttar Pradesh.
Don Mukhtar Ansari is in jail but is the MLA from Mau who’s formed the Quami Ekta Front. He will be the party’s candidate from Mau while his brother contests from Mohammadabad in Gazipur. In the nation’s largest state, a republic unto itself, it seems dons, doctors, filmstars, mullahs and social activists have all turned politicians.