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As the day went by, the 30 June anti-Morsi demonstrations turned out to probably be the largest ever in Egyptian history, with Egyptians from all walks of life peacefully, yet audaciously, denouncing the Brotherhood’s rule.

The Egyptian people’s defiance of Brotherhood rule is a serious popular challenge to the most significant strategic reordering of the region perhaps since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

As the Egyptian army stepped up its game midday on Monday, and checkmated Morsi by issuing a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to respond to the people’s demands, these same media circuits started a concerted effort to bring the “coup d’état” discourse, sometimes forcefully, to the forefront of the discussion about events in Egypt.

I believe that at this stage in our collective development, youth in many African countries are still seized by flawed ideas of what progress looks like. We hold ourselves to impossibly high standards of “development” that have only been truly achieved in a handful of countries, none of which are particularly vocal about the need to achieve these goals.

I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that my trip to Burkina Faso was one of the most memorable experiences that I’ve ever had. Aside from the beauty of the country in all its complexities, the incredible warmth of the welcome I received took me by surprise. Strangers opened up their homes to me. I never paid for transport. I rarely paid for food.

Borrowing from X, I would ask African youth: who taught us to fear each other? I’m inclined to believe that we are in fear of an Africa that does not exist save in the mind of an overzealous elitist journalist in search of a sexy by-line or adventure. I challenge you: gather all of your friends who have a passport and have ever used it and ask them where they’ve used it.

Obasanjo looked nonplussed. He finished his statement, opened the slip of paper, and said to the audience gruffly, “He has written me a note saying this is a dialogue, not a monologue. I know that.” The audience laughed nervously. The former general defiantly continued his musings for another five minutes. I shifted in my seat uncomfortably, expecting a head-on collision between young and old.

Power concedes nothing without a struggle, so it’s better to command respect than to demand it. Get an education, however challenging this might be. Acquire some skills, or a trade that is needed in Liberia. Learn to speak and write a foreign language well. Productive young people are much more powerful when they have something relevant to contribute.

Chávez won a clear majority in elections that were heralded as fair, peaceful and democratic. A stunning 97% of the population (over 19 million people) registered to vote and 82% of those registered, voted.

Indeed, President Obama’s domestic and international centrism has drawn much criticism but, with the hope that he embodies, miraculous transformation is still expected of him upon re-election.

That as it may be, Chávez was the first president of Latin America to declare himself of African descent, as important symbolically for Venezuela’s often marginalized population of African descent (who make up an estimated 34% of the population) and the entire region’s Afro-American community as Obama’s victory was for African-Americans in the United States.

The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months. A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect.

There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground.

Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion about the revolution.

In a way counterrevolution started already mid-March 2011 when Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain to put an end to the movement. Precisely at the same moment NATO forces struck Gaddafi. Cracking down on the uprising in Bahrain, while supporting Benghazi ?

It was an Arab movement in the sense that it happened from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian-Arabian Gulf, which constitutes a cultural and linguistic zone, even if the local dialects are different, a significant number of people have a mother tongue other than Arabic (Tamazight, Kurds…) or do not consider themselves Arabs. A region stretching out from its common destiny.

Through the policies of infitâh (economic opening) and the process of privatization, the coherence of the system built post independence has vanished. Neoliberalism has deepened the differences between rich and poor. For the oligarchies, privatization was the opportunity to plunder and control the benefits of oil and other raw materials but also to snaffle the grants of foreign aid. In each country the gap between oligarchy and society has widened. And rage has accumulated.

Since Humala took office, ten people have died in social conflicts in Peru, more than 120 civilians have been wounded, and states of emergency have been declared in two regions. More than 120 farming leaders and human rights defenders are reportedly under criminal investigation for their alleged involvement in protests against foreign mining companies, including one provincial and one state governor, a priest, and two Catholic Church workers.

Peruvian groups such as Red Muqui and CONACAMI, a nation-wide coalition of mining communities, say they are not against mining. They want a national zoning plan to designate areas for mining and other industry, agriculture and protected reserves. They're also demanding a moratorium on mining in watersheds and the use of cyanide in gold mining operations.

During the strike in November, Humala's prime minister, Salomon Lerner, a left-leaning businessman, was sent to negotiate. He wasn't given much time. One day after Lerner initiated talks, the president trumped him by declaring a state of emergency. This meant that civil liberties were suspended and martial law was in effect. At least 28 people were injured during brutal police repression, including a young farmer who was reportedly paralysed by a rubber bullet fired by police. Lerner resigned, allowing Humala to re-stock his cabinet with a decided shift to the right.

For much of the twentieth century, it was easier to talk of an overarching socialist framework, a "grand vision" within which more specific debates were conducted.  Of course there were many strands of socialism, however defined, and there were also fierce and occasionally violent struggles between them.  Even so, they shared more than a common historical lineage -- they also shared a fundamental perception or basic vision.  At the risk of crude simplification, this vision can be summarised in terms of perceiving the working class to be the most fundamental agent of positive change, capable (once organised) of transforming not only existing property and material relations but also wider society and culture through its own actions.

But in recent times the very idea of a grand vision has been in retreat, battered not just by the complexities and limitations of "actually existing Socialism" in its various incarnations, but more recently and thoroughly by the ferocious triumphalism of its opposite.  Indeed, it may be fair to say that, insofar as any grand vision has existed at all in recent times, the one that increasingly came to dominate public life almost everywhere in the world by the late 20th century was that of the market as a self-regulating and inherently efficient mechanism for organising economic life.  This idea had already fallen by the wayside a century previously, before it was resurrected and dusted off for use in a slightly more "post-modern" format that became the theoretical underpinning for the vast explosion of global economic integration under the aegis of finance capital that has marked the period of globalisation.

The association of the ideology of supposedly free markets with strong tendencies towards greater concentration of capital and the use of the state to further accentuate these tendencies and aggrandise capital has been laid bare for all to see.  That the material processes unleashed by such a trajectory of unevenly shared burdens of crisis are no longer seen as socially acceptable is also becoming evident, in many parts of the developing world that have experienced quiet or not-so-quiet revolutions, as well as currently in the European continent.

"It goes without saying that we deeply regret the further loss of life in what is clearly a public order rather than labour relations associated matter."

The protests began last week when workers demanded a pay increase to 12,500 rand (£976) a month. The action turned deadly when the AMCU clashed with South Africa's dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The NUM rejected the charge of collusion with mine bosses. Spokesman Lesiba Seshoka said: "We are not surprised by his allegation … It is not true. Everyone can see through these lies."

His voice shaking with anger, the union leader Joseph Mathunjwa accused the Lonmin management of colluding with a rival union to orchestrate what he described as a massacre. Mathunjwa, president of the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), told the eNews channel: "We have to send condolences to those families whose members were brutally murdered by a lack of co-operation from management. We have done our bit. If the management had changed their commitment, surely lives could have been saved."

Then Nigeria’s thoroughly compromised labour movement hijacked the revolt, lulled the people into a false sense of solidarity and finally extinguished the revolutionary fire that was burning down the foundations of Nigeria’s ruling elite....The Nigerian Labor Congress and the Trade Union Congress didn’t join the mass protests until at least three days after the fact. They were obviously drafted by President Jonathan

There is a lot to be learnt from the last capitalist depression during the 1930s when some economists and political leaders believed, that militarism and investment in military capital could resolve the crisis. Indeed, some economists today credit the militarism of the German society with ending the crisis without mention of the huge price paid by humans in the Second World War.

Anti-imperialist and progressive forces on the ground in Kenya and even those involved in the political game will have to be strategic in their planning, just as our forces have been strategic in Nigeria. There is a reason why we interred Tajudeen Abdul Raheem in Funtua, in the North of Nigeria. Tajudeen had worked tirelessly against the manipulation of religious differences and we should be publicising the book of the writings of Tajudeen in this revolutionary moment. We must keep his ideas alive as one part of our arsenal.

The dictator’s downfall, however, gave union activists more room to operate. Workers have set up over 500 independent syndicates in recent months. The majority have affiliated with two autonomous labour bodies, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) led by Abu Eita, and the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress (EDLC) headed by former steel worker Kamal Abbas.

ETUF is proving to be a multi-headed hydra. The mammoth organisation was weakened by rulings that dissolved its executive board, put its leadership under investigation for corruption, and pulled the plug on 15 million dollars in annual government subsidies. Yet its core remains intact.

Many activists believe Egypt’s two main powers, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, are trying to rebuild ETUF as a counterweight to newfound syndical liberties. They claim the generals – opposed to organised labour – have sought to contain worker movements by criminalising strikes and preserving Mubarak-era labour laws.

Protesters hurled creative abuse at the black limousines rolling past towards the Chantilly Marriott Hotel entrance, and to protect them, police arrested a few activists who dared step onto the road. These particular masters of the universe first met at a hotel (The Bilderberg) in Holland in 1954, co-hosted by Dutch royalty, Uniliver and the US Central Intelligence Agency. The obscure brainstorming session would become an annual intellectual and ideological “testing grounds for new initiatives for Atlantic unity,” according to Sussex University scholar Kees van der Pijl, perhaps the world’s most rigorous scholar of transnational ruling classes.

On this year’s agenda were “Transatlantic Relations, Evolution of the Political Landscape in Europe and the US, Austerity and Growth in Developed Economies, Cyber Security, Energy Challenges, the Future of Democracy, Russia, China and the Middle East.”

This crew is bound to draw the ire of many victims, yet instead of the kind of Occupy protests I witnessed in London last month – a march through The City with socialists and anarchists furious about parasitical banking practices – or at Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park last year and in various subsequent anti-bank protests by US leftists, the weekend’s Bilderberg protest displayed paranoia about the conspiracies being hatched in the Virginia hotel.

“Mr. Raúl promised us money to stop organizing protests against President José Eduardo dos Santos,” explained Mário Domingos. Kabuscorp, in which former Brazilian world champion Rivaldo plays, is owned by General Bento Kangamba, who is also the president of the club. The general, a member of MPLA Central Committee, is also part of the presidential family, by marriage to Dos Santos’ niece.

According to Domingos, the deal was part of a strategy, “to transform our movement into a satellite organization of MPLA, for us to do solidarity work on their behalf, and hold counter-demonstrations to support president Dos Santos.” By the time of the meeting with the president, the movement had already received US $4 million in an escrow account, six pickup trucks Mitshubishi L200, and six apartments in the Chinese-built town of Kilamba. “The governor of Luanda at the time, José Maria, sent his driver to the bank with us, where we cashed in the equivalent of US $700 thousand in cash. Then the governor’s driver took us home,” Mário Domingos.

Ironically, the scattering of these emerging youth groups and their leaders, as well as their lack of structural organization, has rendered the regime’s strategies of violence and corruption ineffective. Such strategies only give cannon fodder for Angolans to come to terms with the intractable wickedness of President Dos Santos and his regime.

In prioritising the site of production and the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class, traditional Marxism created a number of problems. To begin with, it excluded all those who did not, or could not work from possessing any kind of agency - with the result that the struggles of domestic labourers (women), the unemployed, the disabled were largely ignored.

This is the tragedy of the urban commons – those who “create an interesting and stimulating everyday neighbourhood life lose it to the predatory practices of real estate entrepreneurs, the financiers and upper class consumers bereft of any social imagination.”

In South Baltimore, “regeneration” meant the displacement of a lively street life where people “sat on their stoops on warm summer nights and conversed with neighbours” in exchange for “burglar-proofed houses with a BMW parked out front and a rooftop deck, but with no one to be seen on the street.” Unable to reproduce itself, the social life vanished and the communities became inchoate and disparate.