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Our Cultural Revolution is inspired by the Black Arts Movement in the US, the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, and the Cultural Revolution in China. The fundamental objective of Political Revolution is to democratize the means of production i.e. the establishment of a Socialist system. Although we keep ‘Politics in Command,’ without the Cultural Revolution the Political Revolution is impossible.

New forms of action developed in the 2000s.

The Islamists are (provisionally) the great beneficiary of a movement they call “Islamic awakening”. The main Islamist parties have abandoned the revolutionary utopian goal of the Islamic State and progressively transformed into conservative political parties accepting the parliamentarian game. These parties are rooted in urban middle class, professionals, civil servants, etc. the kind of people who aspire to law and order more than to the turmoil of Islamic  revolution.

The future and the past are still competing.

It adopted an electoral path as the balance of power swung to moderate factions, and radicals associated with unconstitutional tactics were pushed to the margins.

US-based lobbies antagonistic toward the advance of Chávez’s socialism (and sympathetic to marginalised radicals) no longer saw these elements of ‘civil society’ as an effective oppositional vehicle and jettisoned them, deciding that a new tool for regime displacement had to be nurtured.  Students in private sector universities became the new vanguard of ‘democracy promotion’.

In 2008, the US-based Cato Institute awarded the US$500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to student leader Yon Goicoechea for his role in mobilising protests against the suspension of private broadcaster RCTV’s licence. At the same time, a sizeable amount of the US$45 million in funding provided annually by US institutions to Venezuelan opposition groups was channelled to ‘youth outreach’ programmes.

The current protests are important on two counts. First, they mark a coming together of the student movement and radical elements of the MUD. López and Machado have been organising with the student leadership,[5] in particular in relation to the February 12th demonstrations on Venezuela’s Day of the Youth, which commemorates the role of young people in the 1814 independence battle of la Victoria.

Despite claims that social media ‘democratises’ the media, it is clear that in Venezuela it has had the opposite effect, exacerbating  the trend towards disinformation and misrepresentation, with overseas media groups and bloggers reproducing – without verification – opposition claims and images of student injuries allegedly caused by police brutality and attacks by government supporters. In its reporting, the Guardian newspaper[8] cited tweets by opposition activists claiming pro-government gangs had been let loose on protestors.

The images disseminated, for example, to a Green Movement activist in Iran and then circulated to her thousands of followers with the tag line ‘pray for Venezuela’s students’, and to other democracy movements around the world show Egyptian and not Venezuelan police beating demonstrators. This same image was carried by the Spanish newspaper ABC.[9] Photographs and video clips of Chilean, Argentinian and Bulgarian police suppressing demonstrators and carrying out arrests (in their home countries) have been circulated and published as of they were assaults in Venezuela,[10] and one widely reproduced image shows Venezuela’s Policia Metropolitana corralling student protestors. The Policia Metropolitana was disbanded in 2011. Twitter has additionally been used to harangue commentators, including this author, who checked the accounts of her abusive critics to find most had only been tweeting for a day and in that space of time had accumulated around 40,000 followers.[11]

As a young shackdweller put it in the award-winning documentary Dear Mandela, “what he has been jailed for has never been achieved.” Now that the legend has passed away and his liberation movement has caved in to its own short-sighted desire for state power and material riches, new freedom fighters are emerging on the scene — in the form of autonomous movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Mandela Park Backyarders — who, fighting to defend the livelihoods of poor South Africans, stress their independence from political parties and instead seek to enact direct democracy in their everyday struggle for survival, dignity and liberation.

While Mandela’s symbolic leadership helped unite a country that teetered on the brink of racial violence or even civil war, a new form of political activism will be needed to help South Africa emerge from the deep-rooted socio-economic divisions and widespread political abuse that still persist.

The Mandelas of the future will be faceless and plural; they will be nameless multitudes of disaffected poor people — those who grew up in the Rainbow Nation and have learned as much from Mandela’s unrivaled moral fortitude as from the many mistakes he made on his long march to freedom, not least his embrace of a neoliberal economic policy framework. Today’s liberation movements are here to remind us that the only appropriate way to honor Nelson Mandela’s legacy is not to beatify the man but to take his struggle to its logical conclusion.

Praise for him is based, as Jerome states, on his sacrifice, but there is no defending him post-release. His time in office, and the subsequent years, have been marked by corruption and self interest.

In office Mandela presided over the deception while his right-hand man, Cyril Ramaposa, handled the bribes and graft etc. They both got rich, and the people who put them in power actually got poorer. South Africa is a revolution betrayed, Mandela represents its Thermidor. He is a reactionary, pure and simple, Debordian spectacle concealing a squalid fraud.

It cannot be denied thatsucceeded in bringing together people that did not see themselves represented by established political organisations, which effectively was one part of the ‘critical mass’ mobilised against Compaoré. Furthermore, it also mobilised people around social issues (power cuts, state of hospitals, etc.). In that sense, it is an important movement. However, Balai citoyen had a tendency to consider fighting for Blaise Compaoré’s departure to be sufficient in itself; it considered organisations insisting on the exigency and necessity to create an alternative political and social project as not being separate steps but inseparable, and to be in fact adding fuel to Compaoré’s cause.

The fact that during the popular uprising no politician was called upon by the protesters is still a good indication of the credibility of the formal political opposition. In an opposition consisting of dozens of parties there is none that offers an alternative.

With regards to the Sankarist parties, understandably fighting for justice to be served for the assassination of Tomas Sankara, they cannot be considered to be carrying an alternative political project (economic, social, etc.). Judging by the mass of people identifying with Sankara and gauging from these parties’ low popularity, one has to recognise that they are not considered as his true heirs in terms of a political alternative, including the rejection of all external domination.

The trade unions were, and still are, mired in concessions, wage freezes, and other kinds of compromises with employers, and a politics of tailing after the social democratic NDP, which was going nowhere -- hence the lack of a real fight-back against the crisis.

The consulta process, then, sought to actively build and develop our capacities together.  This meant attracting new people to an exciting project with new possibilities: conveying to progressive individuals in union locals that this process carries hope; discovering more strength through political 'mappings' of communities and corresponding exchanges among groups; learning how to work collectively and democratically among diverse sectors of the working class; rejuvenating already existing movements; and overcoming the fatalism that saps the mobilizing energy of activists.

The painful experiences of repression, aptly termed 'Torontanamo Bay' by some, may unfortunately provide a glimpse into the future, given that struggles over austerity and social services are likely to be the flashpoints of political confrontation in the coming years.7

Developing Working-Class Capacities.  As mentioned earlier, the objective of the Assembly is to sustain a process, not to launch a ready-made organization.  The focus, in our view, is on developing working-class capacities based upon recognizing differences and an understanding of our social interdependence through collective movement-building.

 Organizing the various fragments of the working class, as Engels reminded some time ago, is a necessary project, since capitalists are always organized: "they need no formal unions, rules or officers."8

The cost of not having such organizational capacities has become dreadfully clear during the ongoing global economic crisis.  Despite sporadic and localized battles here and there, the working class really wasn't able to take advantage of this historic moment, since our capacities just weren't there.  In fact, capitalism (including neoliberalism) seems to be emerging more powerful and consolidated than ever.  With our weakness so exposed, there is good reason to expect the Right to exploit the situation to its fullest potential.

the phrase “to live well but not better” (than others, or at the cost of others) is potentially confusing in English since “well” and “better” are similar if used to denote qualitative vs quantitative meaning. Language and culture are crucial elements if we are to convince others to understand and then follow this “dictum”. For example, English is a language based largely on nouns, while Anishinabe languages are dominated by verbs, resulting in cultures which focus respectively on objects versus process[12], with a resultant tendency to objectivize or integrate nature.[13] This may in part explain the domination of the planet today by English dominated cultures and may make the task of undoing this domination extra difficult.

Ecuadorian economist Pablo Davalos[16] provides a brief survey of the evolution of dependency, Marxist, world system and neo-liberal classical economics to show how we have arrived at a state of economic autism. He concludes that “Of the alternative concepts that have been proposed, the one that presents more options within its theoretical and epistemological framework to replace the old notions of development and economic growth, is Sumak Kawsay, good living.”

The creation of “autonomous” zones of power in Chiapas, with parallel institutions of governance are said to have brought significant political transformation, but some say they have not yet created a viable model of economic autonomy for poor peasants.[22] Others cite civil – military tensions in the Juntas of Good Governance as reducing local autonomy.[23] Some feel that internal political organization has taken priority over social and economic improvements and weakened earlier efforts to reform the broader Mexican state and guarantee indigenous rights of self-determination.[24] Nevertheless, the Zapatista carcoles are models of governance which include many elements implicit in the ecosocialist and degrowth paradigms and further research on these experiences is sorely needed.

The protection and preservation of balance in the natural world, including all its living beings, is a primary goal and need of our proposal. Mother nature has inherent rights to exist on the Earth in an undiminished healthy condition.

Like its predecessor, the new Green Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the expansion of capitalist agriculture.

The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture, ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the Global South. To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.

The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle.

Biko forged a vision with the potential to cut through these boundaries. Around that same time, another event occurred. It too signaled a fresh opening. This was the Palestinian Intifada. What is known as the First Intifada had a Soweto-like potential. Like the children of Soweto, Palestinian children too dared to face bullets with no more than stones.

Even though the Egyptian Revolution has come more than three decades after Soweto, it evokes the memory of Soweto in a powerful way. This is for at least two reasons.

First, like Soweto in 1976, Tahrir Square in 2011 too shed a generation’s romance with violence.

The second resemblance between Soweto and Tahrir Square was on the question of unity. Just as the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had uncritically reproduced the division between races and tribes institutionalised in state practices, so too had the division between religions become a part of the convention of mainstream politics in Egypt. Tahrir Square innovated a new politics. It shed the language of religion in politics, but it did so without embracing a militant secularism that would totally outlaw religion in the public sphere. It thus called for a broader tolerance of cultural identities

Practices like yoga and meditation were woven throughout Occupy, and were integral to its endurance and impact; they were not a sideshow.

Meditation and yoga, however, do not automatically nurture an anti-racist and egalitarian ethos. If they did, Western practice communities would be sanctuaries from what bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” As hooks has noted, based on her experience as a Buddhist and a woman of color, exclusions along multiple axes of oppression — such as race and class — continue to shape the dissemination of meditation and yoga in the West.

During conversations with Occupy activists, I learned that, while short meditations like moments of silence were used by assembly facilitators in the early days of the camp, the practice became more common as the occupation continued, and challenges intensified.

“As decision-making processes began breaking down,” facilitator Marisa Holmes explained to me, “with more disruption coming from within the camp, from the state, from all angles, we used these practices more and more.”

While grounding exercises helped ease aggression and facilitate communication among Occupiers, they could not stop the violent eviction executed by the New York Police Department in November 2011. They were also unable to transform debilitating internal conflicts that weakened the occupation. At the root of these conflicts, many activists believed, was the fundamental disagreement over whether and how Occupiers should engage with structures of power, including more established institutions on the left, like unions.

“I think a lot of mistakes resulted from the inability to engage with power, interact with it and build strategies around how to shift it,” said journalist Nathan Schneider, who is an editor-at-large for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.”

Many of the participants in Occupy Manifest became leaders in the Occupy Sandy relief effort after the superstorm hit New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Occupy Sandy was tremendously successful in its response, using social media to quickly raise over $1 million and mobilize 60,000 volunteers — four times the number of volunteers engaged by the Red Cross. A key element of Occupy Sandy’s success was participants’ willingness to work across political differences, coordinating activities with churches, FEMA and other relief organizations that didn’t necessarily share Occupy’s values and horizontalist style of organizing.

During their dialogue, Jon Kabat-Zinn noted his original skepticism towards Davis’s radical stance on prison abolition. “But then you gave me your book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete,’ and I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a fantastic idea.”Mindfulness alone will not spark a political revolution, but when joined by actual revolutionaries, it might expand all of our possibilities for freedom.

Reflecting a growing perception that the labor unions are standing by doing nothing while the government presses ahead with labor market reforms that make it easier for businesses to sack employees, on May 1, 15-M set up an initiative to protect the interests of people who are having to work on short-term contracts, grants, bogus training schemes or on a self-employed basis to save their employers from having to pay their social security. The idea is to encourage more people to work together through cooperatives, as well as to use social networks and other media to report companies that are taking advantage of high unemployment to impose abusive working conditions.

Last week it emerged that a police unit normally assigned to monitoring terrorist groups has been given instructions to put some of the higher-profile 15-M leaders under surveillance. "Putting these kinds of stories about is clearly an attempt to use the media to create a climate of fear," says Aitor, who belongs to the Real Democracy Now (DRY) organization, which spawned the 15-M movement. "They want to convert what we are doing into a public order issue." He blames the Popular Party administration at the central and regional level of trying to prevent people from using public spaces to protest.

Aware that 15-M was not left wing, but made up of a cross-section of society that was sick and tired of the current political system, one dominated by two large parties that were increasingly seen as out of touch with the people, the founders of Podemos and the groups related to it joined in the protests enthusiastically, trying to lead them and to channel their energy, but at no time trying to appropriate them.

For Iglesias, there was little to celebrate in having almost doubled its vote from 969,000 in the 2008 elections to 1.7 million in 2011, and instead the party’s celebration of its achievement was further proof of just how out of touch it was with reality. Amid the worst economic crisis in more than four decades, what was so great about garnering seven percent of the vote, when the Socialists had seen their share fall from 43 to 28 percent?

But the leaders of the Communist Party, argued Iglesias, “have become a regime, people who are happy to be awarded a bronze medal, and never think in terms of actually winning elections because all they are interested in really is being seen to be on the left, to be authentic, and to not win.” In short, the communists had become conservative, argued Iglesias, because they had failed to see that the only way to win was by changing the rules.

I discuss how neocolonial regimes have attempted to disarticulate culture from politics, a process that neoliberalism has exacerbated. But as discontent after nearly forty years of austerity (a.k.a. “structural adjustment programs”) in Africa rises, as governments increasingly lose popular legitimacy, there is a resurgence of uprisings and protests, and once again culture is re-emerging as a mobilizing and organizing force.

This attempt to erase the culture of Africans was a signal failure. For while the forces of liberalism destroyed the institutions, cities, literature, science and art on the continent, people’s memories of culture, art forms, music and all that is associated with being human remained alive, and were also carried across on the slave ships to where African slaves found themselves, and where that culture evolved in their new material conditions to become a basis for resistance.

“After the slave trade, armed conquest and colonial wars,” wrote Cabral, “there came the complete destruction of the economic and social structure of African society. The next phase was European occupation and ever-increasing European immigration into these territories. The lands and possessions of the Africans were looted.” Colonial powers established control by imposing taxes, enforcing compulsory crops, introducing forced labor, excluding Africans from particular jobs, removing them from the most fertile regions, and establishing native authorities consisting of collaborators.

Cabral pointed out that whatever the material aspects of domination, “it can be maintained only by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.” Of course, domination could only be completely guaranteed by the elimination of a significant part of the population as, for example, in the genocide of the Herero peoples in southern Africa or of many of the indigenous nations of North America, but in practice this was not always feasible or indeed seen as desirable from the point of view of empire.

What is important here is the assertion that Africans are not only human beings, but that their history, struggle and experiences are part of the struggle for a universal humanity that “belong[s] to the whole world.” “We must have the courage to state this clearly,” wrote Cabral. “No one should think that the culture of Africa, what is really African and so must be preserved for all time, for us to be Africans, is our weakness in the face of nature.” This is in marked contrast to the ideology of “Negritude” that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s in Paris and was to become associated with the writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire.

Movements that had sought a radical agenda to advance the people’s interests were systematically removed through coups d’état and assassinations (for example, Lumumba in Congo, Nkrumah in Ghana, Sankara in Burkina Faso). As stated earlier, Cabral too was assassinated by a group of his own comrades, apparently with the support of the Portuguese secret police (PIDE), on 20 January 1973.

As Cabral pointed out: “True, imperialism is cruel and unscrupulous, but we must not lay all the blame on its broad back. For, as the African people say: ‘Rice only cooks inside the pot’”. And “here is the reality that is made more evident by our struggle: in spite of their armed forces, the imperialists cannot do without traitors; traditional chiefs and bandits in the times of slavery and of the wars of colonial conquest, gendarmes, various agents and mercenary soldiers during the golden age of colonialism, self-styled heads of state and ministers in the present time of neo-colonialism.

Now that political independence had been achieved, the priority was “development” because, implicitly, the new rulers concurred that its people were “under-developed”. Social and economic improvements would come, the nationalist leaders said, with patience and as a result of combined national effort involving all. In this early post-independence period, civil and political rights soon came to be seen as a “luxury”, to be enjoyed at some unspecified time in the future when “development” had been achieved. For now, said many African presidents, “our people are not ready” — echoing, ironically, the arguments used by the former colonial rulers against the nationalists’ cries for independence a few years earlier.

Cabral was adamantly opposed to this tendency. He did not believe that independence movements should take over the colonial state apparatus and use it for their own purposes. The issue wasn’t the color of the administrator’s skin, he argued, but the fact that there was an administrator. “We don’t accept any institution of the Portuguese colonialists. We are not interested in the preservation of any of the structures of the colonial state..”

Culture never has the translucency of custom. Culture eminently eludes any form of simplification. In its essence it is the very opposite of custom, which is always a deterioration of culture. Seeking to stick to tradition or reviving neglected traditions is not only going against history, but against one’s people.

Culture was no longer considered a means of liberation. Instead, disarticulated from such notions, it was left empty of meaning beyond representing a caricature of some imagined past comprised of customs and traditions, consistent with notions of the savage that still prevailed in liberalism and which provided fodder for tourists’ imaginations.

the commodification of anything that can make a fast buck. Just as the early years of liberalism were characterized by the plethora of charitable organizations, so today Africa is replete with development NGOs contributing to the depoliticization of poverty by diverting attention away from the processes that create mass impoverishment and misery. Citizens have been transformed into consumers, and those without the means to consume have been thrown on the dung heap of history as the seldom or never employed. And neoliberalism has attempted to rewrite the histories of the damned (Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre), seeking to erase their memories of the past through its invasion of the curriculums of schools and universities.