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Until now, the plunder of natural resources of Africa continues. But I think there will be growing resistance, not only of the people, but also of the ruling classes and therefore the state-power systems. Because there is possibly an alternative to that plunder, which is the rapprochement – let's call it a Bandung 2 – that is, the rebuilding of a solidarity of African and Asian nations and peoples against the plunder of imperialism. And now the possibility of the African nations getting back the control of those resources and supported by emerging countries like China, like India, like Brazil, who do need some of those resources for their own development, but who are in a position to negotiate with and give opportunity to African states to negotiate the conditions of access which are not negotiated usually with imperialists who ask for a complete capitulation.

It is the responsibility first of activists in the grassroots movements to see that however legitimate their action, it's efficiency is limited by the fact that it doesn't move beyond a fragmented struggle here or there. But it is also the responsibility of the intellectuals. I don't mean by that the academics, but those thinkers and the political people operating in politics to consider that they will have no possibility of changing the balance of powers without integrating in their movement, but not absorbing them to dominate them, but integrating the social movements on the grassroots into their political strategy of change.

The memory of Tahrir Square feeds opposition hopes and fuels government fears. For many in the opposition, Egypt has come to signify the promised land around the proverbial corner. For many in government, Egypt spells a fundamental challenge to power, one that must be resisted, whatever the cost.

Many asked whether the Egyptian revolution will spread South of the Sahara. And they responded, without a second thought: No! Why not? Because, media pundits said, sub-Saharan societies are so divided by ethnicity, so torn apart by tribalism, that none can achieve the degree of unity necessary to confront political power successfully. This response makes little sense to me. For this answer resembles a caricature. Nowhere in the history of successful struggles will you find a people united in advance of the movement. For the simple reason that one of the achievements of a successful movement is unity. Unity is forged through struggle.

Soweto was a youthful uprising. In an era when adults had come to believe that meaningful change could only come through armed struggle, Soweto pioneered an alternative mode of struggle.

The movement's strategy is based on assembling ad hoc citizen coalitions to help push back and challenge specific government actions; trying to figure out how to affect policy by exerting force on specific choke points in a system that badly needs reform. Politicians worried about inter-party politics, re-election or special interests can't see the importance of this. It's about using the power of the network to shake things up and find ways to make the political process more responsive to the needs of everyday citizens.

Typical of the all-encompassing approach of the 15-M movement are the myriad cooperatives set up around the country by a range of professionals looking to barter their services with other groups, as well as to sell them to the wider community. As the Spanish welfare state crumbles, 15-M offers practical solutions based on collaboration and cooperation

"I was brought up to be competitive; but what really matters is sharing.

If one thing convinced the founders of Podemos of the need to enter politics, it was the mass protests on the streets of Madrid in 2011, when disparate civic associations and single-issue activist groups, along with huge numbers of people with no previous involvement in politics, identifying themselves simply as “indignant,” coalesced into what has become known as the 15-M movement. There were two important things about those protests. The first is that they weren’t led or coordinated by the organizations that should have been able to do so, which were labor unions such as the UGT and the CCOO, or the Communist Party-led United Left grouping.

Despite the domestic and international media’s portrayal of the 15-M movement as little more than a bunch of anarchists, the creators of Podemos were aware throughout the summer of 2011, and would point this out later, that 15-M, despite its success, provided two important lessons: “It wasn’t us who organized this,” and that not everybody in the movement was “left wing.”

Carolina Bescansa, who had been studying 15-M for the Center for Sociological Research, noticed during the street protests that the traditional right-left divide no longer made any sense when trying to understand people’s voting intentions.

“This is something we have to deal with together, Colombia included, because Peru has the same problems. There have been outbreaks of violence from activists who are full of talk about democracy,” he stated. Correa warned that radical anti-mining groups were contradicting themselves as “they never protest against highly polluting mining,” but instead they protest against “clean mining” that does not harm water supplies or the environment.

Correa also strongly criticized the “so-called environmentalists” who are opposed to the development of “ecological mining” and suggested they intend native communities to live in poverty “as part of folklore and the environment.”“When we want to develop good mining practices, these so-called environmentalists come out claiming that human beings are not much more than a nuisance to the environment and that poverty is all part of folklore,” he said.

“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.

The Homeless Worker Movement occupied a building in Rio, helping to shelter thousands — but in the run-up to the World Cup they were violently evicted.

Before the advent of Google Maps, maps of Rio de Janeiro depicted the older, more traditional areas of the city and the newer expansions towards Barra and Recreio while the rest of the area was apparently uninhabited space. Google maps dealt a serious blow to this bucolic image of the Cidade Maravilhosa (‘Wonderful City’) by revealing that all available space in the urban area — hills, valleys, rough ground — was occupied by favelas. The reaction of much of the elite was a sense of betrayal, but it’s impossible to sweep these satellite images under the carpet. Suddenly everyone was forced to admit the favelas‘ existence.

So what was the solution for all this “criminal activity”? At dawn on April 11, 1.600 heavily armed military police invaded the area. Sleeping women were kicked awake, huts were knocked down, everyone was sprayed with chemical spray — not from the usual hand-held canisters but from massive cylinders the size of fire extinguishers, which the police carried in backpacks. All members of the press, whether corporate or independent, were expelled from the area and even one of the Globo reporters was arrested by police on the spurious charge that he was “throwing stones.” Occupants allege that four infants succumbed to the chemical spray and rumors circulated that one of the reasons for keeping reporters out was to prevent them from witnessing the fatalities.

Progressives all over the country sat back for 18 months without pushing him to guard those terms of debate, namely those of equality, fairness, decency, and a society that must depend on the state to protect the poor and the vulnerable.

During his presidency, FDR confided to unions and progressive activists that they had to “force” him to do things that would be politically unacceptable.

History reminds us that any social movement that changes the terms of debate will eventually change the national conversation.

Colombia is one of the world's biggest per capita polluters with mercury, in the artisanal mining sector, with an average of between 50 and 100 tons a year lost during the gold extraction process, according to a report by UNIDO, which points out that artisanal mining has expanded fast as gold prices have risen.

The broad social movement in Santander has added its voice to the long-time struggle by environmentalists in Cajamarca, in the central province of Tolima, against the South African company AngloGold Ashanti.

Protests have also been held to the south of Bogotá against polluting activities in quarries run by the army on the grounds of the Artillery School, and by the Catholic diocese of Bogotá's Fundación San Antonio, Mexico's Cemex company and the Swiss firm Holcim.

Protests in Bolivia against rising food prices forced the populist government of Evo Morales to backtrack on plans to cut subsidies. Chile erupted in protests as demonstrators railed against rising fuel prices. Anti-government demonstrations broke out in Albania, resulting in the deaths of several protesters.

As the above quotes from Brzezinski indicate, this development on the world scene is the most radical and potentially dangerous threat to global power structures and empire.

Essentially, the project of “democratization” implies creating the outward visible constructs of a democratic state (multi-party elections, active civil society, “independent” media, etc) and yet maintain continuity in subservience to the World Bank, IMF, multinational corporations and Western powers.

The whole point of distinguishing between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality is to remind us that sense-experiences alone cannot be used to define what is real. In accepting that there is ontological depth to reality, realists reject any causal explanations that are based simply on patterns of events.

The purpose of such theorizing is to allow for an analytical toolset by which we understand the duality of agency and structure. As the argument goes, people interact to create social structures that are then irreducible to the individuals involved, that is, social structures are the emergent products of human interaction.

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.

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

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.