"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Unfolding Arab Revolution


EXTRACT: Communists adamantly oppose the imposition of no-fly zones on Libya, or indeed any other form of imperialist intervention. We in the CPGB want the masses themselves to overthrow the Gaddafi regime, not have it done on their behalf by an outside state power - which would only be doing so in order to prevent popular power, not facilitate it. If the masses were able to topple the Gaddafi regime from below, that would constitute the first real blow of the Arab revolution and would have a profound effect on the course of events in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, etc. We are not seeing presidents and monarchs falling neatly like dominoes - to use the clichéd imagery which has been routinely trotted out by unimaginative commentators (left and right). Rather, what we have are interconnected - and interwoven - democratic and revolutionary processes which are feeding off each other. What happens in any of these countries matters, and almost instantaneously impacts on its neighbours, because we are not dealing with discrete or national uprisings, but a truly pan-Arab movement which does not recognise imperialist-drawn borders. The same people are confronted by the same tasks and hence ultimately with the same solution - ie, regional solidarity and pan-Arab revolution.
In other words, the present situation has vindicated the perspective of an Arab revolution, a slogan that seemed to have been written off by history, but is now back with a vengeance. Plainly, the uprisings now taking place in the Middle East and north Africa have acted as a dress rehearsal for that very Arab revolution, and it is imperative that the working class wins hegemony over the movement.
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