Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

"We Lost All the Battles, But We Had the Best Songs"

In Praise of Revolutions

By SERGE HALIMI

Two hundred and twenty years may have passed since 1789, but there’s still life in the French Revolution. During the bicentenary commemorations, though, François Mitterrand had extended an invitation to Margaret Thatcher and Joseph Mobutu to check it was dead and buried. The anniversary year also saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, prompting Francis Fukuyama to announce the “end of history”; in other words, the neoliberal domination of the world would last forever, the so-called revolutionary parenthesis opened in 1789 had closed for good.

But the current crisis in capitalism is now challenging the legitimacy of ruling oligarchies. The air has become lighter – or heavier, depending on your viewpoint. Le Figaro, for example, referred to “these intellectuals and artists who call for revolt” and lamented: “François Furet [the French historian] seems to have been mistaken: the French revolution isn’t over”.

Like many others, however, Furet had spared no effort to dispel the memory of it. In the past, the Revolution was taken to be the expression of a historical necessity (Marx), of a “new era of history” (Goethe) or of an epic which began with the soldiers of the Year II celebrated in a poem by Victor Hugo: “magnificent barefoot men marching on a dazzled world”. All we are allowed to see now is the blood on the Revolution’s hands. From Rousseau to Mao, an egalitarian, terrorist, virtuous utopia is said to have trampled on individual liberties and given birth to the cold monster of the totalitarian state. And then “democracy” got its act together and won the day: cheerful, peaceful, free-market. It too is the heir of revolutions, but of a different sort – English or American style, more political than social, decaffeinated .

A king was beheaded across the Channel too, of course. But the English aristocracy put up less resistance than in France, so the bourgeoisie there felt no need to make an alliance with the people to establish its domination. Among the privileged classes, a model without the barefoot or sans-culottes had more appeal and seemed less dangerous than the alternative. So Laurence Parisot, head of the French employers’ union, wasn’t betraying the trust of her members in telling the Financial Times: “I love French history, but I don’t like the Revolution very much. It was an act of extreme violence from which we are still suffering. It forced each one of us to be in a camp.” She added: “We don’t practice [democracy] as successfully as in England”.
The polarization of society inherent in the notion of “being in a camp” is unwelcome because instead we all ought to be showing our solidarity with our employer, our boss or his brand – while still knowing our place. For in the eyes of those who aren’t among its fans, the main charge against the revolution isn’t its violence – sadly an all too common phenomenon in history – but something infinitely rarer: the upheaval of the social order which occurs when the proletariat and the affluent go to war.

In 1988, George H. W. Bush, looking for a knock-out argument to floor his Democrat opponent, Michael Dukakis, came up with this: “We’re not going to be divided by class. You see, I think that’s for European democracies or something else. It isn’t for the United States of America.” Class. Just think how horrifying such an accusation must be in the US! To the extent that 20 years later, at the moment when the US economy seems to be imposing sacrifices as inequitable as the profits that preceded them, the present incumbent in the White House judged it imperative to forestall popular anger thus: “One of the most important lessons to learn from this crisis is that our economy only works if we recognize that we’re all in this together, that we all have responsibilities to each other and to our country… We can’t afford to demonise every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit”. Whatever ultra rightwing Republicans are claiming, Barack Obama is not about to start any revolution…

“Revolution is first of all a rupture. Anyone who cannot accept that rupture with the established order, with capitalist society, cannot be a member of the Socialist Party.” Those were the words of François Mitterrand in 1971. Since then, the conditions for membership have become less draconian, since they don’t put off either the IMF’s director general Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or its head, Pascal Lamy. The idea of revolution has ebbed elsewhere too, even in the most radical groups. But the Right has made the word its own (evidently it still contains some seeds of hope), and has turned it into a synonym for the rolling back or destruction of social security gains made – or wrenched – from the established order.

Everyday acts of violence

Even so, a charge levelled against major revolutions is they were violent. Exception is taken to the massacre of the Swiss Guard during the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, to that of the Russian royal family in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg and to the liquidation of Chiang Kai-Shek’s officers when the Communists took power in China in 1949. But if you object to those, then you shouldn’t ignore the famines of the Ancien Régime, which happened against a background of balls at Versailles and of tithes demanded by priests; or the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators massacred by Nicholas II’s troops in St Petersburg on Bloody Sunday in 1905; or the revolutionaries in Canton and Shanghai thrown alive into the boilers of locomotives in 1927. Not to mention the everyday acts of violence which were part of the social order the revolutionaries sought to overthrow.

The story of the revolutionaries who were burned alive hasn’t just affected those with an interest in China; it’s also known to the millions who have read André Malraux’s novel, La Condition humaine. For decades the greatest writers and artists made common cause with the workers’ movement to celebrate revolutions and the glorious future. In doing so, it is true, they underestimated the downside, the tragedies and the chilly dawns (with their political police, personality cults, labour camps and executions).

For 30 years, by contrast, those are the only consequences of revolution which have been spoken about; in fact it’s the recommended course of action for those who want to succeed at university, in the press – or the Académie Française. “Revolution inevitably means an irruption of violence,” explains Academic Max Gallo. “Our societies are extremely fragile. The major responsibility of those who have a public platform is to guard against this irruption”. For his part, Furet reckoned that any attempt at radical transformation was totalitarian or terrorist, that “the idea of another society has become almost inconceivable”. His conclusion is that “we are condemned to live in the world that we live in”. It’s not hard to imagine that such a destiny fits in with the expectations of his readers, who are generally protected from life’s storms by a pleasant existence of dinners and debates.

There are many other examples of the phobia of revolutions and its corollary – the legitimization of conservatism – besides Gallo and Furet, such as the media, including the cinema. For 30 years, television has been keen to show that the only alternative to liberal democracy is scheming tyrannical regimes. And so the attention given to the German-Soviet pact assumes much greater importance than other unnatural alliances, such as the Munich Agreement or Adolf Hitler’s handshake with Neville Chamberlain. At the very least, the Nazi and the conservative shared a common hatred of popular fronts. And the same class fear inspired the aristocrats of Ferrara and the ironmasters of the Ruhr when they enabled Mussolini and the Third Reich to come to power. But is it still permissible to point that out?

If so, then we can go further still. While brilliantly explaining why he rejected a Soviet-style revolution, no less a figure than Léon Blum, France’s first Socialist prime minister, reflected on the limits of a social transformation which had universal suffrage as its only talisman: “We are not certain,” he warned in 1924, “that the representatives and leaders of society today won’t themselves depart from the law at the moment when their essential principles appear too seriously threatened.”

A requirement for revolution

Since then there has been no shortage of just this sort of transgression; from Franco’s pronunciamento in 1936 to Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973, not forgetting the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Blum underlined moreover that “the Republic has never been proclaimed by virtue of a legal vote according to constitutional rules. It was established through the will of the people who rose up against the existing laws”.

Universal suffrage, which is now invoked as a way of ruling out other forms of collective action (including public service strikes, which are compared to hostage taking), has become the alpha and omega of all public action. The questions Blum posed about it have scarcely dated at all: “Is it a true reality today? Don’t the influences of the boss and the landowner bear down on the electors with the pressure of the power of money and the press? Is every elector free of the suffrage he expresses, free through the culture of his thought, free through the independence of his person? And in order to liberate him, isn’t a revolution precisely what’s required?”. In three European countries – the Netherlands, France and Ireland – the ‘no’ vote defied the combined pressures of the bosses, the power of money and the press. For that very reason, it was disregarded.

“We lost all the battles, but we had the best songs.” This view from a Spanish republican fighter seeking refuge in France after Franco’s victory sums up the problem of conservatives and their insistent message of submission. Simply put, revolutions leave an indelible mark on history and human consciousness, even when they fail and even when they are later dishonoured. They embody a moment when fate rises up and the people have the upper hand. This gives them their universal resonance. Each in its way –the mutineers of the Potemkin, the survivors of the Long March, the barbudos (“bearded ones”) of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra – echoes the actions of the soldiers of the Year II; that suggested to British historian Eric Hobsbawm that “the French Revolution demonstrated the power of the common people in a manner that no subsequent government has ever allowed itself to forget – if only in the form of untrained, improvised, conscript armies, defeating the conjunction of the finest and most experienced troops of the old regimes.”

But it isn’t just about memory: modern political vocabulary and half the legal systems in the world were inspired by the code invented by the Revolution. And anyone who thinks about the support for the Third World of the 1960s may wonder if a part of its popularity in Europe comes from the feeling of both recognition and gratitude which it gave rise to. The revolutionary, egalitarian, liberating Enlightenment ideal seemed to be reborn in the South, in part thanks to the Vietnamese, Algerians, Chinese and Chileans who had learned their lessons from Europe. The Empire grew cumbersome, former colonies took up the baton and the revolution continued.

The situation today is different. The emancipation of China and India and their self-assertion on the world stage may give rise to some curiosity and sympathy, but they don’t refer back to any universal hope linked to equality, the rights of the oppressed, an alternative model for development or the desire to prevent conservative restorations based on knowledge and social graces.

Revolutions remain rare

If the international interest in Latin America is greater, that’s because its political orientation is both democratic and social. A sector of the European left has spent 20 years justifying the priority it gives to the wishes of the middle classes by coming up with theories about the end of the “revolutionary parenthesis” and the end of the political significance of working classes. Venezuela and Bolivia’s leaders are, by contrast, remobilizing these people by proving that their lot is being taken into account and their destiny is not sealed – in short, the struggle goes on.

However desirable they may be, revolutions remain rare. They require simultaneously: a broad mass of dissatisfied people who are prepared to act; a state whose legitimacy and authority are challenged by some of its usual supporters (as a result of economic incompetence, mismanagement of the military or crippling internal divisions); and finally, pre-existing radical ideas that question the social order and which, though they may be held only by a tiny minority to begin with, are capable of attracting all those whose loyalty to the old order has crumbled.

The US historian Victoria Bonnell studied the workers of Moscow and St Petersburg on the eve of the First World War. As this is the only instance of this social group being a major player in a “successful” revolution, her conclusion is worth quoting: “What distinguishes revolutionary consciousness is the conviction that grievances can be redressed only by a transformation of the existing institutions and arrangements, by the establishment of an alternative form of social and political organization”. In other words, this consciousness doesn’t appear spontaneously without some pre-existing political mobilisation and intellectual ferment.

This being so, the demands of social movements are primarily defensive – as can be seen at the moment. They aim to re-establish a social contract which they believe to have been broken by the bosses, landowners, bankers and governments. Food, work, shelter, education, prospects: not (yet) a glorious future but “a vision of the present stripped of its most painful aspects” . It is only later, when the inability of those in power to fulfil the obligations which legitimate their power and privileges becomes apparent that the question is sometimes asked outside militant circles: “whether kings, capitalists, priests, generals, bureaucrats, etc, serve any useful social purpose at all”. At this point, it is possible to talk of revolution. The transition from one stage to another may occur quickly – in two years in 1789, a few months in 1917 – or may never happen.

For nearly two centuries, millions of political and union activists, historians and sociologists have been examining the critical variables: is the ruling class divided and demoralized? Is its machinery of repression intact? Are the social forces that seek change organised and capable of mutual action? Nowhere have these studies been more abundant that in the US, where it is often a case of understanding revolutions and conceding all that they have achieved, the better to avert them.

The reliability of these studies has been patchy. In 1977, for example, there was concern about the “ungovernability” of capitalist societies. And the question of why the USSR was so stable also arose. There was no shortage of available explanations: the preference of the Soviet leadership and people for order and stability; collective socialization which consolidated the values of the regime; the non-cumulative nature of problems to be tackled, allowing the party room for maneuver; good economic results; the USSR’s status as a great power and so on. The Yale political scientist Samuel Huntington, who was already immensely famous, concluded this roster of corroborating signs: “None of the challenges which are identified in the future appear to be qualitatively different from those the Soviet system has demonstrated the ability to deal with in the past” .
And the rest, as they say, is history.

Serge Halimi is the director of Le Monde Diplomatique. His article appears in the May, English language edition of the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, to be found at mondediplo.com. This text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

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