"Camille Desmoulins had become an editor because a stammer, overcome for a few minutes during the excitement of July 12th, '89, prevented 'Monsieur Hon-Hon' from airing his views in any other way." p.461, "The French Revolution", by J.M.Thompson, Sutton Publishing, U.K.:2001.
While most countries have committed to limiting warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels — a critical step towards decarbonising the world — this is the bare minimum of what needs to happen. Scientists say we need to stabilise temperature increase to below 1.5°C and this means pushing for an urgent and fundamentally new approach.
The technology exists and the plans have been proffered but without serious political pressure on the government, it will continue to get away with doing nothing — while all living creatures suffer the consequences.
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Fortunately, the Capitalists are divided on the issue of climate disruption — this allows ordinary people to influence the debate with the elite.
I contend that business optimism — and small business optimism in particular — are the new standard for presidential approval because “economics” captures most of what a president influences.
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I could go on. The point is that all of the “big” issues directly influence the economy via their impact on our psychology and our resources. In a free, capitalist country, “the economy” captures all the goodness and badness of a presidency without really trying. And the measure that best reflects the future of the economy, in my opinion, is small business optimism.
Big businesses can do fine with a president who promotes policies that favor big corporations, even if the rest of the country is suffering. But when small business owners are feeling good about the economy, that means the president is doing a more bottoms-up job of getting things right. President Trump has focused on bottoms-up economics from the start, meaning jobs and lessened regulations. Apparently that is working.
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Adams doesn't understand the fundamental contradiction of Capitalism: over-production. The economy will always produce more than consumers are able to buy.
The only source of income for most people is from wages and salary. This caps the amount of consumption in the economy.
Increasing wages increases consumptions, but also costs. Unless profits are to be squeezed, inflation results.
Confidence can only carry the economy so far until the realities of return on investment versus the rate of interest start to restrict investment.
It is interesting to see Adams describe the petite-bourgeoisie as being happy with Trump. This reliance on the support of the petite-bourgeoisie means that Trump has to be tolerant of that class's fascist undercurrents.
But the enthusiasm around the mere specter of Oprah’s presidency reveals an uncomfortable truth about the hypocrisy of Democrats: all the talk of competency during the 2016 presidential election, qualifications, be they ideological or political, are mere pretexts for their choice of candidate.
In the buildup to and aftershock from the 2016 election, perhaps the loudest and most consistent protest heard from Hillary Clinton supporters was “but she’s the most qualified!” Despite having a longer record of public service, Senator Bernie Sanders was deemed less, and by some, insufficiently qualified to run for president. His relative inexperience with foreign policy was a point of regular critique, and those who supported his candidacy on ideological grounds were dismissed as “purists” who didn’t understand the real “work” of being president.
In fact, Sanders’s candidacy arguably took its biggest hit when he suggested that Clinton’s history of poor political judgments, like her vote for the Iraq war, disqualified her for the presidency. Hillary’s qualifications were considered so unassailable, that to challenge them was considered de facto sexism by many.
Trust is enhanced by individuals having the opportunity to get acquainted with their collaborators in a more personal way — to see from non-organizational contexts that they are generally well intentioned; that they make serious efforts to live up to their stated intentions and commitments; and that they are generally honest. So perhaps there is a rationale for the bonding exercises that many companies undertake for their workers.
Likewise, trust is enhanced by the presence of a shared and practiced commitment to the value of trustworthiness. An organization itself can enhance trust in its participants by performing the actions that its participants expect the organization to perform. For example, an organization that abruptly and without consultation ends an important employee benefit undermines trust in the employees that the organization has their best interests at heart. This abrogation of prior obligations may in turn lead individuals to behave in a less trustworthy way, and lead others to have lower levels of trust in each other.
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In other words, trust is crucial for collaboration and teamwork. And an organization that manages to help to cultivate a high level of trust among its participants is likely to perform better than one that depends primarily on supervision and enforcement.
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A revolutionary party must continual live up to its ideals through its practices and organisations.
Although we are in the real, continual danger of betrayal through the active interventions of the plethora of secret services, we must persist in trusting each other.
During his late-night speech, Maduro vowed to reinvigorate the political movement started under his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. He told supporters he plans to prioritise revitalising the country’s ailing economy.
“2018 belongs to Chavistas,” he said.
However, according to a poll by Venebarometro released in December, Maduro could very well lose if presidential elections were held that week. When asked which candidate they would support, just 28.6% of respondents said they'd vote for Maduro.
The opposition is yet to coalesce around a single candidacy, but the pollsters suggested a generic opposition candidate could command at least 46.3% of the vote. A full quarter of respondents said they were undecided.
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Maduro needs to get his act together fast. The division in the opposition helps him somewhat. But he needs to get the economy working. This means more socialism.
Regardless, many offenders are now facing being hit with fines and criminal offenses as a result of their emissions. It is all part of an increasing effort by China’s top leadership to “Go Green” after decades of focus on economic growth above all. Prompted at first by fears of social unrest and the environmental consequences of careless pollution China’s leadership is increasingly interested in using green technology as the next step in its industrial development. For example, with electric cars rapidly becoming cheaper than traditional gasoline powered vehicles in many markets, China is stealing a march on its rivals by becoming the largest market for manufacturers. Beijing already leads the world in its manufacture and use of solar power and other renewable energy sources. It could soon be the largest manufacturers of modern vehicles as well.
Interestingly, under Xi China is also building the world’s most advanced carbon trading system and solar highways to generate electricity, which clearly shows were Beijing believes the future lies. China currently produces 78 gigawatts of solar power and is aiming for 105 by 2020. Embarrassingly for America, China also remained in the Paris Agreement when President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era international agreement, deflecting attention from China’s own actions on climate change at a stroke. Despite the air pollution that still hurts its efforts, the nation remains the world’s leading solar energy producer by quite some margin and China also gets 4 percent of its energy from wind power, of which it is one of the top three global markets.
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Solar roadways are a waste of money.
It is interesting how the Chinese regime are responding to the concerns of its citizens. And how the regime is turning these concerns into a business opportunity.
Don't forget that geopolitical concerns are driving China to green energy. These concerns centre around the US's control of the majority of the oil reserves through its proxies in Europe and Saudi Arabia, while the US attacks errant oil-producing nations like Iran and Venezuela. Green energy for China means energy independence.
Strange how political and economic concerns is leading towards a better environment.
Klaus Abbink, David Masclet and Daniel Mirza demonstrate a different mechanism — resignation. As inequality becomes extreme, they show, people simply give up fighting it*.
US politics is, I fear, consistent with all this; high inequality has given us a kleptocratic billionaire.
It’s also consistent with world history as described by Walter Scheidel. He shows that significant falls in inequality have generally been brought about not by gentle redistributive policies but by wars, revolution, disease and state collapse.
Perhaps there is no stabilizing negative feedback loop from increased inequality towards demands for redistribution. If so, a sustained** increase in equality is far harder to achieve than social democrats would like to believe.
* Plus, of course, there's the fact that the richer the rich are, the more they can spend on entrenching their position by buying the media and lobbying.
** How much could a one-term Corbyn government do to permanently increase equality?
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Yet the reformers persist in their delusion that the rich can be persuaded to give up their wealth. You would get more sense out of Daffy Duck!
The key point of this story, which isn’t made in the movie and few younger moviegoers are likely to be aware, is that it was her decision to make. The Graham family held controlling interest in the Washington Post Company. Great newspaper families like the Grahams, the Chandlers and the Sulzbergers were quirky and often had bad politics. But they also had something today’s corporate, publicly-traded media outlets do not: editorial freedom.
They didn’t always do the right thing. But they could. So sometimes they did.
Sadly, those days are gone.
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Competition within the Capitalist class could sometimes serve the public interest. With the concentration of media ownership, the odiousness of monopoly power emerges. And the public interest is quashed in favour of the private Capitalist interest.
Joseph Stalin initiated the modern cult of Ivan the Terrible. But, since the mid-2000s, Russia’s Eurasia Party — a political movement led by the pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin — has moved to position Ivan as the best incarnation of an “authentic” Russian tradition: authoritarian monarchy.
Dugin’s brand of “Eurasianism” advocates the embrace of a “new Middle Ages,” where what little remains of Russian democracy is replaced by an absolute autocrat. In Dugin’s ideal future, a medieval social order would return, the empire would be restored, and the Orthodox church would assume control over culture and education.
Eurasianism, which was marginal in the 1990s, has gained considerable popularity in recent years by contributing to the formation of the so-called Izborsky Club, which unites the Russian far right. On several occasions, Putin has referred to Eurasianism as an important part of Russian ideology; he has even invoked it as a founding principle of the “Eurasian Economic Union,” a burgeoning trade area of former Soviet states.
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And so begins the drift to Fascism in Russia: an authoritarian state run for the Plutocrats with nationalism to keep the people in line. How Donald trump must be envious of Vladamir Putin.
The first is refusing to be clear and precise about what the mission is. Avoiding specifics about what we hope to accomplish and for whom. Being vague about success and (thus about failure).
After all, if no one knows exactly what the mission is, it’s hard feel like a failure if it doesn’t succeed.
The second is even more insidious. We degrade the urgency of the mission. We become diffuse. We get distracted. Anything to avoid planting a stake and saying, "I made this."
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It is very hard being in a revolutionary party. Our failure is all around us. We have a high turn-over of members. We have members that do not expect to see a successful in their lifetime.
Yet, we must persist. Every day that we survive is a victory. Against the brutal reality of Capitalism, resistance to despair is paramount.
America’s war on terror across the globe (from the Costs of War Project). Click on the map to see a larger version.
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Looking into the future, let’s pray for one thing: that the folks at that project have plenty of stamina, since it's a given that, in the Trump years (and possibly well beyond), the costs of war will only rise. The first Pentagon budget of the Trump era, passed with bipartisan unanimity by Congress and signed by the president, is a staggering $700 billion. Meanwhile, America’s leading military men and the president, while escalating the country’s conflicts from Niger to Yemen, Somalia to Afghanistan, seem eternally in search of yet more wars to launch.
Pointing to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, for instance, Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller recently told U.S. troops in Norway to expect a “bigass fight” in the future, adding, “I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming.” In December, National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster similarly suggested that the possibility of a war (conceivably nuclear in nature) with Kim Jong-un’s North Korea was “increasing every day.” Meanwhile, in an administration packed with Iranophobes, President Trump seems to be preparing to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, possibly as early as this month.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This — although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
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And we all thought that '1984' was about the USSR. We were wrong — it is all about the USA.
2018 begins with instant raises for the lowest paid rung of the labor pool — those working for minimum wage — in 18 states and almost 22 municipalities, the lowest-paid workers are seeing an pay increase.
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The Capitalists see wages as a cost to be reduced — not as a source of funds for purchasing goods. Capitalism requires Capitalists to be myopic — profit is all that matters.
The humanity of the workers is an impediment under Capitalism. To see workers as human beings stops Capitalists making profits. The inhumanity of the system is fundamental to Capitalism.
Controversies over free speech on college campuses and othe place serve to remind us that free speech is in the eye of the beholder, and that people tend to disrespect expression they disagree with. The thing is, however, free speech really is a suicide pact. We're either all in it together or not at all.
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Free speech is essential for a Democracy and, more so, for a Communist society.
The question then becomes do Capitalists have free speech in a Communist society? The simple answer would be "Yes".
Ideally, Capitalists would no longer exist in a Communist society, but the practicalities would suggest that the Capitalists would maintain a marginal existence. They would serve as a reminder of why we should not return to a Capitalist society.
Here are the reasons for which these statements are hypocritical.
If Trump cared about Iranian dissidents, he would welcome those who want to flee to the United States.…
The protesters are protesting economic hardship.…
Sympathizing with working people facing increased prices is not Trump’s brand, and it is rich for him to pretend to care about them.…
The protesters are complaining about the arbitrary, high-handed and authoritarian way that the clerical regime has run Iran.…
Trump has allied himself, and aligned himself, with the Saudi royal family, which in turn is attempting to undermine Iran.…
Protests undermine the Iranian regime. By doing so, these protests weakened Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. This weakened influence benefits Israel, and therefore, the USA.
In fact, there might even be something to be said for anti-meritocracy. It’s possible that Trump’s character flaws will prevent him using his presidency to do great irreversible damage, and they might even eventually discredit his policies: imagine if somebody of ability had his agenda.
And it’s possible that the knowledge that success in politics and the media requires obnoxiousness, self-promotion and a wealthy background and the right backers will deter good people from entering them. Whilst this would degrade public life, it would improve the talent pool available to other occupations and save good people from being disappointed; the embittered old hack is a fate to be avoided. Those of us who are comfortably off can safely tend our gardens and ignore the imbecilities of elite politics.
Whether we want an anti-meritocracy or not, it’s what we’ve got. The question is how to make the best of it.
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Trotsky once wrote that the times produced people preculiar to it. He gave an example that occurred during the Russian Revolution: a businessman gathered together his savings and went in search of military officers to give the money to. He had hoped that the old order could be restored with the aid of funds. He found group, after group, of loyalist officer engaged in gambling, drinking, and womanising. There appeared to be no capable and sober loyalist officers left.
The development of social systems decay when people of talent and ability are excluded from the power structures. This may be what is happening now. If so, the decay is starting to erode the Capitalist class, just as decay eroded the fedual lords.
So my question: what’s a good metaphorical or figurative comparison to help us understand and explain this strange conceptual thingamabob? Is money an invention like algebra? Are there other conceptual constructs that are similar to units of account, comparable mental entities that can help us think about what these things are? I can’t think of any good analogies. It’s vexing.
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In simple Marxist terms, money is a commodity. Based on this characterisation, Roth is right in saying that money is an asset. But he oversimplifies. He denies that interest is the price of money.
A commodity has both an exchange-value and a use-value. Assets are thought of in terms of exchange-value. An asset can fluctuate in its exchange-value, thereby giving an asset a capability to store exchange-value. Commodities can be further traded, or consumed. With consumption, the commodity is extinguished, and its exchange-value and use-value expire.
But not all commodities are exchangeable for all other ones. Commodities that are universably tradeable are called money.
Interest should be better described as the rental price for money. A loan is the right to use a quantity of money. The ownership of the commodity is not transferred as would be the case of an exchange.
Facebook has been working with Israeli Government officials to suppress Palestinian voices in the social media sphere according to a report published on Saturday in The Intercept. The partnership between the social media giant and officials in Tel Aviv has resulted in the censorship, removal or blocking of content deemed critical of the Israelis with these posting being branded as “incitement.”
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Facebook’s virtually unlimited acquiescence with Israeli requests to remove content, has been described as a “censorship rampage“ by Greenwald and have been carried out since Tel Aviv began blaming alleged, “online incitement” for unrest and resistance that overwhelmingly resulted in violence against Palestinian civilians. The hue and cry raised by Tel Aviv resulted in an arrangement between Facebook and the Israeli state, struck in Sept. 2016, that resulted in the creation of teams devoted toward the monitoring and removal of alleged “inflammatory content” criticizing the occupation.
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Despite Facebook’s vigilance over content, the Israelis deemed “inflammatory,” posts by extremist Jewish settlers and far-right Zionist officials calling for brutal repression and violence toward Palestinians went unchecked, leaving the dispossessed people with little leverage to combat the occupation’s control of the popular social network. Palestinian complaints highlighting an increasing Israeli social media discourse of hatred remained ignored by the California-based company.
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“One can create a fantasy world in one’s head if one wishes, in which Silicon Valley executives use their power to protect marginalized peoples around the world by censoring those who wish to harm them,” Greenwald noted.
“But in the real world, that is nothing but a sad pipe dream. Just as governments will, these companies will use their censorship power to serve, not to undermine, the world’s most powerful factions.”
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Capitalist companies exist to make a profit. They will do whatever it takes to keep making those profits.
It is delusional of the Israelis to imagine that these protests arise because of incitement. They cannot imagine that their own brutality, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, bombings, shootings, etc. towards the Palestinians has anything to do with the anger of the latter.
What is known in the US as "the left" has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness.
All of this fails to penetrate those "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, "diversity" is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.
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In the matter of the Deep State, we would find ourselves allied with Donald Trump.
I would have to agree with the Right that the Left is now an impediment to social discourse. The Left has been co-opted by the elites.
When the Left forgot its class roots in the Proletariat, the Left became much easier to co-opt. There is seductiveness in achieving change through reform rather than revolution. The Liberal is the enemy of the Proletariat.
My limited understanding of Iran is that the religious authorities have kept a grip on power — despite being disliked by the urban intelligentsia — by maintaining support among the poor. That makes choosing guns over butter particularly stupid.
The Communists landslide victory is a positive development in the South Asian region. It is like a wave fresh, cool air in a heated region on Indian subcontinent.
But the real challenge begins now. The huge victory has raised huge expectations. Reforms are on the agenda.
However, reforms under capitalism can never be of a permanent nature. The capitalist path on longer run is a road to distraction and losing mass support of the Communists ideology. They have to move ahead on the road of parliament to abolishing of capitalism and remaining elements of feudal society. They know the best how to do it if they want to do it.
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The Nepali Communists used a similar strategy to SYRIZA — building political support through community organisations.
The Nepali Communists may have an easier time because of the weakness of Capitalist development in Nepal. However, this weakness also undermines the development of a Socialist society. A Socialist society has to be industrialised.
As is being shown in Venezuela, the development of socialism during a period of dual power is difficult.
Although it may seem colonialist views are far behind us, a 2014 YouGov poll revealed 59 per cent of British people view the British Empire as “something to be proud of.” Those proud of their colonial history outnumber critics of the Empire three to one. Similarly, 49 per cent believe the Empire benefited its former colonies.
Such views, often tied to nostalgia for old imperial glory, can help shape the foreign and domestic policies of Western countries.
Gilley has helped to justify these views by getting his opinions published in a peer review journal. In his article, Gilley attempts to provide evidence which proves colonialism was objectively beneficial to the colonized. He says historians are simply too politically correct to admit colonialism’s benefits.
In fact, the opposite is true. In the overwhelming majority of cases, empirical research clearly provides the facts to prove colonialism inflicted grave political, psychological and economic harms on the colonized.
It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized. The publication of Gilley’s article — despite the evidence of facts — calls into question the peer review process and academic standards of The Third World Quarterly.
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The Bengal famine of 1943 was the final British-administered famine in India and claimed around three million lives. When Winston Churchill was asked to stop shipping desperately needed foodstuffs out of Bengal, he said Indians were to blame for their own deaths for ‘breeding like rabbits.’ (Shutterstock), CC BY
These counter-examples disprove Gilley’s central thesis that non-Western countries are by definition incapable of reaching modernity without Western “guidance.”
In short, the facts are in, but they do not paint the picture that Gilley and other imperial apologists would like to claim. Colonialism left deep scars on the Global South and for those genuinely interested in the welfare of non-Western countries, the first step is acknowledging this.
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Cries of political correctness are used to suppress inconvenient facts.
One should remember the above picture whenever anyone meantions the famines under Stalin and Mao. Any hierarchical system is capable of such horror.
On a side note, Japan should now be considered to be an American colony because it is dominated by American military and political influence. A Japan acting indepently of American interests is inconceivable. Turkey is able to exert a more independent course for itself.
Because Clinton won’t leave us alone. Because Clintonism, centrism, Third Wayism, DLCism are still running the Democratic Party. Because her corporate neoliberal BS was discredited at the polls yet the party bosses and Dem-aligned media outlets keep shoving it down voters’ throats. Because progressivism and socialism are more popular but can’t get any air until a big sharp stake is driven through the undead heart of soulless centrism once and for all (I’m looking at you, Tim Kaine and Kamala Harris.)
So think on that a while. Hillary Clinton was so sucky that she lost to the suckiest, stupidest, losingest candidate anyone ever dreamed of.
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The labourites would have us believe that we can take over the Labour Party by working inside the system. They forget that one must align to the system before one can join it. Resistance is built outside of the system.
But we cannot divorce ourselves from the system. The people we need to reach are inside the system. Where they are is where we must go. Purity is isolation.
Chappell lays out five questions to ask when people might want to consider using violence to overthrow an oppressive regime or system, using examples from history. Ultimately, though, he returns to the wisdom of Gandhi and King that nonviolence is a more powerful tool than violence. “Violence can kill the liar, the racist, the terrorist”; but it does not kill the “lies that sustain an unjust system, racism, or terrorism. …” He underscores his advocacy for nonviolence with recent landmark research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan that concludes, “Nonviolence is more likely than violence to defeat a militarily superior adversary.” Their study of movements from 1900-2006 to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations or achieve self-determination found that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals. And the trend is increasing even in extremely brutal authoritarian conditions.
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We kill the lies that sustain the system by educating ourselves. In doing so, we develop our proletarian consciousness.
Good referrals are smarter than mediocre, distracting work.
Own your work. No need to do someone else's.
A revolutionary party has to concentrate on political work that advances the political line of the party congress. Yet, this political line has to reflect the realities of the political environment and the strengths of the party.
It would be nice that we could be everywhere at all political events. But the reality is that revolutionary parties are small and spread very thinly. The work we do has to:
Develop the cadre
Expand the carde
Educate the workers
Gain the confidence of the workers
Achieve real gains
We can only achieve real gains by understanding correctly the real political environment, and by using our real strenghts.
Clearly, the protests had no chance to succeed, primarily because they were manifestations of intra-elite conflicts, not largescale mass uprisings against the government supported by powerful internal groups. If history is of any witness, political movements in Iran succeed only when they build on mass anger against foreign powers and undue foreign interference in Iranian affairs. The best examples are the 1891 anti-British tobacco movement, the anti-American and anti-British nationalist movements of the late 1940s and early 1950s concerning Iran’s oil resources, and the monumental anti-American and pro-Islamic movements leading to the 1979 revolution. The latest protests had no foreign element involved; it was directed against the government but hardly was there any blueprint to dislodge the government.
Accept it or not, the Iranian political and economic systems, despite their shortcomings, are much more representative than many countries in the Middle East. That explains why the Arab Spring did not touch down on Iran, while the neighboring undemocratic countries had to use force to contain mass protests or bribe their peoples to stay calm. In Iran, there has been an elected parliament without disruptions since 1979, the president is regularly and periodically elected by the people, and the members of the Assembly of Experts, a body responsible for selecting the Supreme Leader and overseeing his activities, are also directly elected by the Iranian voters. So, channels of vetting angers and protests are there and the government also recognizes the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the Iranians to protest peacefully.
It is the democratic practices that undercut the potential of massive popular movements to oust elected governments in Iran — conservative or reformist. Needless to say, it is useless to dream of an overthrow of the Islamic establishment in Iran someday in the future. Both the conservatives and the reformists equally believe in the fundamental ideals and objectives of the 1979 revolution — maintaining and strengthening Iran’s independent voice in a US-dominated world. And the Iranians are very unlikely to be fooled by President Trump and his cohorts.
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In Marxist-Leninist terms, there was no revolutionary party to drive and sustain the protests. And the people had not yet given up on trying to achieve their goals through democratic reforms. The democratic process in Iran has not been exhausted.
