[mahmud]

How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world.

Now that you mentioned Petraeus, I see you're confused about what "Revolution" means in this context. The course is teaching actual political, armed-struggle type revolution.

Big-R Revolution is very different from anything else. It's the popular uprising of a group of people and the assertion of their will upon, and demand for their rights from, another group they deem oppressive.

Revolution derives its will from the people, and the people derive theirs from their group identity. No people, no revolution. Petraeus is a beauracrat; I don't see a nation of Petraeuses besieging the pentagon with small arms and demanding their birth right for a more efficient budget system.

Bob Hunter is an activist, not a Revolutionary, for he still lacks the popular support of determined people who are willing to defend their home planet. He also lacks the Other; the target of his alleged Revolution. No opposing Other, no Revolution.

Kolakowski is a Philosophe academic, plenty of pen-pushers to go around, frankly. I particularly avoided recommending the Western Marxists and academes because of their petty intellectualism.

Good day, Sir.

[jacquesm]

The late Bob Hunter (you are still speaking of him in the present tense, he died in 2005) may have created greenpeace out of nothing which was very commendable (it probably saved the whales, and - ironically - the whaling industry), but the greenpeace of today is now more of a marketing organization, not an activist platform. Fuel for their boats used to be the main operational cost, now it is media buys. Their CEO receives about 140K euros, which is a slight difference with an ideal driven activist.

The people that support it do so from a strange mix of environmental consciousness and guilt (at least in my circle of friends).

Some of its positions are just as shortsighted as those held by the industries that it opposes.

That doesn't mean I'm against 'green', it's just that greenpeace has evolved to survive in a media driven society.

[tayssir]

I think this is too dismissive of other forms of revolution. I like Michael Albert's explanation of revolution, which is a fundamental change in at least one of a society's defining institutions. http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/2564

From this perspective, the 1953 US overthrow of Iran's parliamentary democracy (to install a monarch) was a successful revolution. And even a revolution with the best of intentions (which obviously wasn't the case with the 1953 revolution) won't necessarily result in an improved society. To the contrary, society might even regress. If a revolution suddenly occurred right now in the US, since we US citizens haven't laid the groundwork of serious popular organizing and institutions, we might expect a form of fascism to probably result.