Seeds of Fire: A People’s Chronology

Recalling events that happened on this day in history.
Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.

Compiled by Ulli Diemer

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January 26, 1911
U.S. forces intervene in Honduras to ‘protect American interests.’
Related Topics: HondurasInterventionU.S. Imperialism
January 26, 1935
Birth of Lee Baxandall (1935-2008), American Marxist, naturist, and author.
January 26, 1990
Death of Hal Draper (1914-1990), American Marxist and author.
In The Two Souls of Socialism, Draper writes:
“Marxism came into being, in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of the Educational Dictatorship, the Savior-Dictators, the revolutionary elitists, the communist authoritarians, as well as the philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals. This was Marx’s Marxism, not the caricatured monstrosity which is painted up with that label by both the Establishment’s professoriat, who shudder at Marx’s uncompromising spirit of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist status quo, and also by the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, who must conceal the fact that Marx cut his eyeteeth by making war on their type.
‘It was Marx who finally fettered the two ideas of Socialism and Democracy together’ because he developed a theory which made the synthesis possible for the first time. The heart of the theory is this proposition: that there is a social majority which has the interest and motivation to change the system, and that the aim of socialism can be the education and mobilization of this mass-majority. This is the exploited class, the working class, from which comes the eventual motive-force of revolution. Hence a socialism-from-below is possible, on the basis of a theory which sees the revolutionary potentialities in the broad masses, even if they seem backward at a given time and place. Capital, after all, is nothing but the demonstration of the economic basis of this proposition.
It is only some such theory of working-class socialism which makes possible the fusion of revolutionary socialism and revolutionary democracy.”
January 26, 2011  
In an attempt to stop the use of cell phones and social media such as Facebook and Twitter to organize protests, the Egyptian government shuts down Internet and mobile services. The plan backfires: the result is that people head out into the streets to see what is going on, and the size of the protests multiplies.
Related Topics: Egyptian Revolt 2011



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