The "Houthis" (known officially as the Ansarallah) is a broad grassroots movement with only a few defined political keypoints. This is deliberate, as the movement seeks to incorporate and represent the Yemeni people in its entirety across both Islamic and political differences. The movement has a right-wing, a centre-wing and a left-wing, each organized into separate unions and interest groups. For example, the left-wing is organized into what is called the "Cultural Front Against the Aggression", just to be very specific.
Origins
The Houthi movement was founded in the 1990s by Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority, which makes up about one-third of the population. Hussein was killed by Yemeni soldiers in 2004, and the group is now led by his brother Abdul Malik.
The Zaidis, once a powerful force in north Yemen, were sidelined during the 1962-70 civil war and then further alienated in the 1980s as Salafist Sunni ideals gained prominence across the border in Saudi Arabia, which exported the ideology to Yemen. In response, Zaidi clerics began to militarise their followers against Riyadh and its allies.
The intermittent insurgency gained support from Shia Yemenis fed up with the corruption and cruelty of the long-time authoritarian president and Saudi ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh, particularly during the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq.
On 18 June 2004 Saleh sent government forces to arrest Hussein. Hussein responded by launching an insurgency against the central government, but was killed on 10 September 2004, the insurgency continue intermittently until a ceasefire in 2010. During this prolonged conflict, the Yemeni army and air force was used to suppress the Houthi rebellion in northern Yemen. The Saudis joined these anti-Houthi campaigns, but the Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army.
Later, the Houthis participated in the 2011 Yemeni Revolution, as well as the ensuing National Dialogue Conference (NDC). However, they rejected the provisions of the November 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council deal on the ground that "it divide[d] Yemen into poor and wealthy regions" and also in response to assassination of their representative at NDC.
The "Houthis" ceased being a rebel group in late 2014 with the advent of the September 21st Revolution and the signing of the UN-sponsored Peace & National Partnership Agreement.
Prior to 2014, the group could indeed be described as a rebel movement as it fought 6 consecutive wars against the corrupt Saudi-backed government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. In September 2014, when the "Houthis" entered Sana'a to topple said government, more than 2/3rds of the entire Yemeni Armed Forces switched and took their side instead of the side of the government, giving the "Houthis" access to missile stockpiles and heavy weapons.
There are currently two competing governments in Yemen, one based in the constitutional capital Sana'a, and one de-facto based in Aden - although the Aden-based government remains unable to exercise its authority there. The "internationally-recognized government" based in Aden doesn't actually operate from within Yemen, but from a shadow cabinet based in the luxurious Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh where they've been exiled since February 2015.
Their direct authority is limited to warlord figures and tribal factions doing their bidding, representing less than 15% of Yemen's total population. In turn, the so-called "Houthi rebels" are part of what is called the Government of National Salvation, which exercises direct authority over 85% of Yemen's entire population.
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About class consciousness (I didn't manage to log back in before the mega was locked).
When we talk about idealism, we mean the model that the power of an idea in people's minds can have a distinctive and meaningful impact on the world. Class itself is a heuristic of a material thing; class consciousness is an ideal thing. Your habits or your employment or your personal pursuits or your consumption don't make you class-conscious; it is your persuasion and worldview that make you class conscious. In that way it's not really different from any other ideology that enlists people as a political force.
No person stands to substantially benefit in their lifetimes from a Marxist movement toward revolution that will take 70+ years to come to fruition. With reform and incrementalism, we can say that there is the sense of one's efforts paying off. This is one reason why parliamentary socialism has more adherents than Marxism, because there's a plausible prospect of an appraisable material goal being achieved. "Class consciousness" is not something that makes you better off. You can't exchange it or use it as a tool. It might lighten your mental load, but it also can make it heavier.
For all their emphasis on being "scientific" and how material things shape the whole of society, Marxists rely heavily on the loophole of class consciousness which basically turns back around and says "if only enough people saw things our way, we could achieve our goals".
That's not to say that it is wrong, not in the least! But it makes many Marxist movements moderately mistaken about their own nature. It's not a bad thing to have a dimension of idealism, we just need to recognize it as such. There is idealism that masks the underlying material forces, but there is also idealism that accounts for the divergences and noise along the material trends. I'm not an armchair, I'm an active communalist who believes that we can only push as far as we can imagine, and l think that far from being "utopian", a prefigurative dimension of politics and of a post-capitalist reality is something that we need to move society forward. So I don't reject the idea of building class consciousness at all, but it's important to see it accurately for what it is.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I figured I owed you all an elaboration.
This is not a correct reading of Marxism.
For example, Mao was obsessed with land reform. During the Long March, the Chinese communists were down to ~1000 party cadres and were scattered into the rural areas as they were pursued by the KMT nationalists. Through the application of Marxism-Leninism, Mao identified land reform as the key to unleash the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in China, which was very specific to the material conditions in China at the time. Mao correctly applied the principles of Marxism-Leninism to China, which would have been disastrous if they had followed the Stalinist (Comintern) or the Trotskyist line, just as the Bolsheviks correctly applied the principles of Marxism to their specific struggle and conditions during the times of WWI Tsarist Russia.
The KMT was not defeated because they were militarily inferior to the Communists, they were defeated because they did not anticipate the revolutionary potential that was unleashed by Mao’s land reform.
Marxism is not about convincing people to come to our side. Marxism is about using the scientific principles to bring about a revolutionary movement. The problem with the Western left today is that such theory - given to us by Marx, Engels and Lenin - are not being applied to understand how to unleash the revolutionary potential of the working class in Western capitalist countries.
Marxist materialism does not mean dismissing the impact of ideas on society, nor does it deny human subjecthood. It views ideas as secondary to matter, in that they have a material basis in a network of human brains, and historically the kinds of ideas that can exist in a society are determined by material relations in that society. It is also not as simple as "people believe what immediately benefits them".
Hey, ty for typing that all up.
I feel bad cuz I'm mentally exhausted and depressed and don't have it in me atm to really write up a proper response. Basically though "the model that the power of an idea in people's minds can have a distinctive and meaningful impact on the world" is just not what idealism means. It's not just you though, I've noticed it's extremely common in online discussions for no one to know what Marxists mean by "materialism," "idealism," "metaphysics," etc.
If I had my Adderall right now (fucking shortages I can't get a refill) I'd make an effort post about what they mean, but I just can rn, sorry
i just think the more homies we have the more people we can be homies with
edit: also class consciousness is why enormous labor sectors are going on strike and winning concessions rn
I think if you read what e said carefully you'd find that it's not contradictory at all with the fact that class consciousness motivates strikers.
i'm depressed and being flippant, ignore me
No worries, sorry if my comment seems condescending or rude.
The other replies have done a good job explaining some of the things you may be incorrectly understanding, but I think there's something that you are understanding to an extent that may help as well. Revolution - in a Marxist sense - is spurred on by the social relations of production no longer being equipped to facilitate the material constraints of a society. Revolution IS a social action, but fostering class consciousness is not an act of faith in battling things out in the realm of ideas (which actually is and always is happening no doubt) but rather cultivating as much organized mass as possible relative to the conditions to prepare for the possibility of ruptures within the existing class society.
Idealism isn't believing in stuff in order to act it out in the world, which is simply a function of human activity. However what you are identifying is a correct dimension of revolution, being that revolution is strictly a change in the social relation to production. The key idea here being that revolution does not come from the idea itself, but rather the tension from the existing social relations of production no longer able to sustain it's relationship to the economic demands of a society.