http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/images/pb5465.jpgAlthough marketing regime change did not achieve its desired results in Venezuela, it continues to be explored there and elsewhere in many parts of the world. That combination of a well-developed strategy of courting potential consumers, training, and bags of money has been demonstrated to succeed where violent regime change has failed. Yet it would be a big error to blame everything upon the CIA. The analogy to the efforts to sell commodities should be instructive. Just as it would be an error to blame consumerism upon the existence of advertising, it is similarly an error to blame successes in marketing regime change simply upon the CIA. A commodity can only be sold if it appears to be a use-value; advertising and a marketing campaign may channel latent desires in a particular direction, but we need to start with the nature of the potential consumers. What kinds of people are produced in a particular society? Relations of production matter. What kinds of people are the products of particular relations of production? . . . Through their practice, their collective protagonism in workplaces and society, people can produce themselves as revolutionary subjects who will not be susceptible to campaigns for market regime change. The best defense is an offence. We need to struggle against dictatorship ourselves -- the dictatorship of capital. To really fight against the color revolutions, we need a color revolution -- a color revolution of a different color. A red revolution.

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