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Algeria

 Here is one of the reasons that the Algerian protest movement is unable to carry out a revolution:

 The protesters "call for" and "demand". That is not what the history of revolutions inform us about how to "remove a ruling elite."  

 Here are some conditions:

  • A regime has to face a mounting pressure that makes it implode from inside.
  • A revolutionary movement that paralyses the economic machine through a general strike.
  • A split in the military/winning of a significant section of the armed forces.
  • The regional and foreign intervention is weak or unable to prolong or co-opt the revolutionary movement. On the contrary, favourable international conditions have to exist. That is absent today.
  • The movement has a strong mass support because the majority/at least a coalition of social strata, including a section of the middle classs, not only desire change, but also believe in the viability and achievability of an alternative.
  • The movement produces leaders who do not compromise.
  • The movement does not call or demand the regime in place to do this or that; it takes over and occupies strategic centres of power, and builds democratic but revolutionary alternative organs.
  • A revolutionary economic programme of social justice, wealth redistribution, etc. Some revolutionary literature has to be produced in this regard. Such a programme has to be radical to counter the radicalism and extremism of the form of capitalism in the X country and has also to be expansive in countering the narrow "civil society" and "human rights" concepts as preached and imposed by imperial powers and their institutions.
  •  The momentum: a movement cannot go on protesting forever. It wears out at the end. Then comes a compromise, if not a crackdown, that promises or achieves cosmetic changes through the powerful propagated recipe of "organising elections and a democratic process."
Once the regime is overthrown the tasks are even bigger.

 Recommended readings: 
— Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East by Isam Al-khafaji, 2004
— Revolution without Revolutionaries by Asef Bayat, 2017

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