The French Revolution did not need an ideol-ogy. Recent uprisings in Mexico and Peru have shown that oppressed people rising up against their tormentors do not necessarily need to call themselves Marxist-Leninists or Maoists.
If poverty, oppression and government neglect gets unbearable, the people have a choice either to take up arms or to move elsewhere. It is more likely that they will take up arms because usually such people have nowhere to go. Ruling elites who have no concerns for social justice and equity, driven as they are only by greed and the quest for power, should not be surprised when peasants, workers and ordinary people decide enough is enough. And the banners need not be red, they can be green or blue or pink.
However, it is also a fact that such outbursts usually cannot rise from the district or regional to national level without the underpinnings a doctrinal base. An ideology of national scope, however, must be scientific enough. And it may be of the left or the right. Let us not forget that it is not the monopoly of the left to be a progressive force. The period of history when the left had the exclusive role of trying to transform society in a progressive way has passed, partly because of what has happened in those countries that called themselves communist. There are movements from the right which have been progressive as well, such as the Portuguese colonels´ coup in l975 which toppled the fascist dictatorship of Salazar and unleashed political and economic reforms.
China and Asia
In the past 500 years, there have perhaps been only two persons who have managed to captivate a worldwide audience with what they wrote: Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations in 1776 and Karl Marx a hundred years later with Das Kapital. The world today still revolves around these two men. Each created an ideology, a school of thought, and a method of analysing society. What the founder wants and what the follower makes of it are, however, two different things. The followers tend to transform an ideology into religion, irrespective of the founder´s intention.