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Showing posts from August, 2016
How accurate is this? " Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" ( The Causes of World War III , 1958, p. 75).
Via Joey Husseini Ayoub Middle East Eye asked me to write an op-ed on what's become an all-too-familiar theme following some of the (ongoing) exchanges between the folks at The Electronic Intifada and folks active in the Syria solidarity movement. To be quite honest with you, I got tired of writing the same thing. I think this is the 3rd or 4th time I write this - in fact you can see it as an extension of my piece for Raseef22 رصيفــ22  - and I know people who have written more than I have - emphasizing especially the work of Leila Al Shami and, obviously, the folks over at الجمهورية al-Jumhuriya like Yassin Al Haj Saleh and Yassin Swehat, all of whom have done infinitely more than I have.  It's frustrating, but here's one more.  I added quotes by Jesse Williams given that so much of the power narrative is being dominated by Americans (as usual, making this even more annoying) in the hope that American comrades would be able to challenge the narrative from within
" LF : You make the argument that we’ve been sold on this  idea that there’s just one kind of love: monogamous heterosexual love that makes a baby. MW :  Yeah. Kant has this goofy German definition of marriage where it’s a mutual contract for the reciprocal use of someone’s genitals. That exclusive-genital sexuality is great if it’s with the right person, but we focus on how much it sucks  not  to have that; we rarely talk about how often it also sucks. Like, marriages are often unhappy—the No. 1 source of harm to a woman is her intimate partner." Love in a Time of Capital
Headlines on foreignpolicy.com, 26 August 2016 "BAN THE BURQA?:  Eight in ten Germans favor banning the burqa in public spaces."  " THE BURKINI'S WILD RIDE:  A judge in France ruled that municipalities cannot ban women from wearing a certain kind of swimwear." Culturalization of social antagonisms, identity politics, etc .
Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those
Islam and Modernity: Can We be Muslims in the West? Islam et modernitë: peut-on être Musulmans en Occident? See also Feminists are failing Muslim women by supporting racist French laws
"When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem." — Arundhati Roy ( see extract from her book here )
Egypt This is how a Chatham House fellow reminds us of Rabaa's massacre. No mention of the military and financial support of the Egyptian regime. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood role in working with the regime and especially with the US and the SCAF from days one so that Mubarak goes, but the regime stays. And calling those criminals in the imperialist camp as "a democratic club" that Egypt is far from is just adding insult to injury.
This is generally a good summary, but I think the author is wrong on the class nature of Trump's supporters. The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics
Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945

Britain

You see, it's not about whether you are a Muslim or a Roman Catholic or nomally Socialist, but what class interests you represent/defend in maintaining the status quo. "Sadiq Khan urges Labour to ditch Corbyn"

UK

That media of "our liberal democratic society" Sounds of Blairite Silence
Headline on foreinpolicy.com, 19 August 2016 " The most disturbing thing about notorious British hate preacher Anjem Choudary is that his terrorism conviction is for something he said, not something he did." How can I be safe from persecution from what I say on this blog? After all, I have been blocked by the Economist comments admin and seen my comments removed by the liberal Guardian! Beware the Extremists
To understand where the so-called liberal democracy stands since ots inception and why the BB has just called one Islamist preacher "one of the most dangerous men in Britain", one should read a historical account. "From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain, and NATO became instruments of 'regime change', seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free-market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a 'watershed event in the global democratic revolution'. This was an extraordinary turn-around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hu
"The Worst Place on Earth": Inside Assad's Saydnaya Prison The liberals have again 'discovered' a new torture compound. They want to raise awareness. Where were they when people like me, and thousands of others were tortured, deprived of their rights, and even killed in the jails of their allies? Is it only when an ally is no longer an ally that we 'discover' their brutality? “For years Russia has used its UN security council veto to shield its ally, the Syrian government,” says Amnesty’s Philip Luther..." Yes, like what the US, Britain, France, etc have done in Tunisia, Egypt, Latin America, Indonesia, Greece, Uzbekistan, etc. They shielded, and still do, their allies. And like how the US using the UN security council veto to shield the Israeli state barbaric actions. Amnesty, according to Aljazeera Arabic website, is an independent organisation and away from any idelology! What about the Amnesty's support of one of the biggest criminal or
It is not the first time, but it always makes me laugh "The evidence now shows that Anjem Choudary is one of the most dangerous men in Britain." When we do it it is fighting for "freedom and democracy", when they do it is radicalism and terrorism. We advocate and impose economic and political policies on backward people, in an alliance with the Saddams, Assads and Ben Alis, championing it as "freedom, democracy, way of life, etc" in order to maintain stability so that capital thrives and our geopolitical interests and preserved.  We organise wars and mobilize Muslim and non-Muslim leaders who we define as moderates because they work for our interests and the interests of their respective classes at home an globally, we mobolize our resources and troops to spread our way of life by dismantling the social fabric of fragile societies, causing the deaths and dislocation of millions,  and when those very same economic policies, social relations of powe
Since the beginning of the Arab uprising the defenders of the status quo helped co-opt and domesticate the uprisings. Here they have twisted marxist and socialist ideas/ideals to try to absolve themselves and the criminal role they have played in aborting a meaningful change in the region.  In the case of Egypt we have seen how the US, a fact this article unsurprisingly ignores, supported a power-sharing between Mubarak's regime without Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood and how later, when the latters were ousted, the US regime continued its financial and military support of the Egyptian army and the Egyptian regime.  We also saw how the leadership of the MB, like its sister Al-Nahdha in Tunisia, hurried to Washington to kiss the hands of US imperialism and show that they could be reliant upon in maintaining the status quo: new faces, the army in the background, elections, but no changes in the fundamentals, i.e. the socio-economic structure that determines the daily bread an

Indonesia: the 1965-66 Mass Killings

Indonesia Gotta Catch all the Communists "A red scare is sweeping Indonesia, digging up the ghosts of the 1965-1966 mass killings, and threatening a fragile democracy." Looks interesting, but access requires subscription
Britain: A report Evidence suggested the biggest cause of the "acute" disadvantage felt by Muslim women is their religion, it said.  "The impact of Islamophobia on Muslim women should not be underestimated," it went on.  "They are 71% more likely than white Christian women to be unemployed, even when they have the same educational level and language skills."  They face particular issues of discrimination when applying for jobs because of the clothes some of them they wear because of their religion or culture, the MPs suggest. Married women in Muslim communities are often expected to be home-makers while their husbands are the breadwinners, the committee heard from expert witnesses.  "The impact of the very real inequality, discrimination and Islamophobia that Muslim women experience is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role," the committee said. ( source: t
" Infiltrating the Labour Party" Everyone wondering what Trotskyists do all day Victory in Defeat
" A careful assessment of the  Bolivarian Revolution  reveals that Chávez’s socialism only ever manifested itself rhetorically: real gains like income redistribution proved compatible with the global capitalist order." Why Twenty-First Century Socialism Failed
"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?
Arabic literature I haven't read Zaat , but it souns a good novel.  " Zaat  by Sonallah Ibrahim Sonallah was born in Cairo, became a Marxist in his youth, and spent several years in prison during the 1960s for his views. His novel  Zaat  tells the tale of modern Egypt though the eyes of its heroine, Zaat, during the periods of the three presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. It goes from the optimism of the early years following the revolution to the full-blown capitalisation and corruption of Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century. Expertly crafted, each of the chapters narrating Zaat’s life, marriage, work and social life is interspersed with a series of newspaper clippings and photograph captions detailing the political and economic events of the day – corruption cases, financial scandals, torture, foreign debt – that graphically lay open the banal thuggery of the rulers and the greed and stupidity of the nouveau-riche. Poignant, yet darkly hilarious at
Review of The Happiness Industry , a book by William Davies "What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits. One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away fre e, so as to form a closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay increases they give to their staff as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus greater effort from them. It seems that there is nothing that can’t be instrumentalised. Yet the whole point of happiness is that it is an end in itself, rather than a means to power, wealth and status. For a tradition of ethical thought from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hegel and Marx, human self-fulfilment springs from the practice of virtue, and this happens purely for its own sake. How to be happy is the chie
The Middle East and North Africa "Why do governments last? What kind of governments last? Increasingly, studies on the stability of regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region focus on how elites enfold the middle and working classes into socio-political orders. Such enfoldment happens through turning the state into not merely an instrument of violent class rule through extraction, but also part-and-parcel of everyday social reproduction." Critical Readings in Political Economies: Resilience
Britain  Via Michael Roberts The Keynesian economic advisors to the British leftwing Labour opposition leadership are ditching Corbyn and McDonnell as fast as they can.  Several Keynesians resigned in June from the economic advisory council, including Thomas Piketty.  Now Keynesians David Blanchflower and Simon Wren-Lewis have come out in support of Owen Smith, the MP running against Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election. Apparently they reckon Corbyn is 'unelectable'. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, and Simon Wren-Lewis, a professor at Oxford University, were both members of Labour’s economic advisory committee. Blanchflower said Smith had been better at "consulting businesses and economists" in three weeks than Corbyn’s leadership had over the last nine months. Wren-Lewis, who was still a member of the committee until meetings were suspended in June, wrote on his blog: “What seems totally
They make this "finding" look like a surprise. They conclude their finding with an already-bankrupt solution.  What do ordinary citizens in the Arab world really think about the Islamic State?
الأشقر يُشرِّح الربيع العربي وانتكاسته ويُعرِّي اليسار "الزائف"