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Arabica Robusta

Don't move, Occupy! Social movement vs social arrest | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 02 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • While notable exceptions exist, the overall tendency of most accounts has been to compartmentalize and classify. Middle-Eastern resistance to dictatorship, Northern Mediterranean unrest against externally enforced austerity measures, and an Anglo-American revolt against the tyranny of the financial sector, have been analyzed as discrete cases each with their own structural and contingent dynamics. The results of this compartmentalization are all too predictable. Two years on, instead of a single image of global rebellion, we are left with fractured portraits of localized discontent.
  • Rather than view these uprisings within the recently sanitized history of revolution and an increasingly ineffectual grammar of social movements, it is high time to call the global occupations of public space what they are: social arrests.
  • The uprisings against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt were uniformly proclaimed as “expressing the will of the people”, while the strikingly similar manifestations of their Spanish, Greek, and American counterparts were all but ignored. This bifurcation in Western responses, one equally evident in governments and the mainstream media, is indicative of how we have come to perceive the role of mass political protest in the first decade of the 21st century. In the tradition of the French Revolution, uprisings against authoritarian rule are signified as acts of popular sovereignty — legitimate manifestations of a people unable to express their will through alternate channels — whereas similar protests within liberal representative democracies are marginalized as the acts of a raucous minority.
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  • these responses are the latest manifestation of a silent yet powerful recalibration of the terms democracy and revolution within our collective imaginations, a recalibration that has been ongoing since 1989. The revolutions of 1989 and their afterlives inaugurated a historical taming of the term, a taming that has carried over into the 21st century. This historical taming consists of two interrelated “police operations” conducted by Western liberal democracies: the first involving a particular way of talking about non-democratic revolutions, the second consisting of a conservative periodization of their own foundational pasts.
  • From a 21st century perspective, these revolutions are increasingly being judged not by what they achieved (the overthrow of the previous socio-political order) but by the new regime’s convergence or divergence from a free-market liberal democratic state.
  • The mass political uprisings that occurred after the establishment of democracy have, by this same narrative, been interpreted in a markedly different light. In the new American Republic, the crushing of the Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions have been seen as the (necessary) assertion of federal power and sovereignty, while in France the continued intrusions of the will of the French people into the National Assembly after 1789 are commonly cited as causes of the descent of the French Revolution into demagoguery and terror.
  • To get an idea of what differentiates the 2011 uprisings from previous forms of popular political struggle, let’s start with a short vignette from a protest action that typified the expression of extra-parliamentary discontent with governments before the 2011 uprisings.
  • Althusser’s image of the hailing of the police officer speaks of a state apparatus (and a correlative subjectivity) that is premised on the idea of arrest. The policeman’s shout essentially stops whoever hears it in his/her tracks, freezes the comings and goings of people.
  • But this anecdote underscores, albeit in hyperbolic fashion, the effective crisis in the theory and practice of social movements that defined the closing decades of the 20th century — a crisis linked to the very category of motion itself. It was the death rattle of a type of politics which — from the calls to abolish world slavery to the struggle for gender equality, from communism to civil rights — has defined contentious political struggle over the past 200 years through the category of movement. Instead of asking what kind of movement the new uprisings of the 21st century represent, the time has come to review the relevance and efficacy of the term itself. To do so we need to reconsider, both epistemologically and in praxis, the kinetics of contentious political struggle.
  • In its place, as another French political theorist, Jacques Rancière, has pointed out, has come an altogether different policing function, one encapsulated by the police officer urging bystanders to “move along!”, that “there is nothing to see here.” While the former is predicated on disruption, the latter above all ensures the constant circulation of people, goods, and services: “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.”
  • all of these sites and banners of contentious politics are directed not at a static state structure that arrests movement but are themselves in fact about stopping or arresting an unbridled and accelerating capitalist system. In this light, the very names given to struggle — the environmental movement, the anti-globalization movement, the slow food movement — become at best oxymoronic and at worst open to co-optation by the very forces they oppose (green-washing, the fair trade industry, etc.). We need to ask ourselves: why do we — and should we — still use the term movement to characterize contentious politics? What political conceptions and practices does this term privilege? What forms and histories of resistance has it obfuscated?
  • It became, through the life of the occupation, the stage on which the new Egyptian society was performed and presented. In their generosity, their tolerance, their humor, camaraderie, and song, the Egyptian people asserted their values and boundaries both to themselves and the whole world.
  • Alain Badiou once wrote, “In the midst of a revolutionary event, the people is made up of those who know how to solve the problems that the event imposes on them.” The people of Tahrir organized and orchestrated their own security, dealt with human and regular waste, and opened and operated a kindergarten so that mothers with small children could come to the square. They converted a Hardees restaurant into a free kitchen, a Kentucky Fried Chicken into a free clinic, organized networks for digital and print information, set up a pharmacy, handled hired agitators, and protected each other’s religious practices.
  • n the first week of June 2013, the actions taken by a coalition of activists against the destruction of a public park in central Istanbul spread to more than 60 cities and provinces, bringing several million people onto the streets. By June 8, the police had withdrawn from Taksim Square, leaving it at least temporarily in the hands of protesters. The protesters erected networks of makeshift barricades at 50 meter intervals along all major routes leading to the square. Within a week, Taksim and the adjacent Gezi Park became a “liberated zone”, a fragile oasis amidst the ongoing and increasingly violent clashes with police forces throughout much of Turkey.
  • There is as much attention devoted to how political and social life should be structured in the square — the ban on party and union insignia, the drawing of lots and time limits governing speech in the assembly, the coordination of meetings with public transit to assure greater participation, etc. — as there is to the what: articulating political manifestos and the position of the Assembly to its outside (whether in relation to the protests in the upper square or to Greek society more broadly).
  • The police conception of revolution and the crisis in the theory and practice of social “movements” form the dual backdrops for the global uprisings of 2011. Beginning in January of that year, a new form of revolt emerged in North Africa and spread, within months, around many parts of the globe. What actually took place at the sites of these revolts, in Zuccotti and Gezi Park, in the squares of Tahrir, Puerta del Sol and Syntagma, offered a seismic challenge to both the police conception of revolution and the theory and practice of political struggle. What happened in these squares was not movement but arrest, not dispersal but permanent occupation.
  • There is no doubt that the Greeks, Egyptians, Americans, Spaniards, Tunisians, and Turks first occupied the public spaces of their urban centers to voice political opposition. They came, as Stathis Gourgouris has pointed out, to “withdraw their consent” from the forces governing their lives. As the days passed, however, people had to figure out how to live and act together inside a square in order to sustain a revolt outside of it. In these sometimes very quotidian decisions, they came to define themselves by how they occupied and existed together.
  • The 800+ plus murders committed by the Egyptian security forces unfortunately paled in comparison to the atrocities later carried out in Libya and Syria, respectively, by Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Overt police brutality, by contrast, is usually the last resort of well-functioning liberal democratic regimes. It appears when the movies, the football rivalries, and the soul-deadening holiday music no longer suffice. Its entrance into the mainstream spotlight, in the United States, in Turkey, Greece, and Spain, is an indication that the urban occupations pose a fundamental challenge to representative democratic states and the clearest signal that its “soft” ideological apparatus is malfunctioning.
  • Yet, within two months of the birth of OWS and over 1.000 sister occupations throughout the US, the federal government coordinated a collective assault on these democratic spaces. The FBI and the Bureau of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the mayors and police departments of over 18 cities, forcibly evicted every major occupation throughout the US.
  • That the monitoring and entrapment of non-violent dissidents has been funded and conducted under the banner of counter-terrorism task forces is an even greater cause for alarm. These signs of an emergent police state within liberal democratic regimes (or more aptly: its passage from shadowed ghettos to front-page visibility) are the strongest testament to the novelty and latent strength of the 2011 uprisings.
  • Yet there is also no denying that almost all of these uprisings have ended in failure. The urban occupations have been dismantled and the aims of the occupiers have either been largely ignored (representative democracies), brutally suppressed (Libya, Syria), or their victories shown to be premature (Egypt).
  • Contacts between the global occupations, formed during the height of the uprisings, have persisted after their evictions. The common form of these occupations has allowed participants not only the opportunity to escape their individual isolation by talking and acting collectively, but more importantly, to draw connections across national grammars of discontent.
Arabica Robusta

2011 is not 1968: an open letter from Egypt | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • These news agencies interviewed political commentators or activists — increasingly becoming celebrities in their own right — to decipher the actions behind the images seen. As interpretation and then meaning were layered onto the images, a significant distortion took place to the acts behind the scenes. Non-Arabic language media outlets relied primarily on English-speaking activists, many of us middle class, many of us already politicized before January 25. Arabic-language news stations similarly turned often to middle class activists to speak on behalf of the revolution, each of whom interpreted every moment according to their respective ideological perspectives.
  • Our explanations also satisfied the practical requirements and standards of a media industry with a target audience accustomed to an interlocutor with a particular profile using a specific political discourse. This process drowned out the voices of the majority. No matter how hard we tried to argue otherwise, we fit the part — middle class, internet-savvy, youth, and thus revolutionary.
  • Other industries soon followed suit: right after journalism, academia, film, art, the world of NGOs relied on us as the ideal interpreter of the extraordinary. They all eventually bought into and further fueled the hyper-glorification of the individual, the actor, the youth subject, the revolutionary artist, the woman, the non-violent protester, the Internet user.
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  • Revolution became unimaginable without the imagery of a model demonstrator who protected you from the potential of being faced with the unknown: a collectivist uprising against a global system of domination within which there is no place for an onlooker.
  • There was no ideology but the ideology of desperation, the unbearable weight of hypocrisy and the limits of a people living in denial of it. The rising militancy amongst organized workers, and the growing opposition through small middle class movements like Kefaya — “Enough”– and the 6th of April movement, as well as through internet-based groups like Kolina Khaled Said (“We are all Khaled Said”) came about in direct reaction to the political ruling class’ ongoing repression of an entire population.
  • Similar to the uprising in Argentina in 2001, street protests in Egypt were marked by widespread participation across class, generational and gender lines. Like in 1968, students and workers both participated but in Egypt never as workers and students, but rather, and simply, as part of a collective and popular movement.
  • A significant moment that made the January 25 revolution thinkable was the rising wave of worker protests that started in 2004. The 27,000 textile workers that went on strike in the industrial city of Mahalla al-Kobra in Egypt’s Nile Delta in December 2006 enabled countless Egyptians that caught a glimpse of that mighty act, or of the multitude of protests that followed, to begin to imagine revolution.
  • The insults of a police officer towards an elderly woman on the street sparked an uprising. April 6 was significant in that the protest moved beyond the geographical lines of one industrial site and was carried out by an entire community. In 2006 workers had broken the social rules of conduct through their public protest.
  • 1968 would have been impossible without the waves of worker strikes and factory occupations in parallel with student protests. In the case of the January 25 revolution, while participants spanned all social classes, bringing together the middle class, the unemployed, workers and farmers, it was precarious workers and not Egypt’s traditional working class that acted as the radicalizing factor of the revolution. This may sound like a trivial differentiation but it is at the crux of the distinction between 2011 and 1968.
  • Workers reacted directly — even if rarely specifically articulated in these terms — to the implementation of the Western economic paradigm of neoliberalism. This meant the government eased the entry of foreign capitalists into Egyptian industry, they privatized factories and public sector enterprises, reduced subsidies while strongly encouraging production for export markets.
  • Precarious workers often maintain two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. Compared to them, Egypt’s traditional working class lives in more secure conditions. Though for usually pitiful pay, outrageous hours in the private sector, poor working conditions and minimal benefits, the traditional working class has fixed contracts and steady incomes which gives them a luxury standing within a working class milieu with few guarantees. Consequently, the working class begin to mimic the middle class’ cautious life style unwilling to risk losing their jobs.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Requiem for a revolution that never was - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...88470

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • This can be the only explanation for the theoretical and rhetorical acrobatics many are engaged in to reconcile their beliefs in democratic rights and revolutionary transformation with what is occurring right before their eyes in Egypt.
  • The popular use and acceptance of the term revolution to describe the events in Egypt over the last two years demonstrates the effectiveness of global liberal discourse to ‘de-radicalize,’ with the collusion of some radicals, even the term ‘revolution.’
  • there was no revolutionary process at all, in the sense that there was no transfer of power away from the class forces that dominated Egyptian society. No restructuring of the state; no new democratic institutions and structures created to represent the will and interests of the new progressive social bloc of students, workers, farmers, women’s organizations etc.; and no deep social transformation. In fact, the rapes and sexual assaults that occurred during the recent mobilizations were a graphic reminder that sexist and patriarchal ideas still ruled, untouched by this so-called revolutionary process.
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  • The initial demand was for the end of the Mubarak dictatorship and the creation of a democratic system that respected democratic rights -- the essential component of an authentic national democratic revolutionary process. However, the maturation of this process was arrested due to three factors: (i) the seizure of power by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) on 11 February, (ii) the channeling of mass dissent primarily into the electoral process, and (iii) the failure of the oppositional forces to organize sustainable mass structures to safeguard and consolidate the developing revolutionary situation.
  • This is important because the liberal appropriation of the term ‘revolution’ to describe everything from the events in Libya and Syria to the Green movement in Iran not only distorts social reality but also advances a dangerous narrative. That narrative suggests that revolutionary change takes place as a result of spectacle. It devalues organizing and building structures from the bottom up as unnecessary because it is the theater that is important; the episodic show; the display that refutes Gil Scott Heron’s admonition that ‘the revolution will not be televised!’
  • In fact, under President Morsi, the military never really went away. It maintained an independent space in the Egyptian state and economy.
  • For US policy-makers, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Morsi government were never seen as an alternative to Hosni Mubarak. Despite the repression meted out to members of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Mubarak regime, it was well understood that the Brotherhood was part of the Egyptian economic elite and open to doing business with the West. Therefore, Morsi was seen as an acceptable and safe civilian face to replace Mubarak while the US continued its influence behind the scenes through the military.
  • The class-based, social and economic interests of the military mean that it will oppose any fundamental transformation of the Egyptian economy and society, the ostensible aim of the ‘revolution.’ Significantly, this means that the power of the military is going to have to be broken if there is to be any prospect of revolutionary change in Egypt.
  • The demand for the end of the dictatorship was an awesome demonstration of people-power that created the potential for revolutionary change. The problem was that the dictatorship had severely undermined the ability of alternative popular forces to develop and acquire the political experience and institutional foundations that would have positioned them to better push for progressive change and curtail the power of the military. Unfortunately for Egypt, the force that had the longest experience in political opposition and organizational development was the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • when the Egyptian military -- a military that has not demonstrated any propensity for supporting democratic reforms -- intimated that it would step in, the mass position should have been ‘no to military intervention, change only by democratic means’ -- a position that a more mature and authentically independent movement might have assumed if it was not being manipulated by powerful elite forces internally and externally. It was wishful thinking that bordered on the psychotic for liberal and radical forces in the country and their allies outside to believe that a democratic process could be developed that reflected the interests of the broad sectors of Egyptian society while disenfranchising the Muslim Brotherhood, a social force that many conservatively suggest still commands the support of at least a third of the Egyptian population, and is the largest political organization in the country.
  • The powerful national elites that bankrolled the anti-Morsi campaign and their external allies, including Saudi Arabia and the US, have successfully set in motion a counter-revolutionary process that will fragment the opposition and marginalize any radical elements.
Arabica Robusta

Egypt's revolution won't end with the presidential election - Mail & Guardian Online - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months. A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect.
  • There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground.
  • Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion about the revolution.
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  • The first is that the metric of revolutionary success lies solely in the formal arena of institutional politics and the development of democratic mechanisms within it. The second is that Tahrir, along with the ludicrously titled “Facebook youth” who populated the square in January and February last year, is the only alternative space in which pressure on the formal arena is thrashed out.
  • And it’s that energy, that those who benefit from the status quo, from western governments to multinational corporations, really fear. Little wonder that there has been a rush by the world’s most powerful entities – from Hilary Clinton and David Cameron to Morgan Chase and General Electric – to simultaneously venerate Tahrir (as long as the demands voiced within it don’t overstep the mark), echo the generals’ calls for “stability” (shutting down broader discourses of dissent in the process) and form links with the largely neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood (whose policies, despite anguished op-eds in Washington think-tank journals, pose little threat to American interests, and indeed offer up many opportunities).
  • What they’re less keen to acknowledge – because it carries the revolution out of its sheltered borders – are the other trenches that are increasingly being etched at the margins of Egyptian society, dividing those who have reaped pharaonic-esque riches as a result of 20-odd years of “structural adjustment” from those left behind in zones of neoliberal exclusion.
  • Forget Shafiq’s advertising hoardings – the revolution is everywhere and it is potent.
  • As the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, actions that appear to be individualistic strategies for survival and not explicitly political attempts to bring down elites can, in the right circumstances, become unstoppable and interlinked channels of mass rejection, a struggle for real agency in an era of globalised corporate cosmopolitanism that strives to deny it to so many.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Protests across Africa: Different attention for different countries? - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...71379

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • As Gaddafi finds new ways to attack Libyans, Libyans unleash their fury against his deployment of mercenaries from West and East Africa as migrant workers from south of the Sahara face increasing attacks and are prevented from leaving the country. Given the racism in Libya and low status of foreign black workers, it was only a matter of time before innocent people were attacked.
  • The language and subtext being used in some of the reports is cause for concern. In a video by Al Jazeera, ‘Immigrant workers under suspicion’, the US-based Frontlines of Revolution uses the headline ‘White Arab supremacy: Revolution or Moor black oppression?’ There is no doubt that there that racism is rife in Libya and that black foreign workers are being targeted, but language like this and lack of historical or political context only inflames the situation
  • Nonetheless, the assault on black Africans is disturbing, not least because the uprisings in North Africa have been framed within an Arab/Middle East context, not just by Western media but more importantly by Al Jazeera, which itself has become part of the revolutionary story. This in itself further antagonises Arab–African/Arab–black tensions and also raises the monumental question as to who is an African and what do we mean by Africa. Pambazuka News editor Firoze Manji addresses this in a recent interview with Al Jazeera – could this possibly be a response to growing criticism of their framing the North African uprisings solely in an ‘Arab’ context?
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  • ‘They wanted to stop us from protesting, we protested. We have a non-violent philosophy, which we maintained in the face of extreme violence. An incredible force of young Cameroonians. We started out almost 300 and ended up less than 50 but (being a) nugget has banished fear, for ourselves and for many other Cameroonians. The population did not join us in droves, but: not one person out of hundreds complained about the blocking on the road; If we ever doubted it, we now have extreme clarity on the absolute need for change and the absolute need for unwavering determination in bringing it about in our country.’ Six members of Cameroon O’Bosso have been arrested and remain in detention.
  • I am sure global corporate media are aware of what is happening and it’s clear that choices are made on which conflicts and revolutions are covered.
  • The mistake the media and activists in the West make is to believe that the voice of revolution has to be highly vocal and visible to their world. On the contrary, there are thousands of activists and social justice movements from across Africa and the diaspora who are totally committed to achieving political and social change in their respective countries. It just takes a little effort and time to know what is happening.
  • As informed citizens and if we are to see ourselves as part of the revolutionary process, then we need to try and grasp an understanding of the layers of narrative and actions which are taking place, not just across Africa but on a global level.
Arabica Robusta

Has Tunisia forgotten where its revolution began? | openDemocracy - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • She pointed out that it meant that all would be promptly released including, “above all Ali Seriati [chief of Ben Ali’s presidential guard] and Rafik Haj Kacem [former interior minister] This is serious. It is what happened under Ben Ali. So it is like we didn’t have a revolution.”  In previous trials Ali Seriati had been sentenced to 20 years and Rafik Haj Kacem, 15 years.
Arabica Robusta

"The next battle will be much more violent": Interview with Philip Rizk - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • There was something very important in this phase which leads up to the mass demonstrations on June 30th 2013 and the following days: The media played an extremely different role than they did in early 2011 and then again after the military coup on July 3rd. Priot to June 30th, They actually covered these events very clearly and showed the police suppression on the streets
  • Just to give a little anecdote: Our group Mosireen, that in the past had filmed things that were for us the perspective of the street, almost did not have a role any longer because so much of this repression was being covered by television and news outlets.
  • To rephrase the question in more concrete terms: Were these mass protests a response to continuing repression and social misery or did the specific nature of the MB as an Islamic party, slowly trying to “islamicise” society, play a role? Initially opposition was growing because repression was maintained and especially because it was covered more than in any other period.
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  • The media succeeded in playing on this by portraying that what Egyptians want is by no means a kind of »secular« society, or state, but they don’t want religious extremists either. And the discourse leading up to the summer of 2013 was increasingly pointing out the extremism of the MB.
  • the armed militants in Sinai fighting the military were quickly identified with the MB although again there is no proof of this connection. The situation there is very difficult to assess and I have serious doubts about a lot of media stories, especially if they are based on statements by the Ministry of Interior or the military. They use these kinds of situations to spread rumors and fear. So, all this is happening in the background leading up to the summer of 2013.
  • But I personally do not believe that the MB had the agenda of becoming religious extremists. Up until now, all the examples the media, the military and Sisi have used to portray the MB as some kind of terrorist entity, there is zero proof of any of that. That is not to say that it could not ever happen. But I do not believe that it has happened. It wouldn't be in the interest of the MB whatsoever. But this narrative has succeeded and provided the perfect enemy required to increase patriotism and suppress a lot of civil rights.
  • t was in the interests of the security regime in Egypt, the military and the Ministry of Interior and so these apparatuses co-opted it. Fights occurred on various occasions, MB headquarters were attacked and vandalised, and every time the Ministry of Interior would support the protesters.
  • Some people would say that this kind of plan, to eventually scapegoat the MB, had already been organized when the MB came to power. I don’t think this was the case. The MB was by far the entity with the most following in the streets. When the elections happened, in 2012, the generals were not seen as that favorable. Because this was the end of the period of the military junta known as SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), where some of their violence against the population was becoming more and more known and there was actually a growing harsh criticism. Many people opposed the idea of a new military regime taking power and I don’t think the generals considered this strategic at the time. So there was this common sentiment for civilian leadership, and the MB was the best entity to fill that role.
  • Here we cannot exclude foreign interests. The USA, the Russians, the Europeans, all of them have some push and pull. When members of the American Congress came to visit they were very happy with the MB because they agreed on all the major points. They were not going to change any of the previous agreements, so Camp David agreement with Israel was going to be maintained, according to their promises. And the MB promised to continue the neoliberalisation of the economy. There are a lot of military links between Egypt and the US, and it was clear that it was an acceptable scenario for the MB to take power at that time.
  • two things happened. One, the MB were not able to maintain enough popularity. So the streets remained unstable; protests continued, especially spontaneous protests with increasing violence. This increasing instability was to nobody’s interest. Not to any of the foreign powers interests, because anyone with money and power is interested in a stable Egypt. It does not really matter who is in power – whether they are a military dictatorship or have a religious agenda – as long as they can maintain a stable situation. And the MB were proving themselves increasingly unable to do that. Secondly, as mentioned before, a lot of the government structure that the MB inherited remained to a certain extent loyal to the old regime. So there was this constant competition, and this internal, slow, everyday opposition to what the MB could do. But at the same time, part of this opposition was also to the MB trying to place their individuals in positions of power.
  • What was the situation like when the military began massacring people? The situation was really shocking. At the end of the day, it was a military strategy of divide and conquer. The military really succeeded in dividing the opposition, by creating a scenario where you are either with the MB or you are not. There is nothing else. Protests that were not pro-MB, but simply criticized the military, were quickly portrayed by the media but also by military spokespersonS as supporting of the MB and therefore immediately delegitimized. Sadly, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of previously very active and well-known figures in the revolution, took this position to not criticize the military yet and to rather give them a chance and see what kind of transition they would be able offer us because our main concern right now was making sure the MB do not have another chance at power.
  • Is this also true for the workers? First of all, there is no workers movement. There was a wave of workers’ strikes. I have written about this in my article '2011 is not 1968'. Tunisia, for example, has a very different historical background as far as labour organizations are concerned. In Egypt, they were very harshly suppressed. So strikes continued, but they always happened in a separate sphere from street protests. Sadly, these two processes are quite separate.
  • In my view, there wasn’t a kind of momentum of a workers’ movement. There was a very significant wave of worker actions, but it was extremely difficult to mobilize workers even to have solidarity to a nearby strike or action. Because jobs are so threatened, you do not want to lose your job. In certain periods people were willing to risk their jobs in order to improve their situation, but very rarely for political ends.
  • When the MB won, strikes quieted down for a while because there was a broad perception that things would change. I remember having conversations where people were saying: »This age of corruption is over, privatization is over.« There had been promises that there would be no more privatization …
  • As I mentioned earlier, the powerful players both inside and outside of Egypt have as their main interest a strong stable state. And the way the cards have been played is in the interests of this kind of stability.
  • Capitalism is not a thing, I would rather want to speak of the spirit of capitalism that in the Egyptian context has manifested itself as a convoluted oligarchy, where the power lies with those with capital, with control of militarized statist institutions. Capitalism in this form in Egypt will only drive people that are not a part of this club of rulers deeper into crisis. Prices are rising excessively as neoliberal policies are maintained by the Sisi government as they were by Morsi. Gas prices have gone up, transport and food prices are constantly going up and wages remain constant, jobs are hard to get ahold of. The more the guarantees for a decent way of life wane, the more capitalism approaches its end. The next battle will be much more violent.
  • A further question on the economic prospects: the general situation seems to be very shaky but there have been massive capital inflows from the Gulf states and grandiose development plans more recently. Many people are still convinced of the good interests of the current regime. With prices going up, there is a perception of foreign funds flowing into the country as a positive thing.
  • The Suez canal is seen as a national treasure. So we are going to make more money out of it? Great. As far as we know, all the income from the Suez canal used to go straight into Mubarak's coffers. I was part of a group that was working on debt in the past couple of years and we don't know where that money went. So if they are going to increase the profits from there, where is that going to go?
  • I don't think this is going to happen in the next few months, but it will come back. The conditions that brought people to the streets in 2011 are already here and so protest will return in the near future. And I think that it will be much more violent the next time, from both sides. I think you can't discredit what happened in the past three years, even though many people paid with their lives or are paying with heavy prison sentences. The kind of consciousness that has been created through these moments of revolt and the various different debates and mobilizations that have occurred, it can’t be undone. It has left a very deep impression on the population at large. We have gone through a lot of waves in the past four years. In 2011, in 2012, there were already heavy moments of depression and almost regret for what has occurred. It is far from over.
  • Looking back on the years since the so-called revolution in 2011 one can see that people were able to topple governments, there were massive workers‘ struggles and a strong youth movement striving for freedom rights. At the same time, however, people first supported the military against Mubarak, then the MB against the military and finally the military against the MB… After the coup in July 2013, there was widespread acceptance of the military’s massacres. How could the next wave of struggles look like?
  • I think the system really needs to collapse in order for some kind of better form of society to emerge. But what that means, I have no idea. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. I think one of the important lessons to learn here is that things cannot easily happen in Egypt in a vacuum, apart from what happens elsewhere in the world. Because you constantly have this influence from the outside, whether it is from the Gulf or from the western states that are sending in at this point weapons and military training and financial support and maintain their trade agreements in order to shape the power constellation. So for things to significantly change in Egypt there needs to be a significant change in those different centers of power as well.
Arabica Robusta

ZCommunications | Reflections on the Arab 1848 by Rahul Mahajan | ZNet Article - 0 views

www.zcommunications.org/the-arab-1848-by-rahul-mahajan

arab social mubarak egypt movements multinational mncs corporations telecom

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Egyptian military, if it negotiates with the people (whatever exactly this would mean), will want to do so in the framework of the existing constitution, in which a national assembly dominated by the NDP (National Democratic Party–Mubarak’s organization) is supposed to remain in power until 2015. If the January 25 movement is not able to assert the sovereignty of the people and its special role as their representative, the chances of real democratization are minuscule.
  • Les Gelb, so apt a spokesman for the U.S. foreign policy establishment that he almost seems a self-caricature, sums up the reasons for worrying about any precipitous removal of Mubarak:   “The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”   When the people have been excluded from being a legal entity, then it is impossible for them to be one. This is a problem insurrectionaries have always faced and will always face. But it is up to those people to decide whether they are, in Gelb’s charming term, a “mob” or whether they are the legitimate expression of the popular will. If they do so, they will get no support from the United States, Europe, the United Nations, other Arab states (except perhaps Tunisia), the bien pensants of the “international community,” or Mark Zuckerberg. The will need support from the one place they may actually get it–what the New York Times dubbed the “other superpower,” global public opinion.   Of course, Gelb, reprehensible as he is, has a point. Who will the military negotiate with and how? Tunisia and Egypt are striking because they belong to that class of revolutions where, suddenly, as if out of the blue, “everybody” is on the same side. Seemingly, the whole country unites and wants the dictator out. Of course, this is not literally true; there are always, if nothing else, the pampered security forces, cronies of the dictator, and a small paid-off subgroup of the elite. But if a vast majority of all sectors of society outside the dictator’s small group is on one side, revolution can come very swiftly.
  • What is a strength in the tumultuous phase of rapid mobilization becomes a weakness once the question becomes, “What is to be done?” It is difficult and tiring to protest, deal with the disruption of daily life, see people be beaten and killed–at some point, it can be comforting to accept the word of some source of traditional authority that you can go home now, the problems will be fixed. I hope that will not happen in Egypt, but there is no use in anyone telling the people who are so heroically making this revolution what they should want next.
Arabica Robusta

The Arabs in Africa - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...the-arabs-in-africa

social movements arab egypt multinational corporations mncs mubarak intervention telecom africa

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Although just one aspect of the current situation in Libya, I suggest that it should give us pause to consider the stakes of this conceptualization of a basic Arab-African or Arab-black antagonism—one that not only formulates these as mutually exclusive categories but also pins them against one another in the context of the Libyan revolution.
  • Just a handful of commentators have questioned the veracity of the “African mercenaries” charge while maintaining their support for the uprising.
  • there is scant evidence that these people are, first of all, participating in state-sponsored violence against the popular uprising, and, second, were brought into Libya for this explicit purpose. On the contrary, we know that Libya was already home to a significant number of foreign workers—including some two million black African migrant workers. We should also note Libya’s documented history of racial discrimination. Almost one year to the day before the February 17 Day of Anger that jumpstarted the revolution, UN Watch, an independent organization monitoring the UN, issued a statement entitled, “Libya Must End Racism Against Black African Migrants and Others.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In light of this recent history, the videos and photographs of “African mercenaries” raise disturbing questions. Are the men we see pictured here perpetrators of state-sponsored violence, are they victims of racism, or is it possible that both of these things may be true at the same time?
  • What we can learn from the framing of violence in Darfur is that Arabs are not considered “Africans” by policymakers, journalists, and organizations, and that Arabs and Africans may be seen by these same groups as fundamentally different, and consequently face fundamentally different kinds of problems—suffering differently, inflicting harm differently, and handling politics differently—in a manner that hinders “our” own consideration of them together.
  • The area that is considered vulnerable to this regional unrest stretches at least from Algeria to Iran and has been called the Arab world or the Middle East, despite the fact that Iranians are not Arab and most of Algeria lies west of France. This geography does not, however, appear to reach far south of the Mediterranean, at least where Africa is concerned. Although the two successful revolutions thus far lay on the African continent, there has been an overall failure to consider their effect in terms of sub-Saharan African politics and places such as Gabon, Mauritania, Djibouti, and Uganda.
  • politics of geopolitics. First, what we should recognize is that terms such as “Africa” and “the Middle East” function not only on the basis of geography or actual political ties, but as stand-ins for racial signifiers. Despite a shared history of European colonialism in its different manifestations, Africa and the Middle East nonetheless bear extremely different histories of representation or historical imaginaries within the European continent (which is, I would point out, also not a continent, but something like a subcontinent).
  • If Qaddafi has brought in foreign mercenaries--and I'm not saying he hasn't--this doesn't change the way the discourse around these mercenaries is tied up in broader race relations.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Glimpses of the Tunisian revolution: The victory of dignity over fear - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...72930

social movements arab multinational corporations mncs egypt intervention mubarak telecom tunisia dakar wsf

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 May 11 - No Cached
  • We expressed our admiration and solidarity and we offered our support and the promise to carry their stories, their struggles and their aspirations with us and share them in whatever ways we could as our commitment to contribute to imagine and construct a better world, more just and equal, each of us in the places where we live and work.
  • We also explained that we wished to explore the viability of a regional and continental Social Forum in Tunisia to celebrate the revolution and support the transition.
  • Enthusiastic citizens discussed and negotiated their differences, exchanged their experiences, disagreed vehemently, even shouted their frustration and disappointments contributing to give form to their visions and inspiring in each other actions and daily practices towards the establishment of a new society.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In a large hall, over hundred people gathered to welcome us. In the intense atmosphere made hazy by the smoke of cigarettes inhaled with anxiety and pain, mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and friends told us their tragedies, their losses, their suffering, their fight, their hope. In a more intimate setting on the third floor of the big building, we met later with others who lost their beloved and cried for justice, who were tortured and demanded their rights.
  • we asked each other with incredulity how we could tell the genuine from the demagogic and the demagogic from the outright false among the rhetoric that seemed to express the same discourses of liberation and the same aspiration to justice and development for all?
  • Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, ‘in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists’).
  • But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world).
  • the Italian Prime Minister and his delegation met their Tunisian counterparts in Tunis to discuss an agreement on the migrant crisis which involved shutting down Italy and Europe and send back the thousands deluded migrants who thought hospitality was one of the values of a continent that likes to preach to the world cosmopolitan ideals. If those migrants knew that in Italy a debate rages on the extent to which the boats that carry them, in which they risk their lives and die by the dozens, can be shot at to prevent their landing on national shores!
  • This revolution may have already changed the stereotypes of the submissive, agency deprived, Arab. But as the transition processes develop they may contribute to the elaboration of new democratic practices whose resonance exceeds the national boundaries and make the Tunisian youth rise to the secular Pantheon of historical revolutionaries.
Arabica Robusta

IPS - With Egyptian Loan Request, Some Fear Loss of Revolution's Gains | Inter Press Se... - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...fear-loss-of-revolutions-gains

movements social arab multinational corporations mncs intervention egypt mubarak telecom imf world bank neoliberalism structural adjustment debt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Many are now expressing anxiety over the negotiations’ lack of transparency and the possibility that the Egyptian government could agree to onerous conditions that may force it to cut back on spending on social welfare and safety nets. “Many fear that a new era of dependency will start, even after the revolution,” Amr Adly, economic and social justice director with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo-based watchdog, told IPS.
  • “The best way for the international community to support a fresh start for the Egyptian people would be to support an independent commission to determine if much of the debt accrued during the Mubarak era is illegitimate and thus should be cancelled, before any new debt is undertaken,” Deborah James, with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a think tank here in Washington, told IPS.
  • Morsi’s government is clearly aware of its lack of economic expertise, and thus has chosen to keep around some important members of Mubarak’s government, including the governor of the central bank, Farouk Al-Okdah, and others. “These are the very members of the neoliberal team once in charge under Mubarak,” Adly says. “These bureaucrats and technocrats are quite conservative, and there is the idea that they have been kept in office in order to negotiate with the IMF and the World Bank.”
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  • On Wednesday, Lagarde said that the IMF is “responding quickly” and sending a technical team in early September. That same day, Prime Minister Hisham Qandi said he would hope for an agreement by the end of the year. If an agreement happens, Egypt would be the 20th African country to be indebted to the IMF, according to 2011 statistics. If the final agreed amount is anywhere near the request, the Egyptian loan would be by far the largest on the continent.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Egypt: Struggles that fuelled a revolution - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...80143

movements social arab multinational corporations mncs egypt intervention mubarak

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Although world and Egyptian media have been fixated on the symbolic Tahrir Square, little attention has been directed towards places where many Egyptians converging on the square actually live. Bulaq, only a few hundred meters north of Tahrir Square, is one such neighbourhood. The residents of Bulaq represent the essence of why Egyptians erupted in mass protests last year. This is a community that has suffered for nearly forty years at the hands of the Sadat and Mubarak regimes, which aimed to erase the district from Cairo’s map. ‘Bulaq: Among the Ruins of an Unfinished Revolution’ is a short documentary film that shifts the focus from the square and into a community at the heart of the struggle for social justice.
  • The repeal of the Emergency Law and the demand for social justice, including housing rights, have been cornerstones of the Tahrir movement.
  • Nearly sixty percent of Cairo’s residents today live in so-called ‘informal areas.’ These are areas that urbanized without the guidance of a government-approved urban plan. A more accurate description of those areas is ‘improvised urbanism,’ as they continue a long tradition of improvised planning found in Cairo for centuries prior to the city’s relatively brief encounter with formal planning from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
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  • In the 1970s, however, Sadat envisioned the area as a new business district to showcase Egypt’s economic realignment with global capitalism. An aggressive campaign of forced evictions and relocation was commenced. Residents were forced out of their homes and given flats in concrete blocs built on the desert fringes of Cairo. This campaign continued under the Mubarak regime. One of the residents filmed narrates her ordeal when she was evicted in 1982, only to return later.
  • Despite the economic hardships and the deteriorating physical environment, the community is thriving socially. The filmmaker intercuts interviews with scenes of everyday life: a woman smoking outside her home, a butcher cutting meat, a child on a bicycle, and a man who is uncomfortable with the presence of a camera and demands to know what is being filmed.
  • It would have made a stronger case against government policies if the audience had the chance to hear from officials directly how they view the issue of Bulaq. The multinational developers and hotel chains that also benefit from this government policy are also unheard. An interview with the management of the Hilton Hotel overlooking the district, for example, could have been interesting.
  • ‘Those responsible for demolitions have to be tried,’ says one man. ‘In neighborhoods like Bulaq we love each other and work together like one family,’ says a woman. Another man confirms that ‘the owners of this place are the people living here; we own this place.’
Arabica Robusta

From Democrats to Terrorists | Boston Review - 0 views

www.bostonreview.net/...therhood-terrorist-group-egypt

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • There were many reasons to be pessimistic about the Revolution's prospects: Egypt's endemic poverty; the weakness of civil society; the absence of organized political parties, aside from the Muslim Brotherhood, with deep roots; the sharp ideological divisions between political groups; and the overbearing and omnipresent security services and military, both of which remained largely intact after the uprisings. 
  • The revolutionaries failed to recognize the extent of the structural challenges to building a liberal democracy, challenges that may have doomed the prospects of any democratic transition. They should have seen the political process that began with Mubarak’s resignation as a down payment toward a democratic future. But, rather than working with the Islamist forces who had been their allies in the January 25 Revolution, the revolutionaries called their political rivals traitors, transforming them into enemies of the revolution. Revolutionaries eschewed formal politics in favor of demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes, crippling the legitimacy of the elected Brotherhood government. They ignored the fact that the Brotherhood, unlike the military, could be removed from office peacefully by the ballot box.
  • This has paved the way for the return of a chauvinistic nationalist discourse in which no conspiracy theory is too bizarre: a former Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court justice (and prominent supporter of the military) claimed that President Obama is secretly a member of the Brotherhood, and Vodafone was recently accused of using puppets in commercials to communicate coded messages on behalf of the Brotherhood. 
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Is the Egyptian revolution dead? - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...88471

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Millions have taken to the streets since January 2011 demanding jobs, income, democratic rights and a shift in the relations between Egypt and Israel that has been frozen since the advent of the Camp David Accords signed in 1979. Egyptian workers and youth have played a pivotal role in these struggles through mass demonstrations, strikes and rebellions. Just recently workers in the utility sector and the arts have staged occupations demanding better wages and conditions of employment.
  • The Guardian newspaper reported recently that ‘Hundreds of British troops are being prepared to deploy to North Africa to tackle al Qaeda-inspired extremists. Under secret plans being drawn up urgently by top brass, UK soldiers would be sent ‘within months’ to the region to help train the Libyan army.’ (1 July) This plan will involve at least 2,000 Libyan ‘soldiers’ who will be trained in an effort to counter so-called ‘terrorist’ threats in Libya and throughout the region.
  • However, a number of political questions remain outstanding. Will the FJP and other Islamic parties be allowed full participation in the proposed elections? Also will conditions improve for the Egyptian workers, farmers and youth under the interim governing council? In all likelihood the problems of massive unemployment and poverty will continue with no program aimed at empowering the majority within society.
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  • In order for Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Turkey to move forward there must be a revolution led by the people and not controlled by the military which represents in Egypt the interests of the national bourgeoisie in league with US imperialism. When such a revolutionary movement takes power in Egypt it can influence the political atmosphere throughout North Africa and the Middle East.
Arabica Robusta

ROAR Magazine - powered by FeedBurner - 0 views

feeds.feedburner.com/roarmag

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • On November 26, 2013, we saw the first implementation of a new Egyptian law effectively banning any and all protest not approved and regulated by the Ministry of Interior. This is the same Interior Ministry whose soldiers have killed thousands of protesters, maimed tens of thousands and tortured unknown others in recent years. This security apparatus is acting with renewed arrogance since the July coup that returned the Egyptian Army to a position of direct authority.
  • Hours later, the “No Military Trials for Civilians” campaign organized a protest against the new anti-protest law as well as the inclusion of military trials for civilians in the constitution currently being drafted. This time, the police beat and arrested dozens, among them some of Egypt’s most renowned activists, the same people who fought the injustice and oppression of Mubarak, the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and now Abdel Fattah al Sisi and the puppet civilian government in place since the coup.
  • Hours later, the police stormed Alaa Abdel Fattah’s home without a search warrant, beat him and his wife and kidnapped him; all this for charges of organizing the protest on the 26th. The following morning the prosecution questioned him at the Cairo Security Directorate and extended his detention to four days pending investigation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.
Arabica Robusta

Comrades from Cairo: "we don't need permission to protest" | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

roarmag.org/...ont-need-permission-to-protest

social movements human rights africa egypt repression military al-sisi

shared by Arabica Robusta on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • On November 26, 2013, we saw the first implementation of a new Egyptian law effectively banning any and all protest not approved and regulated by the Ministry of Interior. This is the same Interior Ministry whose soldiers have killed thousands of protesters, maimed tens of thousands and tortured unknown others in recent years. This security apparatus is acting with renewed arrogance since the July coup that returned the Egyptian Army to a position of direct authority.
  • Hours later, the “No Military Trials for Civilians” campaign organized a protest against the new anti-protest law as well as the inclusion of military trials for civilians in the constitution currently being drafted. This time, the police beat and arrested dozens, among them some of Egypt’s most renowned activists, the same people who fought the injustice and oppression of Mubarak, the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and now Abdel Fattah al Sisi and the puppet civilian government in place since the coup.
  • Hours later, the police stormed Alaa Abdel Fattah’s home without a search warrant, beat him and his wife and kidnapped him; all this for charges of organizing the protest on the 26th. The following morning the prosecution questioned him at the Cairo Security Directorate and extended his detention to four days pending investigation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.
Arabica Robusta

The Economics of Egypt's Coup » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...the-economics-of-egypts-coup

movements social arab intervention multinational egypt mncs corporations mubarak

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A major problem for foreign investors is angst about the legality of much of the privatization carried out under Mubarak. After the 2011 uprising, the corruption involved began to be exposed, a raft of legal challenges were launched, and judges started overturning deals under popular pressure.
  • Investors want to have their cake and eat it: no more corrupt Mubarakite officials, and at the same time no more challenges to corrupt investment deals (which often strip a state company of its assets and lay off workers, spiriting any profits abroad).
  • The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government tried to square the circle. It allowed the illegal privatisations to be challenged, turned back the massive corruption, and encouraged a new class of small and more devout businessmen to build a new Egypt, emulating the Turkish miracle which unfolded under the Islamists there.
  • Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 14
     
    "A Bank of America report in February described a presidential bid by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as "market-friendly in the near term", but warned that Sisi's holdover of officials and discredited policies from the Mubarak era did not bode well in the long term, suggesting it was "a watered down version of the pre-revolution regime"."
Arabica Robusta

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...201122414315249621.html

egypt mubarak arab movements social multinational mncs corporations intervention

shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.
  • Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.
  • Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.
  • It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).
  • However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system.
  • it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly
  • The period of military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming permanent.
  • In each case when governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, "technocrats" were brought in to help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create the institutional infrastructure for their successors.
  • The notion that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave the incestuous relation between governance and business intact.
  • Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell.
  • Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next).
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