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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

Violence comes home: an interview with Arun Kundnani | openDemocracy - 0 views

opendemocracy.net/...e-interview-with-arun-kundnani

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.
  • colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form: whether as refugees seeking sanctuary, whether as the re-importing of authoritarian practices first practised in colonial settings, or indeed as terrorism.
  • What results is a mutual reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimise war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism. What is striking today is the tired rhetoric of military aggression – Hollande’s “pitiless war” – once again recycled, despite the obvious failures of the past 14 years.
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  • Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis
  • Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.
  • What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.
  • These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.
  • The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.
  • This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.
  • ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.
  • The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.
  • We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.
  • there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.
Arabica Robusta

From Democrats to Terrorists | Boston Review - 0 views

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

movements social arab intervention multinational mncs egypt corporations mubarak muslim brotherhood

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

The Globalization of Militarism » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...-globalization-of-militarism-2

social movements arab multinational mncs corporations intervention egypt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 21 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Can the individual survive, grow, expand, within an international system in which national self-interest trumps human needs and legitimates repression as the means to achieving hierarchically imposed goals? 
  • Whether authoritarianism is a vehicle for capitalism, or capitalism, for authoritarianism, we see that advanced capitalist-industrial states, perhaps integral to their mature stage of development, require the total rationalization of the productive system and the human counterpart to that system–a purposely dry formulation of Max Weber’s rational-legal framework in his Theory of Social and Economic Organization in order to suggest (beyond Weber in this one respect) that human beings necessitate the same degree of control and predictability, which is what we mean by rationalization, as the productive order itself. 
  • Egypt, admittedly, seems a dot on the political-economic-ideological hegemonic landscape; actually, it is more—although circumstances have thrust it forward for purposes of analysis.  Possibly another hot spot would have dramatized as well the aforementioned dynamics of the world situation, yet the nakedness of the repression provides, given Egypt’s geographic location, a good departure point. 
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  • What now emerges, because of the Israeli public-relations campaign through its embassies and consulates in world capitals on behalf of the Egyptian military (atrocities and all), known to analysts anyway, is the close ties between the two military commands. 
  • the Pacific-first strategy draws upon the entire arsenal of military resources, now pivoted to Asia, naval power to the front, for the purpose of cordoning off China so to prevent its military-economic challenge to American dominance.  This already appears futile, for without resorting to intervention or war, China has successfully gained entrance into world markets, has an investment record, as in Africa, second to none, and has undertaken massive projects in infrastructure, obviously at home, but also throughout the Third World.
  • The Egyptian military, however, on its part must earn the respect of Washington, more rather than less bloodletting, as in the summary execution of protesters in government hands, or the skyrocketing rate of casualties who are themselves unarmed.
  • The US wraps Sisi’s knuckles, but refuses to cut aid. Israel, per your report, is leading a campaign in world opinion on behalf of the Egyptian massacres, exposing itself for what it has become: a pariah state because of its disregard for social decency and the rights of others.
  • Egypt is not even a civil war, in which case one might choose sides and read into the situation matters of principle and ideology.  In this case, massive force confronts an essentially unarmed populace, raising issues which transcend mere side-taking and reflect instead the elemental question,
Arabica Robusta

Transnational Institute | Africa: Chilling the Arab Spring - 0 views

www.tni.org/...africa-chilling-arab-spring

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 20 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • If the IMF leadership praised the dictatorship, insisted on austerity and advocated squeezing poor people for more taxes, what business does it have today in giving similar advice to Tunisia, or anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa, or for that matter Europe or anywhere at all? What can we learn about IMF thinking in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as Palestine?
  • In contrast, there was no IMF conditionality aimed at reforming the dictatorship and halting widespread corruption by Ben Ali and his wife's notorious Trabelsi family, or lessening the two families' extreme level of business concentration, or ending the regime's reliance upon murderous security forces to defend Tunisian crony capitalism, or lowering the hedonism for which Ben Ali had become famous.
  • In that document, IMF staff worried that "managing popular expectations and providing some short-term relief measures will be essential to maintain social cohesion in the short term," and that this would come at a price: "external and fiscal financing gaps of US$9-12 billion... which would need to be filled with exceptional support from Egypt's multilateral and bilateral development partners, particularly given the limited scope for adjustment in the short term."
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  • Resuming privatization and increasing the role of carefully structured and appropriately priced PPPs should assist fiscal adjustment and mobilize private resources for infrastructure investment.
  • In addition to expanding Public Private Partnerships (PPPs, a euphemism for services privatization and outsourcing), the IMF named its priorities: "adopting as early as possible a full-fledged VAT, complementing energy subsidy reform with better-targeted transfers to the most needy, and containing the fiscal cost of the pension and health reforms."
  • As Adam Hanieh from London's School of Oriental and African Studies concluded just after the G8 summit and allied Arab states pledged $15 billion to Egypt, The plethora of aid and investment initiatives advanced by the leading powers in recent days represents a conscious attempt to consolidate and reinforce the power of Egypt's dominant class in the face of the ongoing popular mobilizations. They are part of, in other words, a sustained effort to restrain the revolution within the bounds of an "orderly transition" - to borrow the perspicacious phrase that the U.S. government repeatedly used following the ousting of Mubarak.
  • If successful, the likely outcome of this - particularly in the face of heightened political mobilization and the unfulfilled expectations of the Egyptian people - is a society that at a superficial level takes some limited appearances of the form of liberal democracy but, in actuality, remains a highly authoritarian neoliberal state dominated by an alliance of the military and business elites.[10]
  • They welcomed Libya's strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector and supporting growth in the non-oil economy. The fiscal and external balances remain in substantial surplus and are expected to strengthen further over the medium term, and the outlook for Libya's economy remains favorable (emphasis added).[12]
  • The fund's mission to Tripoli had somehow omitted to check whether the "ambitious" reform agenda was based on any kind of popular support. Libya is not an isolated case. And the IMF doesn't look good after it gave glowing reviews to many of the countries shaken by popular revolts in recent weeks.[13]
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