Group items tagged

orderly

democracy has not solved the most pressing of our own social contradictions, they have become worse.

it is very hard to keep

But for a democratic surplus, that is, and the procedural rights and freedoms South Africans enjoy, such as assembly and to vote for whom we choose among contesting elites. It is the absence of an out-and-out dictator, it seems, that keeps South Africa’s poor and discontented in their place.

an actual, not merely branded by a well-meaning Al Jazeera, ‘day of rage’.

A riot releases a qualitatively different element of political alchemy. It makes no demand. It constitutes itself as power rather than asking for stuff from the state. People in this mode have a burst to them that ranks and ranks of police cannot hold.

The top two of these historically are bread prices and repression. It seems that Arab politics has added a third distinct motive to revolt, one flowing from the form of state that has arisen in a privatized, globalised, late capitalist and kleptocractic era

Egypt is also an example of a country that decolonized very early and whose nationalist leaders enjoyed much prestige for their role in winning independence and keeping sovereignty. These struggle credentials and symbologies, such as they are, do not last

A second wave of post-nationalist, Arab liberation struggles are patently taking place now with a coherent and infectious set of ideas informing them.