Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

China's internal colony

The Muslim Brotherhood's women activists

An interesting part in this analysis is "democracy", especially the one that should make you question the constant drumming in the mainstream (Western media) that the Tiananmen Square movement was about "democracy" as the Western liberals define it, inflating the role of students in the movement, and devoiding it from any class content.  A part which sounds weak for me is the first one about the scope of workers' control, as the writer has not backed his argument by evidence. The part on the historical process from the 1960s until 1989 is illuminating. The last part, post-1989, also sounds weak, for it does not take into consideration the industrial revolution China has embarked on since 1978 and its ongoing "tormented birth" in the passage to "modernity". ***** Students constantly tried to exclude workers, seeing the movement as “their own,” and sought to maintain its “purity.” Walder and Gong pointed out that until the end of May

Like in most analyses, missing is the historical fact of an overlap of sect and class in some Arab countries. Example: one has to look at the position of the majority of the Syrian bourgeoisie towards the uprising and the regime since the outbreak of the uprising and then the war. Postel:  In recent years, a narrative has taken hold in Western policy and media circles that attributes the turmoil and violence engulfing the Middle East to supposedly ancient sectarian hatreds. "Sectarianism" has become a catch-all explanation for virtually all of the regionʹs problems. This narrative can be found across the political spectrum – from right-wing voices with openly anti-Muslim agendas, to softer liberal-centrist articulations and even certain commentators on the left. In its various forms, this sectarian essentialism has become a new conventional wisdom in the West. It is an intellectually lazy, ideologically convenient and deeply Orientalist narrative. The West's "

Not bad! However, could we speak of economics without considering "uneven and fettered development", regional and global capitalism, productivity, class? The economics of the Arabellion

Kuwait " Even as the perpetually fragmented opposition faces harsh repression, it is finding common ground in the issues of corruption and economic justice. State efforts that shut down all remaining spaces for open debate represent, in a sense, an admission that its strategies of vote rigging, gerrymandering, and soft coercion, practiced since the 1960s, have either failed or backfired. Unfortunately, the state seems to have decided to rely less on guile, and more on naked force. The labor movement is also forging new alliances in the face of opposition. Workers, both citizen and noncitizen, are confronting both a populist anti-immigrant backlash and a wave of privatization and austerity. But in response to these challenges, noncitizen workers affiliated with unions abroad have launched campaigns with Kuwaiti labor unions, which have themselves mobilized to combat cuts in wages and benefits." Crackdowns and coalitions in Kuwait A comment: while in the beginning there

The Muslim Brotherhood's women activists

“There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed." An interview with J C

Societal repression in Egypt The Tentacles of autocracy Yes, a good point about the horizontal repression in society, and the class character of it. It is Freud meeting Wilhelm Reich meeting Weber and Marx. Missing: How long would the current regime and its state repression in Egypt along with the socio-economic structure and power relations last if international capital, Western states, the IMF, the  Paris Club, etc cease their support?  Six months? A year? Two years?

Algeria New government attack on independent energy union

Catalonia: From Referendum to Republic?

"I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."  — George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

Egypt: Free jailed unionists

" Ferocious oppression by the Egyptian and Israeli authorities has produced a new generation of fighters, motivated more by a thirst for revenge than by ideology." Egypt: Sinai's undeclared war