Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“At a very simple level, that means one of the pleasures of reading the  Manifesto  is that it’s beautiful. It’s remarkable. Whether one agrees or not with some of its claims and its positions, it is just a joy to read this incantatory prose. Marshall Berman famously really stresses this, and it’s something that even critics of Marx will often allow. This is a remarkable piece of almost apocalyptic literature. If you read it critically, of course, but also generously and thoughtfully, you may gain, as I did, a great deal more out of it politically and intellectually than you might assume if you only think of it as an introductory text.” China Miéville’s stimulating reading of The Manifesto and its authors

Since the beginning of the Arab uprising the defenders of the status quo helped co-opt and domesticate the uprisings. Here they have twisted marxist and socialist ideas/ideals to try to absolve themselves and the criminal role they have played in aborting a meaningful change in the region.  In the case of Egypt we have seen how the US, a fact this article unsurprisingly ignores, supported a power-sharing between Mubarak's regime without Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood and how later, when the latters were ousted, the US regime continued its financial and military support of the Egyptian army and the Egyptian regime.  We also saw how the leadership of the MB, like its sister Al-Nahdha in Tunisia, hurried to Washington to kiss the hands of US imperialism and show that they could be reliant upon in maintaining the status quo: new faces, the army in the background, elections, but no changes in the fundamentals, i.e. the socio-economic structure that determines the daily bre...