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Egypt: The Labour of Hope

A ‘group’ that “held an attachment to forms of hope that placed faith in the capitalist system to fulfil their dreams . “I develop a political economy of emotion and hope that traces how capitalist systems continue to capture the attention of the very people harmed by them.”  I would use ‘forms of the capitalist system’ rather than ‘capitalist systems’. There is only one globalised capitalist system, albeit with different form in different countries.

Against ‘Hope’

To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless. — Mike Davis, Los Angeles Times, 2022

Hope

I telephoned hope yesterday I asked him: can you  extract for us odor  From onion and haddock?  He said : Sure! I said : and can you  Ignite with water a fire?  He said : sure! I said: is it possible to distill form Colocynth the honey? He said : sure!  I said : and is it possible  to put earth  in Saturn's pocket ? He said : yes… sure! everything is possible I said : then our Arabs [Arab leaders] will feel ashamed someday  He said : not in a million years  will ever happen what you say. — the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar
At The British Library 'There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.' – Lenin Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths
" Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded." — John Steibeck, 01 January 1941 Necessary contradictions of the human nature