Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy It’s worth reading in full an interview on Saturday night, Cairo time, with Egyptian blogger and journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, on the excellent Occupied Cairo blog. But on the question of class polarisation and independent workers’ action he has this to say: The uprising up until now contained elements from all Egyptian society, whether […]
04 Feb
Comments Off on Who’s afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood?
They are: The tyrant’s strategy seems clear. After 30 years of brutality, repression and feathering the nest of his globetrotting fellow elites, at the moment his regime is in peril he will act as the reasonable one. He will act to reverse the “chaos” and “anarchy” in the streets as gangs of violent thugs attack […]
03 Feb
Comments Off on The Egyptian revolution: Liberal democracy as the enemy of freedom
In February 2003 I was part of the 400,000-strong rally in Sydney opposing the impending US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. It seemed for a moment that we were going to disrupt the plans of the self-styled Coalition Of The Willing by sheer force of numbers, part of probably the largest coordinated protest in Australian and world […]
02 Feb
Comments Off on Not good enough. Try again
From the New York Times: CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not run for another term in elections scheduled for the fall, appearing on state television to promise an orderly transition but he would serve out his term. In comments translated by CNN, he swore that he would die in Egypt. Television cameras showed the vast […]
01 Feb
Comments Off on Egypt: Revolution, counter-revolution and Islamism
UPDATE: Now cross-posted at Overland Journal blog. Great to wake up this morning to see that the Egyptian army is publicly stating it won’t use force against the protesters. Of course this could just be part of buying time for the regime, but it goes to the scale of the crisis facing Mubarak and his allies: The presence of the […]
31 Jan
Comments Off on Where has the light on the hill gone? Labor, economic justice & progressive politics
Here’s me being quoted in today’s Fairfax papers by ALP member Sarah Burnside, in a solid defence of the need for the Left to combine economic redistribution with progressive social policies: Similarly, former NSW treasurer Michael Costa argues that “most traditional Labor voters are not supporters of the Greens’ policies”. Costa’s solution to ALP woes […]
30 Jan
Comments Off on Interview with Egyptian journalist and blogger
The poor will want to push the revolution to a much more radical position, to push the radical redistribution of wealth and to fight corruption… In this linked article on Al Jazeera, Mark LeVine (Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of California, Irvine) interviews Egyptian journalist, blogger and socialist Hossam el-Hamalawy. He discusses the developing popular protests in Egypt and […]
29 Jan
Comments Off on Revolution not in the head but on the streets
11: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach The events in Egypt flatly contradict the received wisdom on the Left that social progress comes through a process of slow, patient education to change attitudes and challenge reactionary ideas. In a […]
28 Jan
Comments Off on Call for papers: ‘Capital’ against Capitalism conference
– CALL FOR PAPERS – CALL FOR PAPERS – CALL FOR PAPERS – Capital Against Capitalism a conference of new Marxist research Saturday 25 June 2011 Central Sydney It seems significant, and hardly coincidental, that the impasse that politics fell into after the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the eclipse of Marx and the research […]
23 Jan
Comments Off on Compulsory voting: More to do with legitimating state rule than democracy
It puzzles me that one can say many outrageously left-wing things on Twitter and barely get a rise but when one raises criticisms of compulsory voting (CV) many left-leaning tweeps get very worked up indeed. Sometimes more worked up than they get about things like the possibility of the Liberals winning in NSW in a […]
07 Feb
Comments Off on The Egyptian revolution and the working class