Neither Tel Aviv nor Washington but self-determination for the Egyptian people

Tariq Ali got it right in his speech outside the American embassy yesterday at the start of the march from there to the Egyptian embassy. The capitalist system has always relied on the use of violence to expropriate what it needs from the masses. This violence has always been worse the further from the Western heartlands of capitalism you go. This process was intensified during the neo-liberal decades. If you are for instance a worker in a cotton factory in the Nile delta you should quietly put up with never having enough for your family to eat or not being able to pay medical bills now that the Egyptian healthcare system has been privatised. Such sufferings of the dispossessed is a good and proper thing if it is necessary to prop up the super-wealthy in London, New York or any place that the super-rich gather.

Why should rebellion stop with the Arab masses? Why should the Chinese workers not have the same rights as everyone else? Comparisons have been made with 1989 and the events this year. 1989 was also the year that the bureaucratic rulers of China succeeded in crushing the student revolt that they faced in the summer of that year. The events in China during 1989 are much less remembered than those of Eastern Europe. If there was an equivalent uprising in China on top of the Arab uprisings…

See as well Tariq Ali’s article (H/T Pulse)

Advertisement