notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part I)
(7): By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The lwas of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as abiological necessity. In A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist writes that bombing originated as amethod of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversarires. The first bomb ever dropped from an airplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 11, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa. The first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force agains the Somalis of 1920. In the Second World War, Germany observed the lwas of war against the western powers but not against Russia. As opposed to 3.5 percent of English And American prisoners of war who died in German captivity, 57 percent of Soviet prisoners--3.3 million in all--lost their lives.
(7): When the mass murder of European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population 'in just those areas Hitler was after.' The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: 'the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.' The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique--but only in Europe.
(8): The first genocide of the twentieth Century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904.
(9): Fanon's critics know him by a single sentence from The Wretched of the Earth: "The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." This was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that the violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between the settler and the native. It was a claim that anticolonial violence is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress, that it is indeed a midwife of history. And last and most important, it was a warning that, more than celebrate this turning of the tables, we need to think through the full implications of victims becoming killers.
(30): Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? (...) Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of 'astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran...' They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: 'In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the 'Maragha School.'... The contemporary history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of Andalusia--Arabic-writing spain--in the historical study of the Renaissance.
(31): The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work, The African origin of Civilization, in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to disolacte the history of pharaonic Egypt--in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived--from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt.
(34-35, and whole chapter): important points about the constructedness of "culture," its situatedness in politics.
(36): The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.
(39): Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity.
(45): Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897)... Whereas early-nineteenth century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progres, al-Afghani highlighted modernity's contradictory impact. His religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof 'of our inferiority and decadence,' for 'we civilized ourselves by imitating the Europeans.' Al-AFghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?
(47): ...the development of political Islam has been more the work of non-clerical political intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in colonial India, and Abdul A'la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Ali Shariati in postccolonial Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran respectiviely. The glaring exception was Ayatollah Khomeini. The secular discourse in Iran has tended to resemble that in western Christianity precisely because only in revolutionary Iran has clerical power received constitutional sanction. Whereas fundamentalist clergy were the pioneers of political Christianity, the pioneers of political Islam were not the religious ulama (scholars), but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern.
(48): The shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the tranistion from colonialism to postcolonialism, and can be highlighted by the history of a single mass organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, in Egypt. The society was founded in MArch 1928 when Hassan al-Banna, a young teacher inspired by the ideas of al-Afghani, among others, heard a plea for action from workers in the town of Ismailiyyah. Echoing al-Afghani, he argued that Muslims must draw on their own historical and cultural resources instead of imitating other peoples. The six-point program of action that al-Banna devised focused on creating an extenisve wlefare organization and disavowed violence. It was the defeat of Arab armies in 1948 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel that convinced the society to expend its energies beyond welfare to armed politics... Said to be a state within a state, with its own 'armies, hospitals, schools, factories, and enterprises,' the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers... came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser's prions, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prion. The experience of such brutal represssion under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a raedical orientation in Egyptian Islamic thought.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
While the capital funding for these construction projects comes from trade and fiscal surplus, the labour needed to work on these projects has to be imported. The construction boom led to an increase in demand for foreign labour -known in the Gulf as "expatriates" - usually recruited from the low-wage countries of South Asia. The domestic citizens of the Gulf, or the "nationals," would simply not work for the same low wages.
(...) By 2008, unofficial estimates put the population of Qatar at 1.25 million, 80 per cent of which were expatriates. By 2008, expatriates were unofficially reported to constitute 90 per cent of the labour force in the UAE.
(...) By 2008, unofficial estimates put the population of Qatar at 1.25 million, 80 per cent of which were expatriates. By 2008, expatriates were unofficially reported to constitute 90 per cent of the labour force in the UAE.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
If we look at the entire country from a distance, during the period between 1978 and 1992 there were two great sectors: a public sector that was still largely based on socialist production relations and a private sector in which family production relations prevailed. Looking a little closer, in urban areas, the public sector was dominant, with a thriving family economy at the margins, while in rural areas, the family economy was dominant, with a growing township and village enterprise sector, which harboured both socialist and small-scale capitalist production relations. This was, indeed, a non-capitalist market economy, although it was changing quickly.
(...) Since 1992, much more radical market reforms have changed everything. Deng Xiaoping’s highly publicized tour of foreign-funded enterprises in southeast China’s special economic zones in early 1992 is conventionally cited as the key moment that marked the shift to more radical economic restructuring. After that, the ccp strongly encouraged the growth of the private capitalist sector and by the end of the decade it had presided over the privatization of the great majority of publicly owned enterprises. Between 1991 and 2005, the proportion of the urban workforce employed in the public sector fell from about 82 per cent to about 27 per cent (see Figure 1, below).
(...) This massive conversion of public into private property transformed managers into property owners and other work-unit members into disenfranchised proletarians. Work units in which previously both managers and workers had enforceable claims suddenly became the exclusive possession of the managers. In Marx’s language, labour power was separated from the means of production, as both were converted into commodities, and the responsibilities for production and consumption were severed.
(...) In order to retain some capacity to steer state-owned enterprises in line with political concerns, the ccp has held onto the power to appoint key state-sector executives, and government officials continue to use public holding companies to pursue state objectives that are broader than quarterly profits. Nevertheless, the structure of these enterprises has been fundamentally changed so that they are required—and able—to make profitability their primary goal. To accomplish this, they shed their previous obligations to their employees. Lifetime employment guarantees were eliminated, and enterprises not only reduced the size of their workforces but also discharged veteran workers and replaced them with younger workers who were less costly and more pliant. [13] State-owned coal mines, for instance, now engage contractors who compete to mine coal—using migrant labour—for the lowest cost per ton, a system that helps make Chinese coal mines the most dangerous in the world. [14] Enterprises have also closed unprofitable subsidiaries and removed themselves from the business of providing housing, health care, pensions, childcare, recreation, education and other services for employees and their families. Although these enterprises remain partly state-owned, the features that made them socialist have been eliminated.
(...) In 1978, China’s Gini coefficient (the measure used to compare international income inequality in which 0 indicates absolute equality and 1 absolute inequality) was calculated to be 0.22. This was among the lowest rates in the world. Observers were particularly impressed by it given China’s size and geographic diversity. The prc had accomplished this, despite large income differences between urban and rural areas and between more and less developed regions, because within each locality differences were minimal. Less than three decades later, in 2006, the figure was 0.496, surpassing the United States and approaching the rates of the world’s most unequal countries, such as Brazil and South Africa. [21] Inequality between regions and between rural and urban areas have both increased substantially, but the most dramatic change has been the polarization of income within localities.
(...) The data in Figure 2 indicate that all urban residents, including those at the bottom, now enjoy substantially higher incomes. These figures, however, only record cash income and, therefore, mask the loss of goods and services that had been distributed by the state and work units rather than the market, including subsidized housing, utilities, foodstuffs, household necessities, health care and education. The inadequacy of using cash income to gauge well-being across the structural transformation from a socialist to a capitalist economy becomes clear if one compares the income of the best-off urban households in the mid-1980s with that of the poorest households today. The former group, made up of managerial and professional cadres, lived in well-appointed apartments and enjoyed substantial economic comfort and security, even though they only had an average annual cash income of less than 1400 yuan; the latter group, made up mainly of unemployed or informally employed workers, despite having an average cash income of over 3800 yuan, live in deteriorating apartments, have trouble making ends meet, and avoid visiting the doctor.
(...) The sudden expansion of capitalist production relations since 1992 is what has made income inequality skyrocket in China. Before then, because the great bulk of economic activity was organized around the family labour and work-unit systems, which had responsibility for the consumption of their members, the growth of inequality was structurally constrained. The recent reforms have removed those constraints.
(...) That the current configuration of power in China may appropriately be called a capitalist state is confirmed by the government’s strong support for the expansion of the capitalist sector. Capitalist encroachment on the family labour sector and the relentless displacement of small enterprises by larger ones is fundamentally market-driven, but it is also state policy. China’s political leaders do not want backward produce markets, they want modern supermarkets, and state officials are expected to identify and support ‘winners’ in the economic competition. This expectation extends from the Political Bureau, which grooms national champions, down to county and township cadres, who are inveterate boosters of successful local enterprises. Under these conditions, it is difficult to distinguish, whether conceptually or empirically, state development strategies from the pecuniary interests of government officials and large-scale entrepreneurs, who are linked by myriad family and other ties.
(...) Arrighi correctly stresses the importance of China’s peculiar system of rural land tenure, which has barred individuals from selling land, preventing wholesale expropriation of the peasants’ means of subsistence. These laws have protected the family labour system in agriculture from capitalist encroachment, but they have not been at all incompatible with the operation of capitalist production relations in the rest of the economy, and they have permitted significant capitalist inroads in the most profitable areas of the agrarian sector. Although many entrepreneurs have certainly felt stymied by these laws, and employers of migrant labour will welcome the further influx of itinerant workers that the sale of land-use rights will produce, the land-tenure system established in the 1980s has served the broader interests of capital. For it has not only averted the social instability associated with huge landless populations, but has also allowed rural subsistence production to subsidize the employers of migrant workers, and a reserve army of rural labour to fluctuate in accord with the changing requirements of capitalist production. In fact, while the ccp’s recent decision to promote the sale of land-use rights might now permit capitalism to flourish in the countryside, it may also help to destabilize the larger system.
(...) Arrighi is right to highlight characteristics that are part of the country’s socialist legacy: a population that enjoys relatively good education and health, and a peasantry that retains possession of the land. These, however, do not change the fact that the sector of the economy that is growing most rapidly and successfully competing in international markets operates according to capitalist principles. Indeed, the enterprises in this sector are able to compete successfully because they are capitalist. Chinese entrepreneurs and their foreign partners, with strong and effective state support, have created what is—for the moment at least—the world’s most efficient system of extracting surplus labour. The features that make this system competitive in the global marketplace are the same that are producing ever greater class polarization in China.
(...) Since 1992, much more radical market reforms have changed everything. Deng Xiaoping’s highly publicized tour of foreign-funded enterprises in southeast China’s special economic zones in early 1992 is conventionally cited as the key moment that marked the shift to more radical economic restructuring. After that, the ccp strongly encouraged the growth of the private capitalist sector and by the end of the decade it had presided over the privatization of the great majority of publicly owned enterprises. Between 1991 and 2005, the proportion of the urban workforce employed in the public sector fell from about 82 per cent to about 27 per cent (see Figure 1, below).
(...) This massive conversion of public into private property transformed managers into property owners and other work-unit members into disenfranchised proletarians. Work units in which previously both managers and workers had enforceable claims suddenly became the exclusive possession of the managers. In Marx’s language, labour power was separated from the means of production, as both were converted into commodities, and the responsibilities for production and consumption were severed.
(...) In order to retain some capacity to steer state-owned enterprises in line with political concerns, the ccp has held onto the power to appoint key state-sector executives, and government officials continue to use public holding companies to pursue state objectives that are broader than quarterly profits. Nevertheless, the structure of these enterprises has been fundamentally changed so that they are required—and able—to make profitability their primary goal. To accomplish this, they shed their previous obligations to their employees. Lifetime employment guarantees were eliminated, and enterprises not only reduced the size of their workforces but also discharged veteran workers and replaced them with younger workers who were less costly and more pliant. [13] State-owned coal mines, for instance, now engage contractors who compete to mine coal—using migrant labour—for the lowest cost per ton, a system that helps make Chinese coal mines the most dangerous in the world. [14] Enterprises have also closed unprofitable subsidiaries and removed themselves from the business of providing housing, health care, pensions, childcare, recreation, education and other services for employees and their families. Although these enterprises remain partly state-owned, the features that made them socialist have been eliminated.
(...) In 1978, China’s Gini coefficient (the measure used to compare international income inequality in which 0 indicates absolute equality and 1 absolute inequality) was calculated to be 0.22. This was among the lowest rates in the world. Observers were particularly impressed by it given China’s size and geographic diversity. The prc had accomplished this, despite large income differences between urban and rural areas and between more and less developed regions, because within each locality differences were minimal. Less than three decades later, in 2006, the figure was 0.496, surpassing the United States and approaching the rates of the world’s most unequal countries, such as Brazil and South Africa. [21] Inequality between regions and between rural and urban areas have both increased substantially, but the most dramatic change has been the polarization of income within localities.
(...) The data in Figure 2 indicate that all urban residents, including those at the bottom, now enjoy substantially higher incomes. These figures, however, only record cash income and, therefore, mask the loss of goods and services that had been distributed by the state and work units rather than the market, including subsidized housing, utilities, foodstuffs, household necessities, health care and education. The inadequacy of using cash income to gauge well-being across the structural transformation from a socialist to a capitalist economy becomes clear if one compares the income of the best-off urban households in the mid-1980s with that of the poorest households today. The former group, made up of managerial and professional cadres, lived in well-appointed apartments and enjoyed substantial economic comfort and security, even though they only had an average annual cash income of less than 1400 yuan; the latter group, made up mainly of unemployed or informally employed workers, despite having an average cash income of over 3800 yuan, live in deteriorating apartments, have trouble making ends meet, and avoid visiting the doctor.
(...) The sudden expansion of capitalist production relations since 1992 is what has made income inequality skyrocket in China. Before then, because the great bulk of economic activity was organized around the family labour and work-unit systems, which had responsibility for the consumption of their members, the growth of inequality was structurally constrained. The recent reforms have removed those constraints.
(...) That the current configuration of power in China may appropriately be called a capitalist state is confirmed by the government’s strong support for the expansion of the capitalist sector. Capitalist encroachment on the family labour sector and the relentless displacement of small enterprises by larger ones is fundamentally market-driven, but it is also state policy. China’s political leaders do not want backward produce markets, they want modern supermarkets, and state officials are expected to identify and support ‘winners’ in the economic competition. This expectation extends from the Political Bureau, which grooms national champions, down to county and township cadres, who are inveterate boosters of successful local enterprises. Under these conditions, it is difficult to distinguish, whether conceptually or empirically, state development strategies from the pecuniary interests of government officials and large-scale entrepreneurs, who are linked by myriad family and other ties.
(...) Arrighi correctly stresses the importance of China’s peculiar system of rural land tenure, which has barred individuals from selling land, preventing wholesale expropriation of the peasants’ means of subsistence. These laws have protected the family labour system in agriculture from capitalist encroachment, but they have not been at all incompatible with the operation of capitalist production relations in the rest of the economy, and they have permitted significant capitalist inroads in the most profitable areas of the agrarian sector. Although many entrepreneurs have certainly felt stymied by these laws, and employers of migrant labour will welcome the further influx of itinerant workers that the sale of land-use rights will produce, the land-tenure system established in the 1980s has served the broader interests of capital. For it has not only averted the social instability associated with huge landless populations, but has also allowed rural subsistence production to subsidize the employers of migrant workers, and a reserve army of rural labour to fluctuate in accord with the changing requirements of capitalist production. In fact, while the ccp’s recent decision to promote the sale of land-use rights might now permit capitalism to flourish in the countryside, it may also help to destabilize the larger system.
(...) Arrighi is right to highlight characteristics that are part of the country’s socialist legacy: a population that enjoys relatively good education and health, and a peasantry that retains possession of the land. These, however, do not change the fact that the sector of the economy that is growing most rapidly and successfully competing in international markets operates according to capitalist principles. Indeed, the enterprises in this sector are able to compete successfully because they are capitalist. Chinese entrepreneurs and their foreign partners, with strong and effective state support, have created what is—for the moment at least—the world’s most efficient system of extracting surplus labour. The features that make this system competitive in the global marketplace are the same that are producing ever greater class polarization in China.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is expanding its relief operation to assist those fleeing fighting, which the world body estimates currently stands at 450,000 people, but could climb to 600,000 shortly, in north west Pakistan, the UN agency said.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
IPS: In this context, how do you see the Israeli attack on Palestine?
WB: I have held all along that there are certain key struggles that the WSF must take a very strong stand on. Definitely, the Palestinian issue is one of them. The WSF should take a very strong stand condemning Israel and supporting the right of Palestinians to their own state, and supporting the right of return of Palestinians to what is now Israel. I really feel the WSF can no longer say that we just want to provide a roof for discussions to take place. I have always said that that kind of academic posture will eventually dissipate the spirit of the WSF, and I think that has already happened to some extent. To really reinforce its soul and continue to provide a strong kind of energy in support of civil society movements, the Palestine issue, and Afghanistan, the issue of capitalism really - these are issues in which the WSF must take a very strong stand.
IPS: Such an approach demands a permanent structure.
WB: Yes, I think that we should find ways of really making the International Council a more accountable body. The problem now with the IC is that it is mainly a discussion group rather than a body with real effective powers to move the struggle on.
WB: I have held all along that there are certain key struggles that the WSF must take a very strong stand on. Definitely, the Palestinian issue is one of them. The WSF should take a very strong stand condemning Israel and supporting the right of Palestinians to their own state, and supporting the right of return of Palestinians to what is now Israel. I really feel the WSF can no longer say that we just want to provide a roof for discussions to take place. I have always said that that kind of academic posture will eventually dissipate the spirit of the WSF, and I think that has already happened to some extent. To really reinforce its soul and continue to provide a strong kind of energy in support of civil society movements, the Palestine issue, and Afghanistan, the issue of capitalism really - these are issues in which the WSF must take a very strong stand.
IPS: Such an approach demands a permanent structure.
WB: Yes, I think that we should find ways of really making the International Council a more accountable body. The problem now with the IC is that it is mainly a discussion group rather than a body with real effective powers to move the struggle on.
The interim government, built from a coalition of the Left-Green Party and the Social Democrats, is at least as different from the old one as the Obama administration is from the Bush administration. The latest prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, broke new ground in the midst of the crisis: she is now the world's first out lesbian head of state. In power only until elections on April 25th, this caretaker government takes on the formidable task of stabilizing and steering a country that has the dubious honor of being the first to drop in the current global meltdown. Last week, Sigurdardóttir said that the new government would try to change the constitution to "enshrine national ownership of the country's natural resources" and to "open a new chapter in public participation in shaping the structure of government," a 180-degree turn from the neoliberal policies of Iceland's fallen masters.
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