Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One Stocktaking and Assessment
- Chapter Two De-development and Conventional Policies
- Chapter Three Class Politics Masquerading as Democracy
- Chapter Four The Stillborn and Decomposing Arab State
- Chapter Five Wars and Oil Control
- Chapter Six Dislocation under Imperialist Assault
- Chapter Seven Arab Disintegration and the Rising Power of Imperialism
- Chapter Eight Commodification of Labour
- Chapter Nine Coming to Conclusion in Times of Socialist Ideological Retreat
- References
- Index
Chapter Six - Dislocation under Imperialist Assault
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One Stocktaking and Assessment
- Chapter Two De-development and Conventional Policies
- Chapter Three Class Politics Masquerading as Democracy
- Chapter Four The Stillborn and Decomposing Arab State
- Chapter Five Wars and Oil Control
- Chapter Six Dislocation under Imperialist Assault
- Chapter Seven Arab Disintegration and the Rising Power of Imperialism
- Chapter Eight Commodification of Labour
- Chapter Nine Coming to Conclusion in Times of Socialist Ideological Retreat
- References
- Index
Summary
As argued in previous chapters, poor development in the Arab world primarily follows from the politics of imperialist aggression and subordinately from the interface between ‘free market’ policies and their antidevelopmental outcomes. The stranglehold of free-market ideology is evidenced in the fact that despite the world being mired in a global crisis in which one child under 5 perishes from hunger every five seconds, thirty-five million people die each year from hunger or its immediate aftermath, and one billion people are permanently and severely malnourished (Ziegler 2011), few scholars any longer voice alternative policies such as land and income redistribution, nationalisation and self-reliance. It is probably unprecedented in history that so many people unconsciously share the same belief in the one idea, which is the market dogma. The depth of the schism on the Left is so deep such that even the socialist ‘brand names’ of the North, Trotskyism and anarchism, which exhibit a puny presence in the South, still mull the issue of why the revolution did not arrive in Weimar Germany when the devastation in the colonies appeared trivial. Where the geographic limits of structural concepts end, the ideological stance masked by social science becomes visible. The presence of a Left organised around the straitjacket of bourgeois democracy, as opposed to the necessity of violent struggle, is all on its own an indication of how detached socialist ideology has become from the working class.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Arab Development DeniedDynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, pp. 137 - 158Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2014