Böcker av Ali Kadri

This book is a treatise against neoliberalism illuminated by the path of China. China is a model to be mimicked, but more so theoretically than by replication. If anything, nations of the global South must rid themselves of neoliberally imposed ¿one-size-fits all¿ models, instrumentalised to shift value to US empire. Neoliberal models, robbing nations of their histories and resources, are negative ¿best practice¿ serving the interests of the hegemon. Developing nations need to search for the theory that corresponds to their own conditions and development strategies. Chinäs experience, anchored in labour as the historical agent, offers numerous theoretical cues as to how to build comparable home-grown paths. Thinking development with a subject voids reductionist politics in favour of sober class analysis. The study concludes by restating the age-old wisdom that there is no development without the rule of labour.

Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both characterize many Arab countries, but this was not always so. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period was an age of hope and relative prosperity. But imperialism did not sleep while these countries developed, and it soon intervened to destroy these post-independence achievements. The two principal defeats and losses of territory to Israel in 1967 and 1973, as well as the others that followed, left in their wake more than the destruction of assets and the loss of human lives: the Arab world lost its ideology of resistance. The reversal in economic and social performance between then and now requires an even-handed and theoretically coherent explanation that steers clear of the hallucinatory constructs of individual freedom and choice. Considering such choices is utterly superfluous in a situation where the important choice is often a single one-that is, no choice at all-imposed by the power of history on the unfree majority.The Unmaking of Arab Socialism is an attempt to understand the perplexing reasons for the Arab world's developmental descent-its de-development-from the pinnacle of Arab socialism to its present desolate condition.Kadri focuses on the concept of Arab socialism in general and its application to Iraq, Syria and Egypt as he explores the deleterious effects of redundant labour expelled by dispossessions in the hinterland and the persistence of permanent war.

Ali Kadri examines how over the last three decades the Arab world has undergone a process of developmental descent, or de-development. He defines de-development as the purposeful deconstruction of developing entities. The Arab world has lost its wars and its society restructured to absorb the terms of defeat masquerading as development policies under neoliberalism. Foremost in this process of de-development are the policies of de-industrialisation that have laid to waste the production of knowledge, created a fully compradorial ruling class that relies on commerce and international finance for its reproduction, as opposed to nationally based production, and halted the primary engine of job creation. The Arab mode of accumulation has come to be based on commerce in a manner similar to that of the pre-capitalist age along with its cultural decay. Kadri attributes the Arab world's developmental failure not only to imperialist hegemony over oil, but also to the rising role of financialisation, which goes hand in hand with the wars of encroachment that were already stripping the Arab world of its resources. War for war's sake has become a tributary to the world economy, argues Kadri, and like oil, there is neither a shortage of war nor a shortage of the conditions to make new war in the Arab world.

This work compares the development experiences of East Asia and the Arab world. For East Asia, it's through manufacturing of civilian-end use commodities and for the Arab World, through militarism.