A central lesson is that labour movements will be in a better position to shape political outcomes decisively if they build independent organisations with real strategic capacity. The absence of such organisational strength in Egypt was a key reason why the post-Mubarak order did not evolve in a more democratic direction.
Since Trump’s victory in the November elections, there has been no shortage of variations on Marx’s famous line in The Eighteenth Brumaire: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time [...]
Therefore, it is even more imperative for both the academia and activist communities to interrogate and deconstruct the ideological and ethnic essentialism inherent in analyses of diaspora politics, making visible those efforts that challenge our parochial imagination of transnational social movements. Even social movements purposely mobilised in a local setting could have unintended global impacts, and it is these previously unarticulated transnational lessons that form the radical potential for future activism.
The task at hand is to place the political economy of repression within the contours of U.S. history. It involves sketching in broad terms how, over time, repression is the product of dynamic and fixed relations between capital and labor. The goal is to represent how capital is able to repress labor given essential prerequisites.
Does Marx ever say that his own epistemological methodology is historically contingent and that it is conditioned by a particular historical moment?
