Heyda Fawda

Heyda Fawda is an Egyptian movie about a police officer (Hatem) stalking a school teacher (Nour) who is chasing an Assistant District Attorney (Sherif) who is sleeping with a drug addict (Shiela) who wears mini-skirts. The movie has English sub-titles but the graffiti and posters are not translated.

This was my first Egyptian and Arabic movie. So this post is made out of pure ignorance.

There are so many threads running through this movie. The main thread is the decline and fall of Hatem through his obsession with Nour. But this is against a motif of opening with police suppression of a demonstration and closing with the arrival of riot at another demonstration.

I think the best clue to this movie is the translation of the title as 'Le Chaos'. There is chaos in Egypt which the Emergency Law tries to address. The movie lays out four (4) distinct attempts to control this chaos:

1. Hatem uses force and corruption to regulate the chaos;
2. Sherif uses the merciful application of the law to restore confidence in the system;
3. The headmistress uses education to control the chaos;
4. Sheila uses drugs, sex, love, parties to block out the chaos.

Hatem uses force to convince people that order must be followed even at the expense of the law. In this, he is encouraged by his superiors. Hatem uses the chaos to enrich himself through corruption by cutting through the red tape. In Hatem, the system is defending itself against attack.

Sherif uses mercy to temper the law and so win people across to the system. He interprets the law in order to dispense justice. In Sherif, the system is paternalistic and benevolent.

The headmistress and school inspector strive to raise the education level of the students so that they are better equipped to handle the chaos. Nour tries to teach English to a class but she does not how even though she has the right qualifications. She tells the school inspector that she is a qualified idiot who was taught by other qualified idiots.

Shiela justs gets high, parties like mad, and makes passionate love to Sherif. She uses her wealth and position to hide from the chaos. She is above it while the other characters are caught up the raging currents.

Hatem descent into hell takes him through the impotence of power. He cannot make Nour love him. He can only rape her. He goes from a man who can inflict pain on others to someone cowering in an elevator while the world erupts around him. He is so self-absorbed that he does not see beauty in young love or a famous painting.

Sherif fails when he tries to use the legal system to prosecute Hatem for rape. Sherif sees his own impotence in the face of police perjury and obstruction.

Once all the legal avenues have failed, Nour's mother and the headmistress take their allegations to the street. There the people rise up and invade the police station. Eventually Hatem is sacrificed to save the system.

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Seven Billion Experts—Waiting to Be Heard!

Tom Peters rails against the Central Planners in favour of Seven Billion Experts—Waiting to Be Heard! He argues that the Development policies have failed.

Peters also has a link to a set of PowerPoint slides about this. These are worth viewing in order to see Peter's argument elaborated on.

The underlying assumption is that the development aid has failed. While this is true for the developing countries, development aid has worked wonders for the developed world by increasing the rate of exploitation.

One case in point is coffee. For years, the World Bank recommended that developing countries invest in coffee. So much development occurred that the price of coffee collapsed. And the developed countries benefited from cheap coffee.

So instead of growing food to support themselves, these developing countries now have loans to pay off with a cash crop that does not bring in enough cash.

Now these countries go off to the IMF to sort out their loans. And out comes the cookie-cutter of the Structural Adjustment Program in which the subsidies that make life somewhat bearable are removed and the economy is to be opened up for foreign investment which proceeds to gut the local firms. And now, these countries have a seething mass of angry people. So the governments then need weapons to stay in power. More debt! And more sales to developed countries. What a racket!

Anyway enough jumping on Tom Peters.

The theme of his slides is interesting for Communists especially in our United Front work. The important thing is not to control these organisations but to get people involved. For once people see that they can change little things through their own efforts, they might begin to open up to changing larger things in their life. And they can become more confident about analyzing the structure of society.

We Communists need to become accustomed to "Trying and succeeding on the 37th attempt". The churn of Party membership is mainly due to this continual failing as well as the search for the perfect Party Program.

In all, I think we should view the slides at least in order to refocus ourselves.

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Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease

Jerome a Paris descibes what happens when the Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease. He sees the current economic problems as an aberration.

One of the more interesting things about this Friday's economic news was the very obvious connection between the unemployment number and oil prices. What links the two is debt, the defining feature of what I have called the Anglo Disease, ie the highly unequal economy whereby the rich and the financial sector (almost the same thing these days) capture most of the income but hide it by providing cheap debt to the middle classes so that they can continue to spend.

Emphasis Mine

He expands this point further:

in today's economy, the cannibalistic sector is not oil&gas, but finance. Bankers, through debt, have the ability to convert future cash-flows into immediate profits. Such immediate returns attract more capital, talent and resources (which cannot go to other sectors) and impose an iron discipline on the rest of the economy: those that provide the debt want to ensure that the future cash-flows will indeed materialize, and move in to ensure a relentless focus, in the underlying activities, on profitability at the expense of all other criteria. The immediate contribution of the financial world to measured GDP and growth makes it a popular industry, thus reinforcing its influence - and spreading out its way of thinking, focused on monetary gains and financial "efficiency." So not only the rest of the economy gets squeezed for any extra drop of profitability, but the language of financial analysts becomes the dominant one of not only economic discourse but also political discourse;

Emphasis Mine

This is how Capitalism is supposed to work. Investments flow to the sectors of the economy that that show the highest rates of return. There is no other criteria for a Capitalist investment choice.

What then is supposed to happen is that the rate of return on these new investments is supposed to revert to the mean once sufficient investment has been made. Unfortunately, the inertia of investment decisions means that over-investment occurs and large losses are experienced.

In order to justify this new regime of investment allocation, the spiritual producers are called upon to cast their spells, and wave their wands. The punditocarcy exists only to serve. To Serve Man up to the insatiable demands of Capital!

The author then goes onto explain that:

in a nutshell, the debt bubble hid the class warfare waged by the rich against everybody else, conveniently trapping those that could not or would not live within their means in the system, by making their livelihood increasingly dependent on not rocking the boat.

So close! Class warfare is reemerging in the consciousness of people.

So far, the article is mainly a litany of complaints. And his solution is:

So there you have it: wage stagnation (Anglo Disease) and oil production stagnation (the fundamental driver of the Countdown diaries) combining in a perfect storm. But hey, the financiers are still sitting pretty, and will say that more "reform" and "deregulation" and tax cuts are needed.

Maybe it's time to stop listening to what is highly self-interested drivel, and take back what they grabbed: it's not theirs. And maybe it's time to actually worry about using lots less oil (and gas and coal).

And, wonderfully, a programme to invest in housing and vehicle energy efficiency, renewable energy, and infrastructure, paid for by massive tax hikes on the rich, will help solve the current recession and the oil crisis.

After all that, the only suggestion is to take the rich. A reformist approach! As if the rich would stand aside for the rabble to despoil their ill-gotten gains!

This is a start. The acknowledgement of class warfare is a significant step forward. But it is only one step out of a journey.

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"Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek?"

Mark Thoma points to an article that asks "Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek?" without any comment.

The original article is by Jesse Larner who asks Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right. I think her main conclusion is:

In titling his individualist manifesto The Road To Serfdom, Hayek clearly was equating collectivism with a tendency to slavery. ...

She starts with:

Hayek was a surprise, in several ways. He’s nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants. He admits that there are a few rare economic circumstances in which market forces cannot deliver the optimum result, and that when these occur, the state may legitimately intervene. He recognizes such a thing as the social interest and will even endorse some limited redistributionalism—he goes so far as to suggest that the state ensure a minimum standard of living, an idea that surely embarrasses the good folks at Cato. Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road [to Serfdom] is that he writes with passion against class privilege.

Emphasis Mine

Hayek can propose these things because he is a conservative. And a conservative defends rights and opposes privileges. The arguments within conservatism are mainly about the differentiation between the two.

A conservative could propose that the worker's right to a minimum standard of living trumps the right to enjoy the profits accuring from property because the former reflects a greater good - the right to life.

Unfortunately, conservatives get waylaid into defending the rights and privileges of the ruling class (capitalists, feudal lords, slave owners) over all others. They would come to believe that the current ordering of society (capitalist, feudal, slavery) is the best available and has to defended against the chaos that would result in changing the system.

Larner goes on further to explain why she thinks Hayek is so passionate in his belief that socialism will always lead to totalitarianism because planning reflects the needs and outlook of the planners:

A complex economy is something no person or institution can understand. But it can generate a sustainable order, with a rational allocation of resources, as individuals respond to their own circumstances and make choices as consumers and entrepreneurs, signaling the subjective value that they place on goods and capital stock through the price mechanism: One of Hayek’s most original contributions to economic theory is the insight that economic systems are based primarily on information rather than resources. To plan an outcome and to direct economic inputs and outputs toward this outcome is to stifle the emergence of a spontaneous, democratic response to the needs of the individuals who make up the community—a response that will necessarily have winners and losers, but that will not privilege the vision or depend on the limited information of a governing elite, and that will encourage further experimentation. The responsibility of a government that fosters individual freedom is to set up transparent and impartial rules so that the legal reaction to personal choices can be predicted for all, regardless of social station; to tolerate no privileged access to the law; to provide security; and to protect contracts and private property, so long as doing so does not conflict with the very small set of social assumptions on which there truly is broad consensus (arguably, Hayek’s suggestion that government should be responsible for a minimum standard of living would have fit into this consensus when Road was published.)

Emphasis Mine

Larner is writing this when the price signals from the real estate market caused a huge bubble in property prices, another bubble in stock prices, another bubble in oil and other commodity prices, and a bubble in food prices. And she still believes in the efficient pricing through the market?

And as for the efficient allocation of resources, toll roads are still being built in Sydney while the rail network is near collapse.

Larner overlooks one way of planning: democracy. We all vote on different plans and the one with the most votes is implemented.

I think Larner is of the reformist left in that she would soften the edges of capitalism through the spontaneous emergence of worker collectives that compete within a capitalist economy.

In that, I think she is naive to think that the ruling class would sit idly by while its power is whittled away. No ruling class has ever gone quietly into the dust bin of history.

Make no mistake, a worker collective directly challenges the capitalisr right to rule the economy. For once people see that they can make better decisions that the capitalists, then the people would question the need for a separate class of property holders and their privileges.

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