My Respected Brother Yasser Negm wrote:
“Shahid Bolsen, What is your problem with foreign investment? Do you reject it in principle? What is your vision for development in our countries? Where is the imperialism here ?
We are not against the coup because of Chinese factories being built in Egypt.”
My Brother, no, I have no problem with foreign investment, neither in principle nor practice.
However, it is not obvious to me how Chinese companies building Chinese factories manufacturing Chinese goods to be sold for Chinese profits, facilitated by Egyptian labor, constitutes investment in the Egyptian economy. It is corporate cost-cutting. It is domestic labor producing wealth that will flow out of the country. That is not investment in Egypt, that is extraction of wealth from Egypt.
We should clarify one issue here. You remember how in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were zones controlled by the invaders, and zones controlled by the Mujahideen?
Well, “Free Trade Zones” means territory that has fallen completely under the control and administration of Multinational Corporations. The normal rules of trade, taxation, tariffs, regulations, etc, do not apply in these corporate occupied zones: In these zones, the multinationals make all the rules. That is what a Free Trade Zone is. It is equivalent to NATO declaring Kabul to be a liberated area.
Dear Brother, regarding the vision for how to develop the economies of our countries, it is quite straightforward. Implement the measures which every developed economy implemented to achieve their development.
If you don’t know what those measures are, simply look at all the measures which the developed economies are now prohibiting for the developing world to implement, under the slogans of Open Markets and Free Trade. Namely, classically protectionist economic policies; high tariffs, import quotas, subsidies for local industry, strict regulation of foreign companies’ operations and the exit of capital from the country, etc, etc.
It is patently ludicrous to grant concessions and tax exemptions and incentives to multinational corporations which already have budgets that dwarf the GDP of your own country; and it is even more ludicrous to imagine that by doing so, you will enrich your economy.
Where is the imperialism Akhi? Again, we are talking about the empire of capital; not an empire based on any geographic region. The global owners of capital have long matured beyond petty nationalisms. We are talking about foreign investors, corporations, shareholders, dictating the economic policy of supposedly sovereign countries. We are talking about the complete subordination of national governments to the demands of international business, and the sacrificing of the nation’s natural resources, wealth, labor, and subsequently the daily living conditions, and the very futures of the citizens, for the sake of foreign owners of capital.
Perhaps you are not against the Coup because it is selling the country into slavery; perhaps it does not seem like a good enough reason to oppose the Coup simply because it is an instrument of imposing imperialist control over the Muslims of not only Egypt, but all of Muslim Africa, but on that, my Dear Brother, we will just have to agree to disagree.
I do not know a better reason to oppose the Coup, and furthermore, to oppose any government which pursues the same policies of subservience to foreign investors.
Allah reward you