We are pleased to announce the fourth session of our monthly Catalyst magazine discussions. This month we are reading Anand Gopal’s article The Arab Thermidor, which is a rare look at the rise and fall of the Arab Spring from a class perspective.

Gopal traces the socioeconomic and political trends throughout the region since the 1950s, and then focuses in more detail on the uprisings in Syria and Tunisia, with reference to Egypt and Yemen as well. He posits that the neoliberal turn, which began in the 1990s and consolidated in the 2000s, was key to strengthening the authoritarian regimes and their capitalist allies on one hand and weakening the nascent working class and communal networks on the other. Thus there were few social structures to sustain the Arab uprisings, which as a result were suppressed by brutal regimes or coopted by Islamist extremists, and left exposed to regional and international interventions.

We are meeting on June 3rd, at 7 pm. If you’re interested in a condensed version of the argument, we recommend this excellent interview with Anand on Jacobin radio (transcript available here).

This group is meant to be a forum for committed activists and organizers to assess articles that openly explore strategic and theoretical questions on how to put socialism into practice. We hope you join us for our next meeting and come back in the future. All meetings will be accessible without prior attendance, but we do ask that you read some or all of the material in preparation.

Reading for this session:

The Arab Thermidor by Anand Gopal