The real UAE: Workers on sit-down
strike, surrounded by stormtroopers
According to the WSN article, "NYU officials have emphasized the 'academic freedom' students will have at NYUAD: the university has been given carte blanche control of the campus' operations". Presumably with a straight face, the vice chancellor of the NYU campus at Abu Dhabi said NYU received a "special royally decreed academic freedom zone". Sexton added, "All the various prohibitions on various discriminations that we observe happily here will be observed in the campus in Abu Dhabi". In the internal campus email, Sexton droned, "there is an enormous commitment by Abu Dhabi to make itself a cultural and intellectual center in the region, amply demonstrated by the important world institutions that are establishing themselves there".
In recent months, NYU announced the opening of a satellite campus in Tel Aviv. We've been passing out a flier that addresses this hypocrisy. But it's no accident that within months of each other, management has announced glowing support for these two regimes. It says a lot about that "commitment" NYU management tells us they have over and over again in public relations articles and internal campus emails to all those catch phrases like "academic freedom", "excellence", "dialogue", "democratic ideals", and "community". The commercials just keep rolling.
So what is this "cultural and intellectual center"?
The United Arab Emirates is a federation of city states, each run by a different family. A British colonial creation and now a U.S. protectorate, it is probably the closest thing in the world that comes to a modern slave state. There are no freedoms and no democracy. Unions are illegal, sex slavery is rampant, and homosexuality outlawed.
NYU CEO Sexton
The vast majority of the population is primarily South Asian and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asian working people. They work as indentured migrant laborers who can't have citizenship, live in shanty towns and work camps under curfew, and have much of their wages stolen or, sometimes, not paid at all. A series of strikes have been organized this year. As NYU finished making its announcement, strikes were breaking out again against low pay, abuse, and theft of wages. Police stormtroopers attacked the strikers, who courageously fought back, but 4,000 have been deported in the couple of weeks or so.
The UAE ruling class have built their power on the basis of the oil economy, discovered from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The oil boom allowed them to begin to differentiate its economy and, because of its strategic location for imperialism, has become a hub for finance, IT, real estate, and transport--the most parasitic but most profitable sectors of the neo-liberal economy.
It has become the playground for the regional and international elite--their utopian society--lovingly covered in sentimental articles in the New York Times about once a month. It is a consumer paradise of the rich; a simulated experience; a society and government completely run as a giant corporation. In short, it's a NYU management fantasy.
In the United States and Europe, imperialism has held up the Gulf states as examples of good, "enlightened" Arab societies. Supporting "good" Muslims versus "bad" Muslims is important ideologically to justify imperialism for American official institutions. But this isn't just pure cynical propaganda. The Gulf states and Saudi Arabia continue to play their assigned role in helping to attack all democratic movements, not only in their own societies, but elsewhere, in Lebanon, Palestine-Israel and Iraq. Yet the glowing support for such regimes tells us more about the political and social values of western imperialism and the global elite than about the realities of the Middle East.
The UAE is a perfect example of how capitalism is a bitter enemy of democracy. Without the history of popular movements for democracy around the world we would not even enjoy the basic freedoms we see today. Without any history of such movements in the UAE, not only is there no democracy, but capitalism has developed a caste system where the vast majority of the population has little to no rights at all.
But that's of course how the UAE works. The majority of its population is literally looted, kept permanently at a bare minimum existence, and the profit from this pocketed by the elites. It is an example of the global capitalist system on steroids. This process is something that working people in America have been experiencing for thirty years, but still have residual institutions--diminishing unions for example and, ultimately, still citizenship rights--that slow down the advance of this mass looting. From its CEO-presidents, and the management bureaucracy, to the professional schools, to the Economics, Political Science and history departments,it is exactly what the American university establishment advocates--NYU among the best. From the classroom to coveted relationships with the corporate and political elite, the university advocates and justifies an ongoing class and racist offensive against working people in this country and abroad, that has resulted in falling wages, destruction of independent political organization, collapsing social infrastructure like health care and education, massive rates of imprisonment, and imperialist state terror. As one author has put it, it's socialism for the elites and capitalism for everyone else.
Those "royally decreed zones" NYU management spoke so highly of are the way this all happens. Prostitution, sex slavery, alcohol and drugs, near-naked beaches, and even "free speech" take their place in such zones that the "royals" have decreed, alongside Salafist, sharia law and capitalist indentured labor. The new NYU campus will not be the antithesis of these integrated sides of this "idea capital". Instead, it will be one more expression. The "freedoms" or the decadence of the elite are erected over the necessity of super-exploiting the majority to make this decadence profitable.
The appearance of the institutions of learning supposedly committed to a democratic culture justifies the realities that underpin the logic of this mass looting of millions of people. It exactly parallels the rhetorical appeals NYU has made to slogans of "a private institution in the public interest" as it has risen to the top of New York City's neo-liberal economy of mass displacement and police terror of working and poor people and the mass concentration of wealth into the hands of the few.
No wonder Sexton can shake the hand of Israeli apartheid with the announcement of the Tel Aviv campus and turn around and do the same with the Abu Dhabi campus. Colonial fascism and capitalist dictatorship go hand in hand. The struggles of Palestinians and the South and Southeast Asian working people in the UAE represent the democratic antithesis to the strategies of profit and political rule that the ruling classes, supported by US imperialism and NYU management values, have developed in response to these movements.
