The 'Arab Spring' has come to symbolise defeated hopes for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. In this book, Jamie Allinson demonstrates how these defeats were far from inevitable. Rather than conceptualising the 'Arab Spring' as a series of failed revolutions, Allinson argues it is better understood as a series of successful counter-revolutions. By comparing the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen, this book shows how these profoundly revolutionary situations were overturned by counter-revolutions. Placing the fate of the Arab uprisings in a global context, Allinson reveals how counter-revolutions rely on popular support and cross borders to forge international alliances. By connecting the Arab uprisings to the decade of global protest that followed them, this innovative work demonstrates how new forms of counter-revolution have rendered it near impossible to implement political change without first enacting fundamental social transformation.

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week? What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point? The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.

The 'Arab Spring' has come to symbolise defeated hopes for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. In this book, Jamie Allinson demonstrates how these defeats were far from inevitable. Rather than conceptualising the 'Arab Spring' as a series of failed revolutions, Allinson argues it is better understood as a series of successful counter-revolutions. By comparing the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen, this book shows how these profoundly revolutionary situations were overturned by counter-revolutions. Placing the fate of the Arab uprisings in a global context, Allinson reveals how counter-revolutions rely on popular support and cross borders to forge international alliances. By connecting the Arab uprisings to the decade of global protest that followed them, this innovative work demonstrates how new forms of counter-revolution have rendered it near impossible to implement political change without first enacting fundamental social transformation.

Why do the states of the Arab world seem so unstable? Why do alliances between them and with outside powers change? Jamie Allinson argues that the answer lies in the expansion of global capitalism in the Middle East. Drawing out the unexpected way in which Jordan's Bedouin tribes became allied to the British Empire in the twentieth century, and the legacy of this for the international politics of the Middle East, he challenges the existing views of the region. Using the example of Jordan, this book traces the social bases of the struggles that produced the country's foreign relations in the latter half of the twentieth century to the reforms carried out under the Ottoman Empire and the processes of land settlement and state formation experienced under the British Mandate. By examining the attempts of Jordan to create foreign alliances during a time of upheaval and instability in the region, Allinson offers wider conclusions concerning the nature of the interaction between state and society in the wider Middle East.