~14% of the population holds citizenship (acquired only through blood), the rest must be sponsored either directly by a citizen or indirectly through a corporation, which a citizen always has to own at least 51% of.
the majority of the population moves there with the idea of working for a few years, not paying any income tax, then moving back home. for the white-collared this is easy enough, they live life in a strange bubble, make temporary friends, then go home and forget all about it. you've probably heard about the slavelike conditions blue-collar labourers live in. pretty often their passports are seized and they're made to pay back the cost of their plane ticket. it is somehow still more money than what they would earn back home (usually south asia). there have been attempts at organising strikes etc but those are all crushed brutally.
life for everyone in dubai is defined by transience. you're only going to be here for a few years. there's no point establishing any sort of connection to the land or the people around you. work hard then go home.
there's also an unspoken racial hierarchy that no one will explicitly talk about but manifests itself in all sorts of ways. citizens (emiratis) are at the top, followed by other khaleeji arabs, then by white brits, then other western europeans / white n. amerikkkans, then other (usually levantine) arabs, then pakistanis, then indians, then filipinos. this is approximate but it's the best way i can represent it. your passport determines your pay, even for the same job. most job postings specify what nationality they're looking for. so do ads for rooms.
in many ways it's a microcosm of the world economy but it's all run by a tribal (they're actually organised into tribes) monarchy with a secret police and unspeakable internal politics.
the media self-censors, its an incredibly dumb idea to criticise any aspect of the government outside like garbage collection (there was no sewage system for a long time, afaik many buildings still just empty everything into septic tanks that are collected by trucks). after the gcc-qatar split, it was explicitly made illegal to express any sympathy for the qatari govt. that was the first time i'd heard media censorship being discussed openly.
there's said to be a secret prison somewhere in the desert used to house whoever loses the internal political struggles of the seven monarchies that make up the uae. the federal govt has been involving itself further in regional politics with the war in yemen and the split with qatar. i think this is tremendously stupid because the viability of dubai as the international safehouse of capital that it's become relies to a large extent on being an island of political stability in the middle east and not having any angry people to potentially set off bombs and be mad. if that ever happens capital will flee. they're secretly collaborating with mossad to make sure nothing happens.
there's a complete lack of public space in dubai. everything that resembles it is actually an outdoor shopping mall with security guards on patrol. public parks are entirely fenced with controlled access. there's a whole other thread i could write on the absolutely fucked up urban design of the place. i probably will write something about it once i unsmooth my brain.
i post because i have no idea how to even begin analysing a place like this. i am probably nowhere near as well-read on marx/ism as most of you on this board. it's completely enmeshed in the global system of capitalism but i don't know what to say about it's local functions and what it does within the global system. why are they so obsessed with superlatives? how did this place turn from forgotten desert full of nomads and pirates to haven of hypercapital? how does the citizen/non-citizen distinction function, especially in comparison to similar distincions in places like the u$a?
Edited by sparklefeather ()
so perhaps we can learn something from the existing & past analyses of london applied to these new places.
(not to get into it here but i think some of why brexit is such a clusterfuck is that the real levers of control vacated a long time ago, so no one with real power actually gives a shit)
drwhat posted:thanks for the post. my reply is going to be inadequate, but just to get some ideas rolling around, it is very interesting how closely tied together the uk elite and the middle eastern elite are (especially from my perspective as a non-uker in london) and i would suspect that a lot of british imperial baked-in ideas of caste and place in society must be influencing how things have developed over there in the new cities. considering how much is owned in london by the middle east elite, and how this city has also turned into a transient garbage dump where people only come here to try and make some money before getting the fuck out, the multilayered difficult-to-penetrate social rigor mortis, etc, maybe places like dubai are serving as the london of the 21st c, in terms of concentration & administration of global capital, and the same people are recreating the same structures, though this time paid by new slaveowner kings instead of the old slaveowner kings.
so perhaps we can learn something from the existing & past analyses of london applied to these new places.
(not to get into it here but i think some of why brexit is such a clusterfuck is that the real levers of control vacated a long time ago, so no one with real power actually gives a shit)
there's an interesting spinwatch report about the uae lobby in the uk. i don't think the british ideas of class have much influence on the uae. i want to say that these things already had seeds in the culture but i'm not sure how much i can say about the pre-development/independence culture. it's actually interesting to see what of the culture survived. they seem to really want to hold on to it but how much can you hold onto desert nomad culture when you're driving gold-plated mercedes and your kids have an army of servants so they can't even wipe their asses alone.
i think it'd be interesting to compare 19th c. london and 21st c. dubai but london was the capital of a very centralised empire and dubai is just one of many playgrounds for decentralised capital. palaeo-london arrives from the past *i write around on the floor and become racist*
Fayafi posted:This is virtually the same for Doha, where I lived for 10 years.
fuck doha oh my god it's like dubai but there's somehow even less stuff. it was also 51 degrees once when i went there and i thought i dubai was hot jesus fcukinf crist.
Populares posted:Anyone else remember syriana?
i went to school with a girl who was an extra in that movie lmao
sparklefeather posted:51 degrees
stillsuit future
tears posted:sparklefeather posted:51 degrees
stillsuit future
gotta be the first place where we'll see 35 C wet bulb (aka the temp-humidity combo that is lethal no matter how much water or fans you have), right?
Fayafi posted:outright oppressive
yeah thats about right
also i didn't even mention sheikha latifa, interesting story even though i havent actually read much about it
