NM's blog

It's up to you. As long as you think you're white, there is no hope for you. As long as you think you're white, I'm going to be forced to think I'm black. — James Baldwin

“Neither China nor Russia today offers an ideological alternative to the existing order. As capitalist, oligarchic, extractivist states, they are fully integrated into the postwar global economic architecture.” The writers forget the inherent contradictions in capitalism that determine cooperation and conflict. China, not Russia, represents an economic and technological threat to the Western capitalist expansion (share of markets, extraction of resources, capital accumulation, etc), which in turn affects the social and economic relations in Western societies (domestic social conflicts). The threat of China is enough to create conflict between states. No ideological alternative is required. The writers seem to ignore the economic relative decline the major Western countries have been experiencing (in productivity, living standard, infrastructure, growth…) and how that impacts on the states's imperialist policies. In search of new geopolitics Le Monde diplomatique , October 2026 Exce...

“Both the socialist government and the opposition are accused of selling off the country’s riches to the highest bidder and opening it up to a level of corruption that undermines any prospect of development. As in Serbia, the European Union’s silence (and complicity) has not discouraged a youth determined to take its destiny into its own hands.” Le Monde diplomatique , October 2026 Excerpts Until recently, Albania’s mountains, olive groves, unspoiled beaches and historical remains (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman) attracted an adventurous breed of tourist, very different from the sybarites who want luxury resorts. ‘Despite the lack of infrastructure, and sometimes even roads, Albanians have developed a tourism offer based on hospitality, agricultural produce and tradition. The big luxury complexes are now threatening this fragile economy,’ says architect and urban planner Doriana Musaj. The Trump-Kushners’ project takes advantage of a 2015 law on strategic investment in Albania which provide...

There is a new play in London’s West End at the moment. It’s called  The Standard of Living by James Graham . The play is about the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes . Graham thinks that Keynes offers an alternative to our money-making profit-led society.  “I’m absolutely convinced of that. You always feel that you have to fight for it but most people from my post-industrial working class community accept the intellectual argument that he  (Keynes)  made all those years ago; that [there should be] subsidy on something that doesn’t instantly make direct profit back, a painting, a play, a ballet, a song, that doesn’t have a value that is easily quantified on an Excel spreadsheet but adds to the value of a nation and to the meaning and happiness of it.” But unfortunately, we live in a world where ‘money, purchases and success’ dominate. Indeed, seats for Graham’s play are going for up to £298 (or nearly $400) – although there are some for the under-30s at ju...

I have read Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs – a great novel. I am surprised though that Padura describes Cubas as socialist – that he repeats the official line. It is another unfortunate position that does a disservice to socialism and strengthens the anti-socialist arguments: ‘Is that the socialism you want to live in?’. Over four years, 1.2 million Cubans – one tenth of the population – left the island. I have personally experienced life in two Cuban cities for six months. My answer is: No, I wouldn't live in Cuba, but I still defend the ideals of socialism and oppose the American-led imperialism against any anti-capitalist alternative. Padura admi ts ' the perversion of the great egalitarian utopia of the 20th century as manifested in socialist societies.’ Here is the contradiction: a 'perversion' and 'socialist society'.  'There is the productive inefficiency of its socialist, centralised economic system.' Note that Padura does never pu...

Abraham, Szor and their colleagues can do more than hail the 24 Israeli military personnel featured in the film as courageous. They should urge them to come forward publicly from anonymity, which currently gives opponents an easy basis for dismissing the allegations without addressing their substance. Otherwise, NAZA risks becoming a discredited, normalising propaganda tool at the hands of the very forces it set out to hold accountable, and Abraham and Szor may also be swept into the gruesome machinations of Israel's genocide of Palestinian people as mere collateral damage.

A biographer’s affecting account of prominent critics of Zionism, from Hannah Arendt to Nan Goldin

An account, impressions and findings Pattaya Chiang Mai

“To put it briefly, there is nothing new on the eastern front. The capitalist classes are once again proclaiming, with one voice, that private property is their sole sacred value; that the working class’s submission to the regime of private property is far more essential than the survival of the liberal democracy they have long worn as armor. Faced with the possibility that their domination over society might come to an end, they panic and accuse the left, simultaneously, of being communist and of supporting groups that advocate sharia.” On the stakes for real transformation in the aftermath of the decisive leftwing victory in Berlin

A manufactured crisis that far-right politicians have tapped into for their own political gain. Related Spain's revolt against the rentiers The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

Robin  DiAngelo  describes going for dinner with a Black couple while at university. Desperate to show that she wasn’t racist – ‘At this point in my life, I had no Black friends and had rarely spent time with Black people’ – DiAngelo, who is White, shared ‘every racist joke, story and comment’ that her family had ever made.  Later she realised with horror that she had ‘subjected this couple to racism all night long’.  When White people are ‘nice’, DiAngelo suggests, they are often doing what she was doing: reproducing racism while disassociating themselves from it. The people she is thinking of are middle-class White progressives, who do not see themselves as racist and who are anxious not to be seen as racist. This, DiAngelo argues, makes them all the more likely to unconsciously reproduce racism. —Musab Yunis, London Review of Book, February 2022

Confusion Confusion is not only an individualistic inability to cohere and process one’s thoughts under the “swarming” overwhelm of power, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes. Rather, Fanon poignantly tells us that confusion is central in creating and maintaining the naturalness of ideology’s hegemony, the naturalness of living in the “compartmentalised” and “divided” world between colonised and coloniser. In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes … those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of law and order. In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonisers, counselors, and “confusion-mongers” intervene between the exploited and the authorities … [agents of the state] bring violence into the homes and minds of the colonised subject.  Tellingly, as with all psychic intrusions, confusion is curated, implanted, and stoked ...

On unbendingly holding the line On November 23, 1964, during a layover on his way back from Africa to the USA, Malcolm X spoke to and took questions from an audience at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris. Among many other interventions and questions, an audience member presented a challenge to Malcolm: Mr. Malcolm, you want to form a movement which is extremist, and you have said that there must be a movement of Afro-Americans towards Africa—a philosophical, psychological and cultural return—but that struggle must take place in the United States. Consequently, in the event where the Afro-Americans’ demands are not satisfied, what means do they think of using to make an eventual return to Africa? After asking where the audience member was from and determining he was from the Senegal, Malcolm responds: Number one, if we are extremists we’re not ashamed of it. In fact, the conditions that our people suffer are extreme and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine. We’re no...

Turkey's first Muslim feminist women's association, Havle, is named after Khawla – a  historical Muslim woman whose protest against marital injustice led to the revelation of the first four verses of Surah Al-Mujadilah in the Quran, and the inspiration behind the association's name. The story of  Khawlah bint Tha'labah  (referred to in Turkish as  Havle Bint-i Salabe ) is one of the most powerful and legally consequential narratives of advocacy in Islamic history. Her refusal to accept an unjust marital custom physically altered the course of Islamic jurisprudence and permanently established women's rights to petition the highest authorities.  1. The Injustice: The Cruel Custom of  Zihar Khawlah was a woman from the Khazraj tribe in Medina, married to Aws ibn al-Samit. As they grew older together, Aws developed a quick, irritable temper. Following a domestic dispute, Aws angrily declared to her: "You are to me like the back of my mother."   In pre-Isla...