NM's blog

“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...

Matters stand differently when it comes to colonial and neocolonial formations, which were the dominant framework for Cabral and Rodney. On the place and political role of the petty bourgeoisie , there are certain commonalities and significant differences between their writings.

Kanafani elaborates his theory of resistance literature and offers a visceral account of life under occupation.

The committee “ noted that Western countries, including the UK , had faced criticism for returning to policies that prioritised stability and strong leadership over support for emerging democracies, particularly in Egypt.” Related Ogres and Orientalism

Allow me to provide an example of the psychic inversions many of us have resisted being conscripted into over the course of the Zionist settler state’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Take for example the Student Intifada that sprang up across the settler colony of the United States and spread across the world—the one in which my patient at the beginning of this chapter was also engaged. Almost as quickly as the encampments were created the disciplinary machine churned out its construction of the spectre of violence—the psychic inversion—with which we were meant to identify and then introject: the pro-Palestinian students were the violent actors, not the genocidaires they were protesting, not the corrupt and unethical administrators that were inviting militarised law enforcement to beat their students, not the violently fascistic Zionist counter-mobs who were provided cover for their brutality. Encampments were deemed “unethical” and “violent” by CNN anchors,48 while the Anti-...

A good read “In the end, Hughes argues, there can be no end to dirty work. The most urgent task for any society is not its elimination but its containment. Dirty work will continue so long as it remains in its proper place. Not here, but elsewhere; and if not entirely out of sight at least out of mind. It is only when such containment mechanisms fail, says Hughes, that a fanatical inner group threatens to form, that liberalism becomes fascism, and that something like ICE steps out of the shadows. “To be sure, the sociological conceptualisation of dirty work does not perfectly fit Merz’s use of  Drecksarbeit . Both Hughes and Press focus on dirty work as a play of visibility and invisibility that hardly seems applicable to Israel’s spectacular dirty work in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza: two televised bombing campaigns and a genocide broadcast in real time. And there are other problems. Was Merz trying to say that Israel was acting as the bad agent of Euro-American power? Was he aiming to...

This foolish world cannot possibly be any more foolish. After millions of years of our descent from the Stone Age, the exact same golden rule remains true: the one with the biggest stone, the thickest stick, and the meanest bully is the one who is right! —Ghassan Kanafani, 1972.  Translated from Arabic

“I feel like I am going insane/crazy” is a refrain I have become accustomed to hearing in and outside of sessions. The sentiment began popping up very quickly after the Zionist settler state began its viciously murderous campaign on the Gaza Strip in October 2023. Rather than abating with the mountain of piled-up evidence of genocide at our fingertips, the pattern of confusion, sometimes referred to by people as dissociation, has persisted with what seems like the corollary intensity of the Zionist genocidal campaign. This process is what I refer to as psychic intrusion: a psychic invasion that intends to make retaining access to material reality difficult, derailing us from the political commitments needed to sustain revolutionary fervour and psychic militancy. By mapping out and naming psychic intrusions, we are better able to understand the function of “I feel like I am going insane/crazy.” Rather than the experience of crazy/insane being a fixed state often understood as being due ...

Israel was forged out of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The Greens have very belatedly recognised what should have been obvious all along.