NM's blog

Salaam wants the state to play a key role in development through public investment. Yet, in the case of Syria, she should have explained where would the capital for investment come from: IMF and debt, loan conditions, China, expropriation…? “Advocates of economic liberalism argue that free trade promotes competition, efficiency, and growth. However, this argument often ignores a basic reality: countries do not compete under equal conditions. Producers operate with vastly different levels of infrastructure, access to finance, technology, energy costs, institutional efficiency, and government support. What may appear as free competition is often competition between unequal economies.” Syria's economic liberalisation trap

“Among local people so fervently opposed to corporate culture, the end of the landmark coffeeshop on the corner of Charilaou Trikoupi and Kallidromiou streets is also part of a concerted effort to alter the neighbourhood’s traditional leftwing identity.”

The academic and author has a travel ban imposed on him by the UK government . Related Malm's books and contributions

'The red mujtahid'

The debate is not simply “reform or revolution,” but rather: “ social liberalism, reformism, or revolution .” Available also in French La gauche, une ambiguïté historique fondamentale

Prominent Iranian exiles now cheer on Trump and Netanyahu’s destruction of their homeland .

Thomas Piketty: “ The current protest highlights what is undoubtedly the most glaring failure of the current government: a catastrophic and unprecedented 20% drop in the budget per student since 2017.” Note that in France around 75% of students are enrolled in public universities and institutions. Related France’s pouvoir d’achat crisis [ French public universities are grappling with an estimated €8 billion shortfall, which has pushed nearly all 75 public institutions into deficit budgets]. Clarification: Roberts refers to the 75 core universities, not to all public universities, which are 160.

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