Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Pentecostalism "The attractiveness of this cosmology lies in its seductive promise: that demons — not politics — are to blame for the world’s troubles. And that they can be vanquished through prayer." The spirit of late capitalism

"The question that emerges clearly and forcefully is one of justice. What does justice for Muslims mean in the face of US [led] state violence?  The answer, as you can imagine, is complex, but it is certain that endless wars, militarism, and intervention will not bring justice." 16 years into "the war on terror" and institutionalized Islamophobia lives on

The revolutionary bourgeoisie

The Spanish state / the state as an instrument of repression " The crime of sedition has been in every Spanish penal code since 1822 and carries a potential prison term of up to 15 years. It amounts to rebellion against state decisions or national security forces." (the BBC website)

Catalonia: From Referendum to Republic?

One of the main problems with the disciplinary quality of contemporary academia is the way in which the fragmentation of disciplines carries over into a fragmentation of analysis. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned intellectual laborers everywhere, “interdisciplinarity” rarely succeeds in its aims, often remaining littlemore than the sum of its parts. Reading Social Reproduction into Reading Capital

"[L]ike many other brutal dictators all over the world, Franco partly owed his long, dark reign to powerful friends in Britain." Franco's Friends

US votes against  UN resolution condemning  gay  sex  death penalty , joining Iraq and Saudi Arabia

The return of fasicsm in Europe

The Catalan referendum "This concern with identity and recognition unites separatists, creating a coalition of conservatives, progressives and radical anti-capitalists with no common project beyond independence." Short Cuts

Accurate in describing today's mainstream economists " The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgment become. For while Smith and Malthus found only scattered fragments, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light, yet they did not come to examine the premises and still accepted the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty”. — F. E. 1843

John Berger contemplates life and death at the graveside of Mahmoud Darwish

"I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."  — George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

Bourdieu's class theory – the academic as revolutionary