Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Carillion is a very graphic confirmation that outsourcing public services and sectors to private companies to ‘save money’ on ‘inefficient’ public sector operations is a nonsense.  The reason for privatisation and outsourcing has really been to cut the costs of labour, reduce conditions and pension rights for employees and to make a quick buck for companies and hedge funds.  But such is competition for these contracts that, increasingly, private companies cannot sustain services or projects even when they have cut costs to the bone.  So they just pull out or go bust, leaving the taxpayer with the mess. It’s a microcosm of capitalist economic collapse." Interesting links about studies on privatisation. Carillion and the 'dead end' of privatisation

With Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon's political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love. Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe - that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab - Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn't in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a ...

"European countries claim to be at Tunisia's side, yet for years have failed to deliver on that promise. Instead, they prioritise their own  national interests, securing access to Tunisia's lucrative market and  workforce without reciprocating in kind." What a discovery!  January 1978 a general strike was drowned in blood. In December-January 1983-4 the "Bread Riots" also brutally suppressed with more than 80 deaths. December 2010-January 2014 an uprising was met with the police more than 80 people.  Now we are in January 2018 and protests have erupted. The local bourgeoisie with International capital and financial institutions (imperialism's "peaceful" tools) keep countries like Tunisia under their heel. You're on your own

A year ago the critic and cultural theorist  Mark Fisher passed away. Here is one of his pertinent observations: R: How has capitalism persuaded us that it’s the only ‘realistic’ political-economic system? M: "One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services – and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal comes with these procedures often - managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, ‘You...

Essential Readings: The Syrian Uprising

Mohamad Malas, memory and life

"Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [ Abkunft : descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush...

NHS England "The number of nurses who leave every year is enough to staff 20 hospitals"

U.S. perspectives: a very short summary "[I]f Trump himself has fallen short of Hayekian ideals of economic reason, the appointment of yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus to the Treasury ensures that neoliberalism will continue  where it counts. Trump’s hyper-reactionary neoliberalism does not constitute a new hegemonic bloc, however. It is, on the contrary, chaotic, unstable, and fragile. That is partly due to the peculiar personal psychology of its standard-bearer and partly due to his dysfunctional codependency with the Republican Party establishment, which has tried and failed to reassert its control and is now biding its time while searching for an exit strategy. On the other hand  to "reinstate progressive neoliberalism*, on  any  basis, is to  recreate—indeed,  to  exacerbate—the  very conditions that created Trump. And that means preparing the ground for future  Trumps—ever  more vicious and dangerous."  — Nancy Fraser ...

100 years after the Russian Revolution History from Below

Contrary to "value-free" social science (promoted by Max Weber), "The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality … but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies — open and undisguised — seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement." — Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

Mothering a Muslim

The Real Winston Churchill