Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Women's strike 08 March 2018

" A lot of truth in this . But there is a real problem with the tendency to see all this in terms of ‘turning away from western values’-as if fascism wasn’t a western value-as if justice was the sole possession of the west-as if movements for democracy were all about a desire to be western. In so many ways this whole discourse is part of the problem-people who have never expanded their universalism beyond a constricted eurocentric post-war vision. I do think we’re confronted by discursively similar discourses in this respect-both flowing out of an amazing theoretical laziness and ennui." — John Gamey Indeed, is Germany's complicity with Isreal in crimes a Western value or not? The decades long of Western states support of dictatorships in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere a Western value or not? Is the state of Europe today, including the consequences of neolibral capitalism, the rise of the far-right, corruption, relentless privatisation, curtailing unions ...

Carter told Brzezinski and secretary of state  Cyrus Vance  as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.  One initiative Carter authorized to achieve this goal was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan's  Inter-Services Intelligence  (ISI); through the ISI, the CIA began providing some $500,000 worth of non-lethal assistance to the mujahideen on July 3, 1979—several months prior to the Soviet invasion. The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by CIA official  Robert Gates , "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes" thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended. That same Carter now considers the U.S. an oligarchy

Germany "The neoliberal bourgeoisie no longer acts according to the rules of classical Marxism. The CEOs of the DAX 30 companies will not suddenly arrive like Batman to save centrist politics. The economic elite is, after all, the client of the state – always dependent on handouts, outsourcing, deregulation and implicit subsidies. Both Trump and Brexit show: the corporate elite will take what it they are given – and they usually learn to like it. So the German left must outline a new long-term strategy . The first question is: what does it mean to be progressive in 21st century Germany? At a micro-level this is answered every day by the altruistic actions of young people and trade unionists: to do volunteer work with migrants and refugees; to attend democratic political and cultural events; to cycle and to recycle; to uphold the rights of women, ethnic minorities and gay people. To confront unflinchingly the memory of the Holocaust. To trace, as the Marxist philosopher Geo...

The African anthropocene

Big business is hijacking our radical past

"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

White do white people like what I write? The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.  ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to  We Were Eight Years in Power . ...

Russia "Russia’s economic decline continued, but this could now be presented as the price of foreign glory. Through September 2015, the main subject could be Ukraine. That October, it changed to Syria. The new Russian wars are a Bonapartism without a Napoleon, temporarily resolving domestic tensions in doomed foreign adventures , but lacking a vision for the world. Ideals are recognized in order to be mocked. In the parts of southeastern Ukraine under Russian and separatist control, millions of people have lost their homes and thousands their lives, but the property of the oligarchs is untouched—and those separatists who believed they were fighting against oligarchy have been murdered."

"Malm presented his dissertation  Fossil Capital  in 2014, at Swedens’ Lund University. The book is a tome of 797 pages in total, and a breakthrough in the debate on climate change." "Without a mass movement, we don't stand a chance against fossil capital"

The evolution of neoliberalism in Tunisia 1980-2107

"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...

England It is easy to forget that in 2005 Theresa May was a shadow minister going into a general election with a Conservative manifesto promising to scrap all tuition fees, the BBC reminds us. "People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises." — L.

“The State Farm of Al-Assad between Rejection, Adaptation and Re-Appropriation (1971-2010): Revisiting the Authoritarian Construction of a Territory in the Syrian Countryside”

"we might note that for the underachieving Arab countries, which is in fact the overwhelming majority of them, the crunch on their course of development is fourfold." Development under the threat of war in the Arab World

Italy " Social phantoms always emerge in moments of crisis. Hatred of the foreigner is the result of a lethal cocktail of bad politics, irresponsible information and economic crisis. Now in Italy all bearings have been completely lost and a climate of endless electoral campaigning has triggered a chain reaction that no one seems able to keep in check: the entire political campaign is focused on the subject of immigration." Keep silent. Don't talk about it

Britain Michael Roberts reporting from a Labour Party conference Models of public ownership and   Why did Labour lose in 1983? "In a way, the myth that it was the 'hard Left' that cost Labour the election is an inverted form of Bennite optimism. It lays all the emphasis upon ideology, agency and leadership, albeit in a thin, polemical way that asks no searching questions of the Labour Right and Centre, long its dominant forces. But, then as now, agency and leadership turn out to depend on far bigger historical processes. And it's their obliviousness to those larger processes that leaves Corbyn's right-wing critics out in the cold, fantasising about re-staging the battles of the 1980s."

Stay out of it Like Houda Sharawi, Jamila Bouhired, Nawal Saadawi, and thousands others, many more today are fighting all sorts of oppression. Fatma Ramadan (an Egyptian trade unionist) Narges Hosseini (currently detained for her protest against compulsory 'hijab') Tunisian women protesting against the IMF Iraqi women protesting against new law that would allow child marriage Western women, you who consider Arab and Muslim women unfit and want to "empower" them, and  claim "to defend human rights", stay out of it. Arab countries and people have had enough of  - imperialist states wars and destruction   - support of stability and dictatorship  - co-opting uprisings,  - hypocrisy  - the "rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democracy' - marketing this or that Arab/Muslim woman to your public - promoting a Clooney or a Jolie as embassadors  Invest in a regime change at home, and in empowering women exploited in workplaces and co...

And here is some narrative with some crap on the top A liberal is telling us how/why "the West" should have saved Syria. I know that amnesia is prevalent nowadays, but I personally remember well how "the West", "the international community" and "the free world" have "saved" Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rwanda before that. "Syria: the failure of our age" Also The boy who started the Syrian revolution, before it became a war

There were no red banners in Navalny’s largely teenage and twenty-something audience. But if Russia has any revolutionary energy left, it isn’t to be found among Stepakhno’s ‘left patriotic youth’, but here, among Navalny’s supporters. Not that 1917 itself is much of a marker these days: young people are taught next to nothing about the October Revolution, said Violetta Grudina, who heads Navalny’s small but active Murmansk cell. ‘The very word “revolution” has been branded extremist. Better not to talk about it – what if people find out that it’s possible?’   [A Russian] Diary

A rare use of the word bougreoisie by the Financial Times, without inverted commas. Before 2008 the word 'capitalism' itself was almost absent except among some far left-wingers. The Western ruling class, the corportae media and other defenders of the system see Trump as a liability, but also some other 'excesses' of the system (such as inequality) might threaten the 'credibility' of capitalism. The discreet terror of the American bourgeoisie

Britain " this account rather downplays the role of collectivities, especially trade unions, which probably did more to shape Britain’s distinctive labour relations, and certainly did more to sustain working-class incomes, than any state programme. More troubling to me, however, is the way Renwick’s teleological narrative approach limits the analytical power of the book. We are told a story of how this welfare state came about, but because there is neither a comparative framework nor any real analysis of the way social structures (not just people) shape both visions and outcomes, the distinctiveness of Britain’s choices never really emerges. The book does provide a good and readable account of the making of the Beveridgean welfare state. But without a sharper analytical focus, and especially some attention to Beveridge’s ideas about how to provide income security without disordering family life, the book not only ignores the welfare state’s disciplinary function but also rather...