Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public ser...

In Arabic The "civilised world", "the human rights defenders" are silent again while the Syrian regime backed by Iran and Russia is committing another massacre . Hang on, the victims are not white Western journalists or Christian Arabs! The very same Syrian regime and its backers that is responsible for 93 percent of the civilian deaths so far. Hang on, what about ISIS? ISIS has killed white Westerners in some European cities and the US.

It is not only the cospiracy theorists and the alt-right, we shouldn't forget "the liberal defense of murder" in the Iraq case prior to 2003. A lesson from Syria

How to "hide" crimes According to a report by the World Bank itself "the development of biofuels has caused a rise of 75 in food prices between 2002 and February 2008 (out of the 100 percent global rise, while the prices of energy and fertilisers accounted for only 15 percent).  This estimate is much higher thatn the 3 percent figure retained by the U.S. administration. According to the World Bank teh hike in prices has already cost consumers $324 billion in poor countries and could drive 105 million more people into poverty. So as not to displease President Bush, the World Bank did not publish this report. It was a leak in the press that allowed the information to emerge. This analysis of the World Bank remains ideologically tainted by neoliberalism. The development of agro-fuels is not responsible for the 'disorganisation of the markets' but reveals their irrational policies and their criminal consequences [my emphasis]. Eat, drink, or drive, the free m...

The BBC online:  Britain is set for the coldest February week in five years as freezing air arrives from Russia. Putin's regime has done it again! The sanctions have been proved ineffective.

Italy They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health, transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini’s politics, focusing on his “social doctrines” regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were “errors”; the movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”. CasaPound was borrowing leftwing clothes: imitating the strategy of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, it aimed for what Gramsci had called “cultural hegemony” by infiltrating the cultural and leisure activities of everyday Italians. In reality ... there was no Italian equivalent of Germany’s denazification: throughout the postwar period, one far-right political party – the Movim...

"A social system based on private ownership of production can’t support the kind of planning that could avert environmental catastrophe. The owners of capital are fragmented and compelled by competition to look after their own interests first, and any serious planning would have to override property rights — an action that would be aggressively resisted."  Sam Gindin

A book Social Reproduction Theory

"There has been a shift in the mood of liberals. Less than a decade ago, they were confident that progress was ongoing. No doubt there would be periods of regression; we might be in one of those periods at the present time. Today, liberals have lost that always rather incredible faith. Faced with the political reversals of the past few years and the onward march of authoritarianism, they find their view of the world crumbling away. What they need at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of intellectual anodyne that can soothe their nerves, still their doubts and stave off panic. This is where Pinker comes in. Enlightenment Now is a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls." John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's "embarrassing book".

In an excellent interview at the Register.com, the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis identifies the contours of this regime of affective management.  TV now tells you what to feel.
It doesn’t tell you what to think any more. From  EastEnders to reality format shows, you’re on the emotional journey of people – and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. “Hugs and Kisses”, I call it.  I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it’s a system of guidance – it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a “hugs and kisses” moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.  Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the ‘empire of the self’ everyone ‘feels the same’ without ever escaping a condition of solipsism. ‘What ...

“Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time."  Karl Marx

Iran's Haft Tapeh workers

"For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker And also a review of  Pinker's previous book on "the decline of ...

"Human rights concerns are fine when they can be used as an ideological weapon to undermine enemies or to restore popular faith in the nobility of the state. But they are not to interfere with serious matters, such as dispersing and crushing the rascal multitude forming associations against the interests of the men of best quality." Noam Chomsky,  Deterring Democracy  (1991)

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” George Orwell

"Masters in the art of deceipt, the accused institutions [the IMF and the World Bank] concede some mistakes so as to remain at the center of international affairs. Far from being worried by the increasing poverty that it causes, the World Bank seems more concerned with social troubles that put neoliberal globalisation in jeopardy. In a semi-confidential report, under the guise of a mea culpa , it continues to promote an economic model that has deliberately denied impoverishment people vital protections from the insatiable appetite of the most ferocious economic actors. From now on, the new edifice that ensures the expansion of the model of capitalist agriculture consists in making access to land subject to market forces, but also water resources, which amounts to a privatisation of biological life. Finally, it promote the concentration of agricultural resources and encourages speculation." Debt, IMF, and the World Bank  by E. Toussaint and D. Millet, 2010, p. 123

إيران نظرة على الحراك الجماهيري الأكبر منذ 1979

Marx bicentenary

England Investing in education is investing in future generations. It is passivity, compliance, acquiescence, and more that make the English students and their parents accept the tuition fees. It is the mentality, and the ideology, of business.  It is about packaging and selling debt, hedge funds, etc. It is about creating a teacher-customer relationship. It is the most aggressive neoliberal capitalist economy in Europe. It is the myth of "we cannot afford scrapping tuitions fees" and "it is too costly for the state". It is the objective of reproducing compliant workforce that will think less and be at the service of the same ideological dogma. A Danish at an elite London university has told me how discussions in class are controlled and how they are much more open in Denmark, and how there is much less hierarchy. A better comparison would be a Germany, a country with a bigger population and woth no tuition fees. English and Danish tuition fees compa...

"The growth of large-scale migration is after all part of the system of corporate globalisation that took hold in the past 30 years and widened inequality both within and between countries. It's also been fuelled by 15 years of western wars and intervention from Afghanistan to Somalia. And in Eastern Europe, the exploitation and migration of low-waged and skilled workers has been central to the neoliberal model imposed after 1989." Seumas Milne, the Guardian online, 01 January 2013 Italy as an example ' Migrants are more profitable than drugs' Raped, beaten, exploited

"We the signatories of this statement, refuse to separate our opposition to U.S. imperialism and any imperialist war drive on Iran, from our support for the progressive and revolutionary social justice struggles of Iranian women, workers and oppressed minorities against their regime." Statement in Solidarity with Iranian Women

"Algeria's angry young men! Racism in all its splendour. These orientalist cliches of the Arab-Berber man are really hard to dislodge even in the most "progressive" spaces (and I am not talking about the Guardian here). When, as an Arab, you speak up your mind, you show your anger and emotions, you are being upfront and direct in your behaviour, you are dubbed unreasonable, difficult to communicate with, not rational (not cartesian like the European), too emotional and above all you need to be controlled, tone-policed, disciplined and in need of civilising and enlightening in the European ways. I go through this almost every day and it is exhausting and painful!"  — Hamza Hamouchene,  commenting on this . Indeed, you wouldn't see Ms Hannah speaking about the British or Wetsern youth as narcisistic, football addicts,  commody lovers, their ignorance of their history,  indifferent to other people's sufferring, to their governments wars, support of the ...

How fundamentalism works "As economics is not an exact science, the number of counter-examples is irrelevant. If I put forward a hypothesis in physics which is proved wrong by an experiment, I must question the theory. And the theory progresses through such invalidation. In economics, you can undermine the existence of millions of people, but none of that human evidence will affect the ideology of structural adjustment ." — Susan George, vice president of ATTAC France, December 6, 2000 See also "How poor countries develop rich countries" "A tonne of cocoa is roughly US $1,300, while one 4x4 vehicle is now about US $120,000. So you need about 92 tonnes of cocoa to exchange for one 4x4. But to get one tonne, you will need not less than 20 acres of land. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana has only around 2-3 acres, meaning it would take him or her well over 500 years to produce enough cocoa to buy a 4x4.” John Opoku, human rights lawyer and activist, Gha...

"...the British and other governments of the democratic and liberal world, so far from protesting (Saddam Hussein's regime which killed several thousands of his citizens with poison-gas bombs), kept quiet and did their best to keep their citizens in the dark, as they encouraged their businessmen to sell Saddam more arms including the equipment to gas more of his citizens. They were not outraged, until he did something genuinely insupportable...he attacked the oil fields thought vital by the USA."  Eric Hobsbawm, On History, p. 350

I couldn't finish reading this. I was holding myself not to throw up. The return of Dubai's ultimate folly

The SSNP, the fascists, and Syria Scroll down to read the section related to the title above

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” ―  Samuel P. Huntington ,  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , 1996, p. 51

"The interesting thing about Rojava is that while the YPG and YPJ are lauded worldwide for their struggle against the Islamic State, the fact remains that the solidarity shown for the Syrian Kurds is based on a notion of a common enemy rather than shared truths. While ISIS was globally understood in the terms of science fictional apocalypse, the city of Kobane became a metaphor for secularism, heroism, anti-terrorism and patriotism, all values assumed to prevent the arrival of the doomsday and behind which, the world, specifically the western world, would securely stand. Ironically however, the ideas that inspire what’s happening in Rojava developed from a critique of western paradigms of capitalism, positivism, individualism and professionalism. Therefore, it is urgent to become informed about the ideals of the Kurdish Liberation Movement and what it does on the ground so that now a larger support can be mobilized for it as it is dealing with Turkish attacks and its abandonment...