Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Immanuel Wallerstein , currently a senior research scholar at Yale University, is among the greatest living sociologists and one of the most appropriate scholars to discuss the current relevance of Marx. He has been a reader of Marx for a long time, and his work has been influenced by the theories of the revolutionary born in Trier on May 5, 1818. Wallerstein has authored more than 30 books, which have been translated into several languages, including his very well known  The Modern World-System , published in four volumes between 1974 and 2011 Read Marx, says Wallerstein An interview

Britain Alan Sugar is a representation of what is low, crass, agressive, and disgusting in doing business. He is the opposite of what human ingenuity, innovative skills, and energy is and what should be invested in. He has been promoted as an example to emulate, someone who embodies the spirit of self-made man and entrepreneur. Many British and non-British love him though. But that says a lot about the type of the economy and 'ideology' of the last 40 years and the power relations fostered and perpetuated to obfuscate reality. It is not a surprise then that he considers this a joke . He is in fact an embodiment of those capitalists who would fight against the existing order tooth and nail, and fight against any small progressive change.

The Italian malaise

Erotica Nowadays credited to a fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath called Jalal adʹDin al-Suyuti, "The Book of Exposition" is an exploration of promiscuity under the societal constraints of the Arab-Islamic world, using bawdy and salacious scenarios to stimulate and evoke fantasies in the readerʹs mind.  The Book of Exposition by al-Suyūti

English schools: on the footsteps of the French ones? Mr Courtney was referring to a speech in February in which Ms Spielman said: "School leaders must have the right to set school uniform policies in a way that they see fit, in order to promote cohesion." By "cohesion" Ms Spielman means conformity . What we are speaking about hear is the headscarf not the veil. The latter covers the whole face not the first. Banning the headscarf at school is considered

"The global community has done little to intervene in the  ongoing genocide ."  Is there such a thing as a "global community" or "international community"? What we have, in fact, is big powers and regional ones decide who is worth "saving" and who is a collateral in geopolitics. Think, for example, of Bosnia vs. Rwanda and Syria. "For the most part, there has been confusion about who the Rohingya are and why they are being targeted by the Myanmar regime. Azeem Ibrahim, an international research fellow affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and the U.S. Army War College, argues that the persecution of the Rohingya is historically rooted in the situation of postcolonial Myanmar and the normalized “otherness” of the Rohingya people within the country’s culture. Ibrahim’s new book  The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide  t races this troubling history of persecution and explains its origins." Book review The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar...

Feminism is about injustice. It’s about tackling injustice whenever you see it. Pop art and patriarchy or خرابيش نسوية

المثلية الجنسية في نصوص شعرية

Anti-semitism This is probably the first time I remove a post from the blog. Enough is enough and The Labour Party, Israel, and anti-semitism So not to confuse a crude depiction with serious opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state as a settler, colonial, apartheid and imperialist state. And not to use the anti-semitism exploited by the Western imperialist state to silence any oppsition to the Israeli state or deflect attention from an alternative,  small as it is, to the status quo, exploitation, austerity, plunder, wars, oligarchy, corruption, stduents debt, neoliberalism, obscene inequality, cuts in social services, xenophobia, hypocrisy, double standard, attacks on pensions, teaming with autocrats for financial and geopolitical interests, etc.

Hungary Centrists/liberals, who like wars, austerity and status quo, and who presided over obscene inequality, and exploitation at hime and abroad, want to save "liberal democracy" even if that meant advocating an alliance with the neo-Nazis . Is this new?

"Just 3% of Americans own half of the guns in America. And that 3% isn’t just anyone. According to a Harvard study flagged by Scientific American this month, the person most likely to stockpile guns in this country is an older, white man from a rural conservative area. And an alarming body of research shows that they’re motivated by racial anxiety and a fear of emasculation." No comment.

"In this short book, I argue that Marx developed three key laws of motion of capitalism, around which a clear analysis of the nature of modern economies can be understood. From these laws, we can understand why capitalism cannot escape being subject to regular and recurring slumps; causes vicious rivalry among national states that leads to perpetual wars; and engenders uncontrolled and wasteful use of natural resources that now threatens the destruction of the planet itself." Marx 200

Anti-Sexus: Or, pornography does not exist

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst...

But this will not change the position of those liberals and leftists who have supported the Syrian regime or have remained silent.  The formers because they prefer a "secular", "Western-oriented", "liberal" (and neoliberal) man (and his wife) to those long-bearded men. The latters who think that there are a few progressive elements in the Syrian regime worth defending, and the Russian state, is a counter balance to western imeprialism. War crimes evidence in Syria 'overwhelming'

Chinua Achebe, Five Years On

Anti-semitism and reactionary anti-capitalism

What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism

The Real Views and Aims of the Putin-gate "Skeptics"

Britain I say: Israel is "neo-colonialist, imperialist power, associated with the US, oppressing Palestinians." The mural is about "class and privilege." I don't buy pomegranate from Lidl supermarket because they come from Israel. Is that enough to make me anti-semitic? If a Jew, a Zionist or any other person defends the Isreali colonial settler-state and its imperialist nature, s/he is complicit in crimes and oppression.  Is that enough to make me anti-semitic?

Fellini's   8½

Decolonizing Philosophy: Samuel Loncar Interviews Carlos Fraenkel and Peter Adamson about Islam, Reason, and Religion

Rim Banna R.I.P.

Britain However radical Labour’s 2017 manifesto was in many ways, it said nothing about rolling back the mechanisms bequeathed by the “war on terror.” This reflects a major historical weakness for Labour, which was always its loyalty to the constitutional status quo. This Veritable Arsenal

The underpopulated countries of Africa are in general underpolluted. The quality of the air is unnecessarily good compared with Los Angeles or Mexico. Polluting industries should be encouraged to move to the less-developed countries. A certain amount of pollution exist in countries where salaries are low. I think that the economic logic whereby tons of toxic waste can be dumped in places wehre salaries are low is irrefutable ... Any concern [about toxic products] will anyway be much greater in a country where people live long enough to develop cancer than in a country where the infant mortality rate is 200 in 1,000 by the age of five. — Lawrence Summers*, internal memo of the World Bank, December 13, 1991.  Quoted in Toussaint and Millet, 2010, pp. 255-6 *Summers was at the time chief economist and vice-president of the World Bank. He later became Secretary of the Treasury in Bill Clinton's government, before becoming the president of Havard University, until June 2006. The ext...