Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Rana Plaza disaster – five years on Sweat and blood in our shirts and trousers. But  where are Bill and Angelina?

But by far the most casualties were suffered by Koreans. US carpet bombing, largely unopposed, was the furnace that forged North Korea as a merciless and paranoid regime. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 per cent of the population." Korean peace treaty would have to overcome decades of distrust

"Creative destruction"?

Marx 200 Conference in Berlin Scroll down to read the English version

Syria: on academic freedom and responsibility

There are no good guys" - or "everyone is equally bad" - has become a trope used by many otherwise decent people to absolve themselves of moral guilt for being bystanders to injustice. Are there really 'no good guys' in Syria?

"was there nothing wrong with capitalism before finance (and ‘financialisation’) emerged after the 1970s?  Were there no crises of overproduction and investment, no monopolies and rent-seeking before the 1970s?  Was there a wonderful productive, competitive, equal capitalist mode of production existing in the 1890s, 1930s or even in the 1960s? And why did finance suddenly emerge in the 1970s, leading to the GDP measure being altered to account for it? Mazzucato offers no explanation of why capitalism became increasingly ‘unproductive’ and ‘rent-seeking’.  But Marx’s value theory does.  From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, there was a sharp fall in the profitability of the productive sectors of all the major capitalist economies. Capitalism entered the so-called neoliberal period of the destruction of the welfare state, restriction of trade unions, privatisation, globalisation – and financialisation.  Financialisation (looking to make profit from the purchase and sale of fi

The soundtrack to London's murders

The biggest trading partner for each country. It matters a lot!

Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis

"Hooliganism came relatively late to Russian football, emerging in the early 1990s as a self-conscious copy of the decades-old English example – with its vicious firms, favoured clothing labels and racist chants." The rise of Russia's neo-Nazi football hooligans

This is funny, but it also refletcs how deep the level of political degeneration has reached.

A ruling class that has allowed all this and squandered wealth at home and abroad (enriching Western cities, for example), while their Arab-Muslim brothers and sisters suffer under economic development, poverty and different sorts of oppression, should be overthrown. The next Arab revolution must be socio-economic or it will not change the fundamental. Dubai's upper middle-class  

Cuba  (en français) par Richard Gott

A rarity from the London School of Economics. I don't necessarily agree with the idealization of Rojava 'revolution' , though. American imperialism is involved in it, among other problems. Syria and our brutal world order This is a summary of the predicament: “It is the capitalist-statist-nationalist-patriarchal system that forces people around the world and at the moment especially in the Middle East to choose between lesser evils in the name of freedom. Forcing millions of people to pick between ISIS or Assad; religious fundamentalism or secular militarism; monarchy, caliphate or racist nation-states; women's pornification or complete veiling; Sisi or Morsi; Atatürkism or Erdoğanism; etc are not choices but perfect weapons of breaking the people's will. To force people to settle between death by drowning or by burning is the perfect way to make them lose the most fundamental human power: hope." — Dilar Dirik

"It is more a matter of the daily erosion of intellectual integrity, the relentless commodification of scholarly values, and the tightening grip of managerialist autocracy. And no one can seriously believe that any of this will be improved by leaving the EU and submitting to the unregulated embrace of global capitalism in its most buccaneering and profit-hungry form." In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity

"There is no alternative" "It is better a banana republic than fascism" I also like the comment: voters are not innocent; they are complicit in seeing no alternative, but the staus quo.

K is for Karl - Communism (episode 2)

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion

Crossing divides

Dear Basha'r al-Assad apologists, ...

"The Arab world’s main problem is dictators who continue to be supported by foreign powers, and foreign powers bombing them when they cease to be useful. The problematic Western interventions, past and present, will remain controversial and dangerous. When they are financed by Saudi petrodollars, they are even more problematic, serving the interest of a lethal repressive regime rather than the suffering people of Syria." — Madawi al-Rasheed "Problematic" and "controversial"? This is what I call liberal academic correctness; not calling a spade a spade.

Échanger autre chose que de l'argent

Once it lost the PCF as the mediating force to represent its grievances, the French working class fulfilled Herbert Marcuse’s  1972 warning  that “The  immediate ex pression of the opinion and will of the workers, farmers, neighbors—in brief, the people—is not, per se, progressive and a force of social change: it may be the opposite.”  When The Communist Party stopped a French revolution

Remember the Greek tragedy and the role of Yanis Varoufakis in it? Here is his reading of the Communist Manifesto