Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

K for Karl – machine [episode 5]

"I’m not a very passionate republican – many things bother me more than the monarchy. But as principles go it is unwavering. We have a  class problem in Britain  and the monarchy exemplifies it. If it’s a guilty pleasure I’m after, I don’t turn to betrothals in real-world feudal dynasties: I have Netflix. The political scientist Benedict Anderson  described countries as imagined communities . Call me a misery guts, but I’d rather imagine one in which I am born a citizen, not a subject, and others are not born to govern me." "The royal wedding" Note: Imagined Communities is a seminal book. It is an essential reading.

Revisiting the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam 

A bit old, but I think it still very relevant, for many who oppose Trump, for example, lament a loss of "a tolerant order". Tolerance?

Because it is not Manchester or Nice. "Palestinian men, women, and children, slaughtered in their own homeland for the crime of wanting independence and sovereignty over their own country. The Western media will present no face to those murdered, no name, no age, no background, no hospital images of mangled bodies and doctors frantically trying to save lives. There will be no interviews with family members or friends telling us how wonderful and caring their deceased loved ones were - because the Western media kno w that to do so would humanise the Palestinian people and create international sympathy for their cause. Western nations are complicit in these war crimes, treacherous Arab nations are silent, and those shameless African nations who clambered over each other to attend the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem have disgraced the memory of those who fought for African independence and against apartheid. The proverbial image of David vs Goliath could not be played out...

Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam

"It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths . A common condition of oppression, after all, is to be blamed for being the victim, and that blame gets meted out in language designed to rob the oppressed of their very struggle."

Interpreting "This is America" by Childish Gambino Warning: there is no ass shaking, knickers or even Eurovision trash.

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific ...

There have always been Marxists in Labour but it has never been a Marxist party (or even, by some definitions, a socialist one). Its 2017 general election manifesto was social democratic in nature, vowing to reform rather than replace capitalism. But in his speech, McDonnell couched the party’s pledge to renationalise “water, rail, Royal Mail and energy” in more radical terms: “It’s a significant development as a result of the new exploration of the ideas of Marx.” John Mcdonnell and the rebirth of British marxism?

The invention of sexual indentity and its imposition on the Other. "American and European missionaries of liberalism, that is, those who imagine that the global community of the future will be led by a secular cleric, [have sought] to proselytize their value system and model of social and political order to all Muslims whom they seek to save and rescu e from their despotic system of rule, failing which, the missionaries would at least want to rescue Muslim women and increasingly male (and female, though less attention is paid to the latter) Muslim 'homosexuals' from Islam's misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance. This act of proselytization aims to convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted. As Talal Asad put it, the liberal mission is to have the Islamic tradition 'remade in the image of liberal Protestant Chiristianity.' Muslim resistance to this benev...

Transcript of Bashar al-Assad's victory speech, 2020

Are we the baddies?

"There is no "core" or "periphery" to the global operation of capital and the military forces that sustain it. The ruling elites in the US, the EU, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are as much the beneficiary of the system they violently uphold as those who are disenfranchised by it are dispersed in these very places.  Racism  is a mere ideological veneer to the hardcore economic logic of colonialism and imperialism. Predatory capital is colour-blind and gender-neutral. It abuses white and coloured labour identically and it makes no difference to its maddening logic if you are a Donald Trump or a Saudi prince, an Egyptian general, an Indian entrepreneur, a Russian oligarch, or a Chinese businessman. Those who are abused and maligned by the selfsame system are as much among the poor of the US and Europe as they are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Colour and gender codification of power is a mere false consciousness to the economic logic of power and domi...

There is a book sweeping the popular media at the moment.  It’s called  Factfulness .  It purports to argue that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the world is becoming a better place.  Poverty is falling, life expectancy is rising; health levels are improving; people have more things and better services.  Even violence and wars are in decline. This is a hoary old message... Rising world inequality

" The Saur Revolution had been based on a coup led by young officers. But Afghanistan had a conscript army, with men from every corner of the country, mostly from the families of small peasants and sharecroppers. Those soldiers followed orders, but they had not been politically convinced. There had been no urban uprisings and no peasant war for land. In that sense, the Saur Revolution was a top-down coup with little rural support. The idea that Communism or socialism required a dictatorship by a minority was widely accepted among radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Karmal had learned his politics in prison in Kabul, Taraki had learned his in Bombay, and Amin had spent years in New York. The Afghan Communists were simply doing what the Left globally knew had to be done if they really wanted to change the world. Their tragedy is, in an acute and terrible form, the same one replicated elsewhere ." Related The West's favourite Afghan

A recommended read "If what I call vanguard neoliberalism established this phase of capitalist development (in the UK: 1979–97, and social neoliberalism then consolidated it (1997–2007)), the current period of crisis neoliberalism (2007–) is primarily defensive, an attempt to preserve the now decaying order through ever-more generalised attacks on the subaltern classes – not as ‘occasional’ incursions to enable budget cuts here or prevent industrial action there, but as permanent aspects of the political regime (Davidson, 2017)." Neoliberalism as a class-based project You may need to open a free account to access the essay

To Putin's leftist supporters, look how beautiful these two men look like and how alike they are!

52 Palestinians killed on deadliest day since 2014, reports the BBC.  So what? Who cares? There is the World Cup soon! An IDF tweet

I think that the article, contrary to its title, it is a more a summary of the main ways the Palestinian have followed in their struggle against a settler colonial state since the first Intifida  than "why Isreal kills". Why Israel kills

One of the paradoxes of social life in late capitalism is that, even as more and more people abandon certain types of drug -- alcohol, tobacco, ecstasy, sex -- addictions  ar on the rise .  The number of alcoholics, opioid addicts, gamblers , social media addicts, porn addicts and so forth shows a secular increase. In other words, the drugs of sociability are declining, while the drugs of solitude are gaining ground. What kind of problem is this?  Trump says, massacre the dealers . The Duterte option . Liberals, with the soft paternalism of the moral reformer, say treat the disease . So we murder the problem, or we medicalise it. Hard cop or soft cop; either way, the problem is being suppressed . Toxicity in late capitalism

Al-Gami'ya Interview with director Reem Saleh

Prior to the 12 May demonstration in London, the Trade Union Congress had publised the results of a research: "The current period of wage stagnation is the worst for two centuries. Not since the beginning of the 18th  century (when it took 24 years ) , has it taken so long for real wages to recover from a slump." Britain's 17-year real wage squeeze

Aren't the people of Iran and North Korea entitled to the same protection racket? "They, arguably, are more threatened. Yet that isn't how the global hierarchy of violence works." Trump, Netanyahu, and the nuclear conflict with Iran

"But then –the third event—globalized capitalism that exhibits all the features that Marx so eloquently described in  Das Capital , and the Global Financial Crisis, made his thought relevant again. By now he was safely ensconced into the Pantheon of global philosophers, his every extant word published, his books available in all the languages of the world, and  his status, while still subject to vagaries of time, safe—at least in the sense that it could never fall into obscurity and oblivion. In fact, his influence is inextricably linked with capitalism. So long as capitalism exists, Marx will be read as its most astute analyst. If capitalism ceases  to exist, he will be read as its best critic. So whether we believe that in another 200 years, capitalism will be with us or not, we can be sure that Marx will." The influence of Karl Marx – a counterfactual