Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The day that a political project with impeccably pro-migration credentials triangulated into abstention on a miserable, destructive Conservative immigration bill." Labour's immigration U-turn

Class was the key for Erik Olin Wright

Venezuela

"None of the welfare benefits and financial packages on display today existed a decade ago. In fact, in earlier times the people in Qom used to equate being a student of religious studies, or  talabegi , with poverty and low quality of life. But this image and even self-presentation has been radically overturned in the past decade. Simultaneously, the state has been following neoliberal policies for the vast majority of society by privatizing universities and schools, deregulating labor laws, suppressing unions and cutting public budgets, while it has fashioned a welfare state in Qom for a few would-be its loyal subjects." Protesting Clerical Welfarism in Iran's Pious City

The crocodile tears of private jetters Davos: climate and inequality

From the archive Mario Vargas Llosa

Venezuela's crazy economics I wonder though what is this "international community" that is holding a solution to the disaster in a world dominated by a hegemon, international capital, and a continuing rise of far-right regimes.  Is the author speaking about the same "international community" that should have done something about the slaughter in Syria, the genocide in Myanmar, the detsruction in Libya, or the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, one of the worst in moder history?

Venezuela Maduro is supported by authoritarian China and Russia. The opposition is supported by the "democratic" U.S., Canada, a "democratically-elected" neofascist in Brazil, and the like. A coup should be OK then. Then they could claim it was a "humanitarian intervention" by "the free world" in the interest of "the Venezuelan people", i.e. the oligarchs and the "middle class". I wonder though how the American imperialists support a coup without having the army on their side. The 2002-US-supported coup almost escalated to a civil war.

"Human bone" in Primark's sock Workers in Asia and else where are sending a message: "we are exploited to the bone so that you could afford what we make."

"We do not want communists in Brazil" Anticommunism without communism

Britain Be careful with what you advocate.  Even for half-baked solutions, the market fundamentalists would ditch you out

Davos and the ‘liberal order’

"Order prevails in the Arab world"

???

لا بديل من إسقاط الأسد… بين الشعار والواقع

Italy and France A row that exposes both hypocrisy and truth Further reading: -  How poor countries develop rich countries by Jason Hickel (LSE) - How Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney - Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century  by John Smith

"The key to understanding contemporary authoritarianism in Morocco lies thus not only in the monarchy as a core institution, in its religious authority or its neopatrimonial power and its clientilistic networks, but also in the class projects of urban renewal, slum upgrading, poverty alleviation, gentrification, structural adjustment, market liberalization, foreign capital investment, and the creation of a good business climate. Instead of focusing on how much power the monarchy possesses, the book tries to capture how methods and techniques of government and rule have changed within the context of our contemporary global situation. The creation of a "good business climate" became key for the ways in which authoritarianism transformed and the ways in which the interests of ruling domestic elites and global economic elites increasingly intertwined. The central arguments of this book contradict this popular mythification of the Moroccan exception. I argue that the ref

Admission of lack of integration is the best part I like in this review. "I loved the  New Enclosure  as an account of the operation of government under the imperative of neoliberalism. But what I craved was a deeper integration with economic history. "I think Brett does a great job of making clear that his entire argument is operating within self-imposed limits. It is an analysis of the realm of government and governmental discourse. As such it makes a huge contribution. It provides a frame within which many other histories can be written. But reading Brett has left me worrying about the sanitizing effect of this kind of methodological choice. It has left me worrying because, as I am all too aware, the same criticism can be made of my book  Crashed ." Christophers'  The New Enclosure

Mainstream cinema Is it gettinng "history wrong" or is it deliberate distortion?

التحولات الجنسية كنتيجة للقهر في المنطقة العربية "Sexual transformations as a result of oppression in the Arab region" One of the sources used by the author to write this article is  Zigmunt Bauman's  Liquid Love .

Brexit "More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cossetted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was." "The British ruling class amd Brexit"

"Unless we, as a government, are prepared to act vigourously and take strong measures to combat the insidious propaganda of the extremists we are bound to have something very like rebellion in India before long... You say what you like about not holding India by the sword, but you have held it by the sword for 100 years and when you give up the sword you will be turned out. You must keep the sword ready to hand and in case of trouble or rebellion use it relentlessly. [Edwin Samuel] Montagu calls it terrorism, so it is and in dealing with natives of all classes you have to use terrorism whether you like it or not." —General Henry Rawlinson, commander-in-chief in India, quoted by John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire,  Bookmarks Publications 2006, pp. 113-14

Surprise! Surprise! These Palestinians are really depriving many people of a few things. BCRI reversed their decision to award Dr. Angela Davis the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award Also in Arabic

"They are either fanatics, or victims who need our support." Class struggle in Tunisia: A general strike today called for by the UGTT "Tunisia is under pressure from the  International Monetary Fund  (IMF) to freeze public sector wages as part of reforms to help reduce the country's budget deficit." Rise of cost of living, IMF's imperialism, global capitalist competition ... Tunisian "revolution": 2011-2019 Further readings - Debt, the IMF and the World Bank by Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet  - The People Want by Gilbert Achcar

“Turkey’s authoritarian turn is often portrayed as a by-product of President Erdoğan’s vainglorious personality or as the inherent telos of political Islam. But rather than signifying a stock competition between religion and secularism or between Islam and the West, the current fault lines in Turkey, as in much of the world, are emblematic of a slow-moving structural breakdown and reordering of the global capitalist system and the resurgence of nationalist, nativist and authoritarian politics in response to this." Middle East Report (288) editorial

“Intrepid, incorruptible, passionate and gentle. Imagine as you read between the lines of what she wrote, the expression of her eyes. She loved workers and birds. She danced with a limp. Everything about her fascinates and rings true. One of the immortals.” – John Berger 100th anniversary of the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg

The local and the globa l Göran Therborn employs a very interesting approach. I recommend the following articles: - Class in the 21st Century (2012) - New Masses (2014) - Age of Progress? (2016) - Dynamics of Inequality (2017) Note: you may not find free access to all of the articles unless you have a subscription.

A public event in London: a book launch World in Crisis

The present has a background Example: a champion of "middle-class America" and "middle-class values", a fighter against "aliens" Wasn't Bill Clinton a darling for Liberals and Neoliberals alike? Further reading “ The Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.”

I'm surprised to see this on El País . I'm not surprised to see the distortion in calling Rosa Luxemburg a 'pacifist.' De su vasta producción teórica destacan los temas que forman parte de su legado y que constituyen lo que, una vez muerta Rosa, se denominó “luxemburguismo”, una escuela marxista de características propias: su pacifismo, su lucha contra el revisionismo y la defensa de la democracia en el seno de la revolución. But which "democracy" Luxemburg fought for? Bourgeois democracy? "In the event of war threatening to break out, it is the duty of the workers and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved to do everything possible to prevent the out break of war by taking suitable measures, which can, of course, be changed or intensified in accordance with the exacerbation of the class struggle and the general political situation. Should war break out nevertheless, it is their duty to advocate its speedy end and to utilis

The BBC: ignoring criminal consequences of an era In its " Russia's bitter taste of capitalism ", there is an omission of the major consequence of the restoration of capitalism in Russia and the USSR, which is that  the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union took more lives than the Iraq and Syrian wars put together : 1.9 million excess deaths in Russia alone in 1990–95; around 4 million for the  USSR in the 1990s.  Sources:  – Vladimir Shkolnikov and Giovanni Andrea, "Population Crisis and Rising Mortality in Transitional Russia’, in Cornia and Renato Paniccià, eds,  "The Mortality Crisis in Transitional Economies", Oxford 2000, p. 256; Michael Marmot,  "The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity", New York 2004, p. 196. –  Jospeh Stiglitz's Globalisation and Its Discontents, 2002 Then add the plunder of the wealth and the rise of the oligarchs. Compare that with the way the BBC deals wi

"Tolerance"? To explore ... Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

Something I was surprised to discover. Political rights for foreigners

Here is an argument published by foreignpolicy.com exactly a year ago: One mistaken reason to avoid attacking North Korea is the fear of direct retaliation. The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly claimed that North Korea already has ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach as far as the United States. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration, or rather an anticipation of a future that could still be averted by prompt action. It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted. [G]iven South Korea’s deliberate inaction over many years, any damage ultimately done to Seoul

England: the rule of capital and corporate university "Up to a quarter of students in England are doing degrees that will not give them sufficient earnings to justify the cost of their loans, a think tank says. The centre-right group urges ministers to cut places on those courses offering little financial return and increase those in post-18 technical education." The centre-right group is obviously a defender of capital running universities and determining what education should students pursue. Instead of scrapping fees or make higher education almost free like in most countries, the solution is to scrap places because they are not marketable. The purpose is to create a debt-enslaved, pliable workforce.

The British yellow vests are of a different stock

"Capitalism is killing us" Translated to Arabic as "The capitalist terrorism ... How modern life is killing us without blood"  الإرهاب الرأسمالي ... هكذا تقتلنا الحياة الحديثة دون دماء

من الأرشيف المجلس البلدي

England "Shandor, 48, became homeless after falling behind on his rent following an accident at work." 48 years old and doesn't own a home! What has he been doing in his life? Why didn't he get a university degree and a good job? Why hasn't worked hard, not taking two jobs, not riding a bike looking for a third one, or, at least, why hasn't he managed to take a mortgage and work for a bank for 20/30 years? What is the difference between him and those refugees who come to our country for our milk and honey and our "generous benefits system", and make it unsustainable, dragging productivity down? He should be banished to Libya or Russia and his boy taken into custody!  England needs three million new social homes, a report says What about the developers, speculators, and the house prices? Three millions homes means a fall in the house prices, and a house after all, is not built to live in, but a place to make profits from, attract oligarchies,

"We can only wonder what Marx might have thought or said to Jones. Four years earlier in the  Manifesto , he and Engels had considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization. He was now collaborating with someone who held the opposite opinion, a situation that pulled him toward what his Hegelian training would have recognized as a position of immanent criticism — that is, criticism that submits to and appropriates the very premises of a competing standpoint in order to transcend it dialectically." The evolution of Marx's thinking on colonialism Further reading Marxism Orientalism Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar

The Swedish model? By 1980 Sweden had the lowest income and gender inequality in the world. As a result of the neoliberal capitalist reforms from mid-1980s, "The current Swedish income distribution bears some resemblance to the English one of 1688. The average member of the richest 0.1 per cent has a disposable income, after tax and transfers, 38 times greater than that of the median-income earner. At the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, England’s temporal lords had an income 30 times that of urban middleclass merchants and traders."  Angust Maddison, Contours of World Economy, 1-2030 AD,   Oxford 2007, pp. 278-9 Wealth distribution has worsened even more, resulting in the most uneven pattern to be found in Western Europe, on a par with those of Brazil, South Africa or the  USA.  In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 per cent owned 18 per cent of all household wealth; by 2017, it had risen to 42 per cent. The National Education Authority (Skolverket) has found that a quarter of

A good background of the current state of affairs The EU: from social-democratic dream to neo-liberal nightmare

Bearing in mind the events if the last 18 years (from wars, globalisation, the "war on terror" and its consequences, "economic crisis and stagnation, Arab uprisings, migration and cruel borders, to the rise of the far-right nationalism ... one might find the following conclusion, written in 2000, still pertinent: "The liberal individualist analytical corset does not fit the world as it is. It fails to strap American power into its prognosis of a supra-state order. It fails to identify mechanisms that can pull the social dominance – both economic and political – of the Pacific Union states over other societies under cosmopolitan governance. It fails to spot how the spread of liberal democratic polities is combined with the undermining of the conditions for their organic consolidation. And  finally it does not recognise that intervention by powerful states in the name of liberal individual rights is inevitably and inescapably arbitrary given the haphazard political

مراجعة كتاب "كيف زرعت فرنسا جذور الطائفية في سوريا؟"

خمسة أشرار أحمد مطر

From the archive

A page from imperialist domination and continuity 
 Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review ( Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09 ), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain. I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East. "Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large." John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role

End of the Neoliberal Era? I have selected some key points in an article by David Kotz. [I]f accumulation and profit rates have not been stellar, in some respects neoliberalism was much better for capital than the previous economic regime, in directing a far greater flow of wealth to the capitalist class. By  2010, neoliberalism had returned in the guise of austerity policy. The misery and insecurity of the Great Recession helped to fuel unexpected political developments— a rise of right-wing nationalism and renewed support for some kind of ‘democratic socialism’.  The current structural crisis has taken the form of stubborn stagnation despite unprecedented monetary stimulus, with slow economic growth, a low rate of capital accumulation, stagnating real wages and worsening economic insecurity for working people— conditions that have helped to produce new political polarizations. The main features of post-war [WWII] capitalism in the advanced economies are well known. The sta

Creating a role model A more powerful weapon against "Islamic fundamentalism"?  An Arab-American leading "a global emancipatory feminist movement"

Neoliberal capitalism in Turkey There is a comparison with trade union rights in the EU. Neoliberal capitalism has undermined trade union bargaining power significantly in the US and the EU. In countries like Turkey or Egypt the situation for the labour movement is worse. It has been a "war" by capital globally, and that's why the French Renault in Turkey can get away with it or Perfetti Van Melle in Bangladesh ignores the rights of workers to form a union. In the case of Turkey, especially after the failed coup, workers have sided with Erdogan. Note that Turkey being the country with the highest numbers of journalists incarcerated/persecuted in the world was well-known to "the free world" and "the international community" before the coup, but  Turkey, like Saudi Arabia, has its own role to play within the global and regional dynamic of capital accumulation and a balance of forces within US hegemony. Erdogan's war on workers

"Wood’s narrative pokes a finger in the eye of most pat thinking on the subject by trying not to center Putin in its analysis. Putin of course still dominates the book, though not in the same cartoon supervillain style that predominates in most political writing today. But Wood is at pains to stress that he is simply one part of a larger system of oligarchic authoritarianism inherited not from Communism but the Boris Yeltsin years, when the ex-Soviet Union was buried under a mass of radical neoliberal reforms that spread grinding misery throughout the country and left it a shriveled husk of what it had been before 1991." Russia beyond supervillain

I was shocked, devastated and appalled upon hearing that  Britain continued seeking arms deals with Saudi Arabia in weeks after Khashoggi was mudered I couldn't believe it. How could that happen? It must be a conspiracy by The Mirror and The Independent! 

One of the early books that fundamentally changed my thinking were by Syrian writers. One of them was the original Arabic version of  This review was written 4 years before the appearance of the English translation.

Indian women who cannot wait for white Western missionaries to show them the way to "equality"

This is a good analysis

"The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices." —Charles Péguy