Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

A very, very short account that doesn't include economic and cultural aspects. Note that more recent studies put the numbers of Iraqis killed by the sanctions to an estimate between 200 and 300 thousand. Chomsky then was still relying on studies done by journals like The Lancet, for example, which put the number in "the hundreds of thousands".

Free ebook from Verso How to be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century By Erik Olin Wright

How meat plant workers became the frontline in Covid-19 war

The area of the UK 'worst-affected' by Covid-19

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline

A left of liberal argument Should we be scared o the coronavirus debt mountain?

What's behind the disaster in the Lombardy region?

"In this pandemic, the mask reveals far more than it hides. It exposes the world’s political and  economic relations for what they are: vectors of self-interest that ordinarily lie obscured under glib talk of globalisation and openness. For the demagogues who govern so much of the world, the pandemic has provided an unimpeachable excuse to fulfil their dearest wishes: to nail national borders shut, to tar every outsider as suspicious, and to act as if their own countries must be preserved above all others. When these tendencies combine with a fawning loyalty to the free market, the results can be ruinous. In mere weeks, the mask went from being an urgent human need to a cynically exploited asset in a global resource grab – the fastest such journey, perhaps, of any product in history. Sometimes, it felt as if the mask itself was beside the point – that it was just a trigger to rehearse old routines of acquisitiveness and discord, with no further, greater end in sight." Ho

Virtual Mayday 2020

We're knee-deep in shit and drinking cups of tea

The future of the Hirak movement

If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.           — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even more pandemics

Civilised London

Even some of the best researchers make terrible blunders. Here is my email to Jared Diamond: It's a fascinating book [ Guns, Germs and Steel ] and I salute you for your approach and research. I am on p. 216 (1999 edition.) of your book. I was struck by this statement: "For example, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?" The CIA World Factbook ( quoted by wikipedia ) estimates that in 2000 the adult literacy rate in Iraq was 84 percent for males and 64 percent for females, with UN figures suggesting a small fall in literacy of Iraqis aged 15–24 between 2000 and 2008, from 84.8% to 82.4. That despite the sactions and the invasion and its consequences. Under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi education system was one of the best if not the best among the Arab countries.

Ignored Plight of Dalit Muslims

Equating the settler, the occupier, the invader with the victim, the one who fought back. The liberal [leftist?] Gideon Levy, the Jewish settlers had a "just cause", and the Palestinians had their own too. All what we need is to know what happened then and there. "Why didn't you tell us aboit the Palestinian village of Tantura?" 

A free ebook A shock to the system

Missing profits—a summary Paper 40% of multinational profits are shifted to tax havens globally 

The causes are the "ongoing plunder of poor countries by rich countries, banks, multinational corporations, and global elites in the North and South." Again, this approach ignores the class structure in the poor and middle income countries, the socio-economic policies of the ruling elites (only mentioned in passing) and the role of the dominant classes in perpetuating the plunder, the lack of the political will to embark on economic and technological development, etc. Such an approach treats relations between states as separate from the sociology of the countries in question. The author of the article has a PhD in sociology! One or two more paragraphs would enlarge the picture and provide a better expalnation.  "The Global South" must be freed of its debt servitude

The Anti-Fascist Revolution