Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism .

“There can for present purposes be no question that there is sufficient evidence that the UAE is not only failing to prevent genocide, but is also complicit in genocide .”

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture. The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the  strength  of American capital, not its decline. Trump claims that the  result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy. A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing. Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate. Tariffs on their own are insufficient to r...

Freedom in capitalist markets entails the freedom of property owners to use and dispose of their property, including the freedom of business owners to run their businesses as little dictatorships, not as representative polities. You do not elect your boss, let alone vote on your wages or working hours. The political scientists Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch have argued that workplaces are fundamentally places of unfreedom—many workers do not even have enough individual liberty to decide when to go to the bathroom without their bosses’ permission. — Trevor Jackson , The New York Review of Books, 2024