NM's blog

“To put it briefly, there is nothing new on the eastern front. The capitalist classes are once again proclaiming, with one voice, that private property is their sole sacred value; that the working class’s submission to the regime of private property is far more essential than the survival of the liberal democracy they have long worn as armor. Faced with the possibility that their domination over society might come to an end, they panic and accuse the left, simultaneously, of being communist and of supporting groups that advocate sharia.” On the stakes for real transformation in the aftermath of the decisive leftwing victory in Berlin

A manufactured crisis that far-right politicians have tapped into for their own political gain. Related Spain's revolt against the rentiers The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

Robin  DiAngelo  describes going for dinner with a Black couple while at university. Desperate to show that she wasn’t racist – ‘At this point in my life, I had no Black friends and had rarely spent time with Black people’ – DiAngelo, who is White, shared ‘every racist joke, story and comment’ that her family had ever made.  Later she realised with horror that she had ‘subjected this couple to racism all night long’.  When White people are ‘nice’, DiAngelo suggests, they are often doing what she was doing: reproducing racism while disassociating themselves from it. The people she is thinking of are middle-class White progressives, who do not see themselves as racist and who are anxious not to be seen as racist. This, DiAngelo argues, makes them all the more likely to unconsciously reproduce racism. —Musab Yunis, London Review of Book, February 2022