Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Good! Marx deserves better critics

"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 Communist Manifesto as a graphic novel

The Communist Manifesto at the British Library Note that the full price to attend the talk is £15. Obviously, and ironically, the event is not for the working class!

K is for Karl - Communism (episode 2)

Remember the Greek tragedy and the role of Yanis Varoufakis in it? Here is his reading of the Communist Manifesto

Michael Roberts replies to the Financial Times' "Activist Manifesto" Recent empirical work on the US class division of incomes has been done by Professor Simon Mohun .  Mohun analysed US income tax returns and divided taxpayers into those who could live totally off income from capital (rent, interest and dividends) – the true capitalists, and those who had to work to make a living (wages).  He compared the picture in 1918 with now and found that only 3.8% of taxpayers could be considered capitalists, while 88% were workers in the Marxist definition.  In 2011, only 2% were capitalists and near 84% were workers.  The ‘managerial’ class, ie workers who also had some income from capital (a middle class ?) had grown a little from 8% to 14%, but still not decisive.  Capitalist incomes were 11 times higher on average than workers in 1918, but now they were 22 times larger.  The old slogan of the 1% and the 99% is almost accurate." From communism to activism? ...

In a world ridden with a crisis This is not the first time the Financial Times , a leading paper in denfence of the system, writes about Marxist ideas. In order to save the system a few things have to be done, including a warning on inequality and the "excesses of the free market", and co-opting any potential movement that might threaten the existing power relations. In fact, what the bourgeoisie fear most not the "Activism", or even socialism, but the slipping away of their power to the far-right, or worse, to barabrism. Thus comes this reading of the Communist Manifesto Note: You can read the article only once if you don't have a subscription.

" Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion." Indomitable Terry Eagleton assessing Eric Hobsbawm "Hobsbawm himself always argued that his historiography was inseparable from his Marxism and, indeed, only made possible by it. I argue below that he was essentially right in this judgment. For those of us on the anti-Stalinist left, Hobsbawm’s orthodox communism meant that his political judgements—his extraordinarily narrow conception of the working class, for example, or his belief that nationalism could be harnessed for progressive ends—had to be treated with deep suspicion; but much of his historical writing has to be afforded a great deal more resp...