Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Capitalism and workers struggle in China

We have to end the permanent wars

If you are not radical enough Lessons from Nicaragua to the Arab uprisings, Syriza, Venezuela ... "The achievements of the Sandinista government between 1979 and 1990, while they allowed for significant improvements of the living conditions of most of the Nicaraguans, did not break with the export-oriented extractivist model dominated by big capital. Nor did they promote active citizen participation in the economic and political decision-making processes. The fact that the political institutions and internal organization of the FSLN were left undeveloped allowed neoliberalism to regain a foot­hold. Further, there were no tools people could use to prevent the Ortega regime from corrupting the other government institutions." Nicaragua 1979-2019

"The border in this sense is a very recent, twentieth century form of racial sovereignty. It is no more inevitable or natural than the existence of concentration camps. The fact, however, that it feels natural, that it has achieved the appearance of 'the way things are', that it seems inevitable, is an indication of how powerful the ideology is." The border as political fantasy

Imperialism, globalisation and the profitability of labour

What do the Iranian people want?

Neoliberal revisionists are sanatizing/sterilizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical legacy and portraying him as a moderate. "In this brief celebratory moment of King’s life and death we should be highly suspicious of those who sing his praises yet refuse to pay the cost of embodying King’s strong indictment of the US empire, capitalism and racism in their own lives." Martin Luther King Jr. was radical

"We the signatories of this statement, refuse to separate our opposition to U.S. imperialism and any imperialist war drive on Iran, from our support for the progressive and revolutionary social justice struggles of Iranian women, workers and oppressed minorities against their regime." Statement in Solidarity with Iranian Women

Scathing! Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence

"Robin Yassin-Kassab examines the axis of useful idiocy that responds to the rise of torch wielding fascism in the U.S. with whatabout-Hillaryisms, that defends British chauvinism as a tactic to combat globalism, and that defends the genocidal Syrian Regime as a hedge against 'Zio-Wahhabi' imperialism. "It isn’t surprising that the right sees every Syrian refugee as a potential terorist when the left has spent years  opining that the Syrian revolution is run by al-Qaida (or American imperialism, or Zionism). These beasts feed each other. The greatest threats today are rising authoritarianism, whether it calls itself leftist or rightist, and the preference for ideology over human reality, for simplistic conspiracism over complicated facts. This is going to get a lot more messy. We need answers to the politics of austerity and the undoubted tensions of a globalised and increasingly technologised economy. Nostalgia for the social compositions of earlier decades, and the...