Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Hong Kong resistance

This is excellent. Beyond the Plague State

They are in a hurry to resume "business as usual" and capital accumulation.

In English and French Covid-19 and circuits of capital Covid-19 et les routes du capital

ore corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor ... Students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a sub ‐ altern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values’ (Giroux, 2014, p. 20). The implications of this go far beyond the university itself, resulting in what Giroux, one of the leading writers on this topic, has called ‘the near‐death of the university as a democratic public sphere’ (p. 16). In these assessments, neoliberalism, in its impact on Higher Education, is associated with a range of other terms or ‘discourses’: The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institu ‐ tions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an ...

"Over the past few years a number of brilliant scholars have been hounded out of the academy because of their political convictions, their commitments to struggles for Palestinian rights and against white supremacy. At the same time, cowardly administrations repeat right-wing talking points about free speech. It’s indicative of this capitalist, upside-down world that tells us that corporations are people but people are disposable, that we live in a knowledge society but facts, learning, and education are simultaneously devalued and commodified, that success brings freedom when in fact it brings debt and entrapment in the service of the capital accumulation of the very rich." Which side are you on? The Comradely Professor

"The problem with the 'cheap food' system is that, it is only 'cheap' for capital: it really isn't remotely cheap for most of the world's populations of people, animals and plants. It is in fact enormously expensive, and we are beginning to pick up the tab." What, or whom, will we eat? Related article: Capital's hunger in abundance

Provided the economic basis of the social order is not called into question, criticism of it, however sharp, can be very useful to it, since it makes for vigorous but safe controversy and debate, and for the advancement of “solutions” to “problems” which obscure and deflect attention from the greatest of all “problems,” namely that here is a social order governed by the search for private profit. It is in the formulation of a radicalism without teeth and in the articulation of a critique without dangerous consequences, as well as in terms of straightforward apologetics, that many intellectuals have played an exceedingly “functional” role. And the fact that many of them have played that role with the utmost sincerity and without being conscious of its apologetic import has in no way detracted from its usefulness. Ralph Miliband pledged himself to the socialist cause at Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery as a sixteen-year-old, shortly after fleeing the Nazis in Belgium. It led him to s...

Economic growth: a short history of a controversial idea

"Capitalism is killing us" Translated to Arabic as "The capitalist terrorism ... How modern life is killing us without blood"  الإرهاب الرأسمالي ... هكذا تقتلنا الحياة الحديثة دون دماء

End of the Neoliberal Era? I have selected some key points in an article by David Kotz. [I]f accumulation and profit rates have not been stellar, in some respects neoliberalism was much better for capital than the previous economic regime, in directing a far greater flow of wealth to the capitalist class. By  2010, neoliberalism had returned in the guise of austerity policy. The misery and insecurity of the Great Recession helped to fuel unexpected political developments— a rise of right-wing nationalism and renewed support for some kind of ‘democratic socialism’.  The current structural crisis has taken the form of stubborn stagnation despite unprecedented monetary stimulus, with slow economic growth, a low rate of capital accumulation, stagnating real wages and worsening economic insecurity for working people— conditions that have helped to produce new political polarizations. The main features of post-war [WWII] capitalism in the advanced economies are well known...

A recommended read "If what I call vanguard neoliberalism established this phase of capitalist development (in the UK: 1979–97, and social neoliberalism then consolidated it (1997–2007)), the current period of crisis neoliberalism (2007–) is primarily defensive, an attempt to preserve the now decaying order through ever-more generalised attacks on the subaltern classes – not as ‘occasional’ incursions to enable budget cuts here or prevent industrial action there, but as permanent aspects of the political regime (Davidson, 2017)." Neoliberalism as a class-based project You may need to open a free account to access the essay

“Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time."  Karl Marx

White do white people like what I write? The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.  ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to  We Were Eight Years in Power . ...

Jeff Halper "lays out the case for Israel’s centrality to the system of transnational economic hegemony by following up his initial question with a section entitled, “The Global Pacification Industry,” which explores capitalism’s accumulative process, alongside the changing nature of global conflict. As state to state engagement involving tanks and conventional armed forces has receded, Halper argues it has been replaced by the increasingly important role of what he terms “securocratic wars,” located in the “global battlespace,” which aim at nothing less than the pacification of the world-wide population to which his title refers." War Against the People See also My interview with Jeff Halper (2008)

The Colonialism of the Present