Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Karl Marx Walks London There is some exaggeration in the wordings on the front page. However, I was in two walks a few years ago and I recommend you go on one, for it inspires to read Marx and to question the prevalent perceptions about his ideas.

“It is worth noting,” [Martin Luther] King said, “that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.” Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx (Click on Free view when subscription message pops up)

Education starts at home If you want to know more about socialism, you don't need to look back at the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Look at Venezuela. And if you need to have theoretical and ideological understanding of what socialism is, follow Fox News. I wonder though why the journalist here adds this sentence that demolishes his has arguments against "socialism".  "But no country has ever successfully enacted a system that matches Marx’s vision for the world – a reality even the staunchest Marxist will admit." It is also convenient to call Bernie Sanders, a social democrat, a socialist because it helps the child learn more about the evils of socialism and how to protect the American way of life from it How to get your child say no to socialism

Biographies and introductions to Marx Free to download

The Young Karl Marx (movie) It is not easy to find a free online version. You might experience annoyance with pop up windows, but will evetually get it play.

Mazzucato draws inspiration for her activism from two sources: on the one hand the heterodox economics of Karl Polanyi and on the other hand the democratic ambition of John F Kennedy. JFK inspires Mazzucato to call for the economy to be given a “new mission”. Polanyi’s analysis of the economy as a constructed social artefact makes this seem possible. If the market was made by the state then it can presumably be remade. The question, of course, is how. Unfortunately, the boldness of Mazzucato’s vision and the brashness of her rhetoric are not matched by the depth or coherence of her answer to this basic question. "Mariana Mazzucato's bold mission to reform the global economy"

Happy birthday, Karl Marx In Opinion section on the New York Times By a professor at a South Korean university

K is for Karl - Communism (episode 2)

Our educated elite According to Karen Pierce, the UK's ambassador to the UN, Karl Marx was Russian! During the Syria debate, she commented: "With respect to Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what has become of his country… in its defense of the use of chemical weapons against the innocent.” Pierce's Russian counterpart said that Marx and Lenin were frequent visitors to London. Lenin was. Marx wasn't a frequent visitor, but lived almost half of his life in the city.

"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition... The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property", is "an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race." — Marx, Capital , vol. 3 "It seems to me axiomatic that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism . . . is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace." Capitalism "may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental prote...

Crucial. A debate between Michael Roberts and David Harvey

Immanuel Wallerstein , currently a senior research scholar at Yale University, is among the greatest living sociologists and one of the most appropriate scholars to discuss the current relevance of Marx. He has been a reader of Marx for a long time, and his work has been influenced by the theories of the revolutionary born in Trier on May 5, 1818. Wallerstein has authored more than 30 books, which have been translated into several languages, including his very well known  The Modern World-System , published in four volumes between 1974 and 2011 Read Marx, says Wallerstein An interview

“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

Charles Baudelaire, Jane Jacobs, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Karl Marx

" 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...

Dictatorship dies in darkness

Capital.150: part 3 – struggle!

David Harvey's new book  Marx's Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason Event

"I'm a Marxist — we are misunderstood on both the left and right"

Michael Roberts reviewing Jonathan Portes' Capitalism: 20 Ideas You Really Need to Know