Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 I think this is worth watching. Ethos, a Turkish TV series

Boris Johnson's message to the working class Related It's not an accident Britain and America are the world's biggest coronavirus losers

By someone with a career in the IMF Ten reasons why a 'Greater Depression' for the 2020s is inevitable

Protecting the rich, exposing the poor to humanitarian and economic disaster

Western news coverage: The white perspective

Britain “The scorn which the angry young men hurled at the establishment was a class resentment but one devoid of any class consciousness,” feminist Lynne Segal writes perceptively in  Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy . In the decades that followed, shaped by race riots, feminism, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism, working-class solidarity appeared to fracture. The rise of what’s now called identity politics began. From the the Blitz to Brexit "While in 1931 10% of married women  were in work, that rose sharply to 21% in 1951 and 47% in 1972 It is interesting to draw a c omparison here . If in an industrial power like Britain, an Empire, with 200 years of capitalist development, women became half of the workforce only in early 1970s, how should one analyse the condition of women in Africa and the Middle East? Why Arab women, for example, do not in total terms make half of the workforce? Does that have som...

A picture about Hong Kong, which incorporates sociology, political economy and international relations in one short piece is rare to find. A must read. Hong Kong's resistance

Working-class people don't need to "break into the elite" A critique of BBC2 broadcast (I find it funny, but telling that the BBC classified this topic in Entertainment and Arts section) Yes, it is about social structure. Nathalie Olah in her critique advocates social justice instead of social mobility. But could "social justice" be achieved within the existing capitalist socio-economic relations?

Berlin, Germany It seems that the police of the strongest economy in Europe, which exports submarines, trains and surveillance equipments lacks the technologies to make arrests of far-rights criminals! Ferat Kocak believes this is one reason why the violence here has flared up. "This is traditionally a very white middle-class area, but that's now changing, it is becoming more multicultural, with people with different lifestyles. These far-right guys don't feel comfortable with that." I thought the problem was with the uneducated, the unenlightened! Far-right violence in a Berlin district

Syria Despite the length of the war and the catastrophes it has brought, the deeper forces behind Syria’s conflict remain poorly understood, even on the Left. The protagonists are too often seen in the culturalist terms of “Sunnis vs. Shias,” or “Islamists vs. Secularists.” Just as often, the war is reduced to pure geopolitics, with the lead actors assumed to be mere proxies for America and its international opponents (or allies). Rarest of all is any developed discussion of the class dynamics that shaped the Syrian state and society even before the 2011 conflict. Yet these had a decisive effect on the uprising and the regime’s ability to withstand it. Grasping these social elements of the conflict is just as important today if we want to understand the Assad regime’s strategy for the “new Syria,” and how it intersects with the plans of his Russian and Syrian allies.

India’s middle class had never before faced a revolt by domestic workers on such a scale. Sandhya Gupta, a resident, told the  New York Times : ‘They are like [a] bone that is stuck in our throats — we can neither swallow them, nor can we spit them out’ India's servants revolt

The new political cleavage doesn’t, as many suggest, reflect the distinction between the “elite” and the “masses”. It obscures it, helping conceal the fact that the political interests of the cleaner and the steelworker are far more similar than of either to Cleese or Bilimoria. Whether in south Wales or south London, workers suffer from the casualisation of work, the stagnation of wages, the imposition of austerity. Class is still the defining force shaping British lives The Frost Report

Brexit A YouGov analysis of more than 25,000 voters suggests the following division of leave voters in the referendum, linked to the 2017 election result. •  Middle-class leave voters: Conservative 5.6 million; Labour 1.6 million.  •  Working-class leave voters: Conservative 4.4 million; Labour 2.2 million. (A few of the remaining 3.6 million leave voters supported smaller parties; most did not vote in 2017.) So the largest block of leave voters were middle-class Conservatives, followed by working-class Conservatives.  Just one in eight leave voters was a working-class Labour supporter. To be sure, had even half of these 2.2 million voters backed remain, the result of the referendum would be different. But to suggest that the referendum’s 17.4 million leave voters were dominated by working-class Labour supporters is simply wrong. Labout's Brexit tactics are "failing spectacularly"

Algeria An interview with Hamza Hamouchene

Another indictment of the "International Criminal Fund" “We are not poor but were made poor, this is your policy, oh dollar” ( Mish faqir lakin ifqar, hatha nahjak ya dular ). This understanding of corruption is in stark contrast to notions of corruption which depict the main problem of postcolonial states in the global South as one of corrupt individuals, rather than global economic structures that keep elites, leaders and policies which harm their populations. Framed this way, the problem is mismanagement rather than (deliberate) structures that benefit the elite at the expense of the majority." Do you know who governs us? The damned Monetray Fund Essential reading: Debt, IMF, and the World Bank  by Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010

Very good! I recommend it to "Westerners" and non-Westerners.

When the celebrated Saudi-Jordanian novelist Abdel-Rahman Munif was asked why he named his literary masterpiece on the rise of the petro-modernist cities of the Gulf  Cities of Salt , he replied: By Cities of Salt, I meant cities that grew suddenly in an unnatural and extraordinary way, not as a result of a long historical accumulation that led to their expansion, but more as a kind of explosion due to sudden wealth. This wealth (oil) has led to inflated cities that have become like balloons that can explode and end once they touch something sharp. The same applies to salt. Although it is necessary for life, humans, and all creatures, any increase in its quantity  . . . life becomes unsustainable. This is what is expected of the cities of salt.  . . . When floods come to them, when electricity is cut off, or when you experience real difficulties of one kind or another, we will discover that these cities are fragile places ill fit to be modern...

Long live the middle class! " only 25 black Caribbean students entering medicine or dentistry courses in 2014-15." UK higher education: class and race

US The Vanishing Middle Class

France There are plenty of colourful characters in the Macron camp, ranging from a retired bullfighter in Arles, Marie Sara, to Rwandan refugee Hervé Berville, éclair entrepreneur Brigitte Liso and horror film producer Laurent Zameczkowski. One of the better known figures is mathematician Cédric Villani, known for his unique dress sense including large spider brooches. Having won over 47% of the vote in the first round, he looks unbeatable. "They tend to be very middle-class, very white on the whole, and half are absolute newcomers to politics," says Prof Marlière. (The BBC online) The politice of celebrities, of media image-making. " A physician, in order to be admitted to practice, must demonstrate his theoretical and practical knowledge of medicine. A politician, on the other hand, who, unlike the physician, purposes to decide the fate not of hundreds of people, but of millions, does not have to show such proof of knowledge. This fact seems to be one of t...