Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...

“There is no alternative, I concluded. The delusion of democracy was a colonial concoction (a world capitalist ruse) that is now exposed for what it is and over and done with - we've hit a wall with pictures of Trump, Modi, Assad, Sisi, Ayatollah Khamenei, Putin, and the rest of them plastered all over it. This is the case unless, like Hannah Arendt, we make a crucial distinction between freedom from tyranny and liberty to choose a different political system. At this point in history, I have therefore concluded, we are far more invested in freedom from tyranny than harbouring any conviction or trust in liberty to choose a legitimate alternative state. I am now convinced we are far better off understanding what has tormented us and despising it than hoping to achieve what we wish and has historically escaped us.”

Benedict Anderson called the nation states "the imagined communities."  The Lebanese American historian William Haddad wrote: “The nation state is the prison of the mind.”  

Some interesting arguments by a reformist leftist. A call that the UN Security Council, a criminal institutions dominated by imperialist powers, plays a role, is ludicrous to say the least. Death knell of liberal globalisation?

Stop war, not people /Let's dismantle borders (A photo I took in Genoa, Italy)                 Genoa, Italy 05 September 2018

This piece suffers from some problems, in particular the narrow bourgeois definition of democracy in regards to the "Tunisian exception", but it is worth a read, especially the first part of it that deals with the historical background. Failed dream of political Islam 

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri...

Israel A liberal Israeli paper unlike any Western liberal one

Some interesting arguments of a big picture. However, it is too much political science, too little political economy. Hardly any mention of economic growth, profit, ownership of the means of producing wealth, capitalist uneven development, and what would make the rich countries jeopardise their standard of living for "a new international order" that is just.  It is not clear what the author means by the so often-repeated second person "we". Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy. "The Demise of the Nation State"

I have read the Introduction and it sounds a very interesting book. The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey

Is there an alternative to countries?

The Political Theology of ISIS

  Nationalism "in any imperialist society is bound up with chauvinism, and Britain is an imperialist society, with England its historical core, which has always been defined by its status in the imperialist hierarchy, whatever William Hague says to the contrary.  Orwell’s efforts to situate the basis for socialism on the terrain of culture and “ Englishness ,” which admittedly had a certain proto-Gramscian quality in its approach to popular culture as a strategic factor in political struggles, surely represent the last serious attempt to articulate something like a left-wing “Englishness.”  It was certainly light years ahead of the mawkish, demagogic detritus that passes for the same attempt these days.  Yet it failed rather badly, for two reasons.  First, because it misjudged the class basis for any post-war socialism, estimating that the perpetual growth of a functionary and technician class would be the basis for a rational yet national post-capitalist syste...

Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East It is a good essay, but I wonder why one in concluding a 30-page essay does not insert three lines on the role of Russia and its support of the Assad regime.

Via Joey Ayub' blog "The inherent contradictions which have plagued Syria and the world should give rise to deeper realizations, eloquently expressed by Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik in a Facebook post: “It is the capitalist-statist-nationalist-patriarchal system that forces people around the world and at the moment especially in the Middle East to choose between lesser evils in the name of freedom. Forcing millions of people to pick between ISIS or Assad; religious fundamentalism or secular militarism; monarchy, caliphate or racist nation-states; women's pornification or complete veiling; Sisi or Morsi; Atatürkism or Erdoğanism; etc are not choices but perfect weapons of breaking the people's will. To force people to settle between death by drowning or by burning is the perfect way to make them lose the most fundamental human power: hope."