Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

‘ The decaying American empire ’ argument is disputable. The comparison with the collapse of the Soviet Union misses the different economic structures of the two countries. The US economic power has not been experiencing a long term stagnation, for example.  Actually, the argument should be the way around: in 1980s there was no ‘whip of external necessity’ compelling the US to outcompete the Soviet Union. The latter was not an economic threat to the US. Today China is the ‘external whip’ but to an already more powerful American economy – a dynamic one in terms of capital-intensive industries, productivity and an array of industrially-advanced allies and subordinates.

It looks a very interesting dossier Alameda

  The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

This statement was published in 1995, i.e. before the wars and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and before the destructive legacies left behind after the American forces withdrew from the two countries, the Arab uprisings and the war in Syria, the NATO ‘intervention in Libya, and of course the ongoing invasion of Ukraine – a proxy war in fact. In addition to the exacerbated ecological degradation, rise in global inequality and social insecurity and precarity, etc. I am convinced, for example, that capitalism cannot deliver world peace. 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 – and at the moment its most aggressive and adventurist organizing force, the government of the United States – is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace. Nor do I think that ca...

Return of the king

A liberal view

“ Some will argue that we should not compare so-called liberal democracies in the West with repressive governments elsewhere in the world. But what did the United States’ status as a liberal democracy do for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and working-class Black America? For that matter, what did Iran’s status as a revolutionary society for the  mostazafin —the dispossessed—do for Asieh Panahi and the residents of her neighborhood as they confronted the bulldozers?“ A Call for Solidarity