Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

There have been a few praises and critiques of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I have recently got across an. interesting one. Piketty, write Gareth Jones, “says relatively little about where capital is located, how capital accumulation in one place relies on activities elsewhere, how capital is urbanized with advanced capitalism and what life is like in spaces without capital.” In reading Capital “ I was struck by the attention to the rich, to those with wealth and their distance from the mean of incomes and wealth/capital, and how little analysis is given to the poor.” A geographical essay   (or through a gmail account ) Related I prefer Lordon’s dissection though. “Thomas Piketty’s thousand-page economics bestseller reduces capital to mere wealth — leaving out its  political impact on social and economic relationships throughout history .”

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism.  “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. *** From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates “Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Tran...

Was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine motivated almost entirely by Vladimir Putin’s ideological fears and concerns for his regime’s preservation?

“The genocide in Gaza and the repression and criminalization of Palestine solidarity on and off U.S. university campuses and around the world  tell a larger story of global capitalist crisis .  The absolute savagery of the unfolding genocide has touched a raw nerve throughout the world precisely because it brings home the high stakes involved as the dynamics of global crisis play out, from Kenya to Argentina, from France to the United States, from Bangladesh to Nigeria.”

A good review , especially that it questions the authors’ ‘alternative’ and its limitations.

Capitalism and the Shipping Chaos

Global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist. The problems we associate with globalization - the social injustices, the growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological degradation, and so on - are there not simply because the economy is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people. Even the most benign or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these compulsions but must follow the laws of the market in order to survive - which inevitably means putting profit above all other considerations, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These compulsions also require...

A provisional statement Related

On the death cult of capital accumulation

Prevention Before Cure

It sounds a very interesting work. Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia