Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“[I]f a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves….Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.”  Working-class control over how and where we live is the lodestar shared across the nascent independent tenant union movement.  Control, whose negation defines  tenancy  for this movement, necessarily constitutes its horizon. But the excessive focus on rent, akin perhaps to a trade union fixation on increasing wages, obscures the forest (capitalism becoming a world without rent) for the trees (rent itself). Is rent the crisis?

“Rather than making work easier or more rewarding, we expect the development and application of new technologies, particularly in the areas of automation, computation and artificial intelligence,   to disempower us .” “In a world where the vast majority of us are  compelled to work in order to live , the future of work matters – which is to say: workers matter…  In a word, they [workers] are free , and by their most basic and human capacity for autonomy introduce uncertainty into a finely calibrated calculus for making money.” (My emphasis N.M.) As far as I can understand there is a contradiction. The word ‘free’ is not even in inverted commas.

Ideological affinities and a long intellectual history lie behind the curious reverence for the Syrian dictator among fascists and white nationalists Related Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

“The strike is the first in union history to target all three companies at once.” The class war: On Friday, Ford announced that it had laid off 600 workers at a Michigan assembly plant as "a consequence of the strike". And the President is attempting to maintain the social peace.

Calling it a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’ is an exaggeration, I think. Macronism in peril Original article in French

Trivialising class struggle

After more than a decade of independent publishing and media activism

Bring class struggle back in

This is a very engaging paper. A must read. Capitalist Totality and Geopolitical Fragmentation

  Still mostly valid since it was written in March 2020. The virus, capitalism and the long depression

The  Times , on the morrow of the coup, was writing: “Whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.” Professor Hugh Thomas, from the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at Reading University: the trouble was that Allende was much too influenced by such people as Marx and Lenin, “rather than Mill, or Tawney, or Aneurin Bevan, or any other European democratic socialist.” This being the case, Professor Thomas cheerfully goes on, “the Chilean  coup d’état  cannot by any means be regarded as a defeat for democratic socialism but for Marxist socialism.” Ralph Miliband (October 1973): The Chilean experience “offers a very suggestive example of what may happen when a government does give the impression, in a bourgeois democracy, that it genuinely intends to bring about really serious changes in the social order a...

In the more economically developed countries, one just needs to replace the factory with retail and catering service industries, HSBC gender pay gap, for example, budget airlines workers, migrant workers in farming industry (e.g. Italy and Spain), or as cleaners, low paid essential workers (e.g. nurses in England), Amazon workers, etc.  The following was written in 1976, but I think is still largely relevant globally. “The hard core of the bourgeois feminist movements has typically been the ‘career women’ elements, business and professional strivers above all. Protective devices for the benefit of women workers in factories help to make life more bearable for them, but they are usually irrelevant to upper-echelon women trying to get ahead in professions. Worse, they may introduce restrictions which get in the way. At the very least, the ‘pure’ feminists demonstrate their social purity by rejecting the idea that the women’s question has something to do with class issues. Protec...