Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In 2016 “the Trump presidency had seemed unlikely to many of us then, but Fitzgerald, among others on the anti-fascist left, had an acute awareness that we could not rely on establishment politicians as a bulwark against oppression. Now, let’s compare this: “ There is an urgent need for social justice movement organizing, growing unions and union power, antagonism rather than acquiescence to existing power structures, and expansive networks of care and support. The most powerful social movements of  the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Nor did they collapse during Trump’s first tenure…  There’s no one way to plug in to today’s interconnected struggles. The Palestine solidarity  movement , which also  challenges  U.S. hegemony and colonial power structures…” with the ‘revolutionary leftist’, tribalism and parochialism, and continuing illusion in the Democratic Party in...

“Abdourahmane Ridouane’s deportation is not an ancillary phenomenon. It is a logical part of the inner workings of a system developed long before 7 October and whose vindictive activities continue despite the present political crisis. The power structure uses all available means and finds new justifications in current political events, be it public security during the Olympics or the repression of anti-Semitism - both perfectly legitimate.” A state that has a monopoly on the use of violence and uses it at home and abroad (imperialistically), finds scapegoats in its rule and divide policy and in its distraction from the social, racial and class issues. It manufactures an ‘enemy within’ and nurtures the far-right ideology. It goes as far as passing legislations akin to ones passed by a police state - example: the ban on wearing of the headscarf. When a French student last year admitted that he would be complicit in oppression if after university he would be working with the IMF, whe...

“The problem of the Reformists was—and is—that they want to create a series of changes with little danger while also preserving and boosting the system. But the hope-giving movement of today is free from the shrapnel of political Islam, and this is clear from its slogans. In order to explain what it wants and does not want, this generation of protestors has not resorted to any concept that has a religious or even quasi-religious pedigree, and this is a great accomplishment. This method and path were completely intuitive and arose out of the protestor’s collective wisdom.” And that is not an exception. Whether in Tunisia and Egypt or Libya and Syria, the 2011 uprisings, and later the 2019 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, did not resort to religious slogans and concepts. “ One of the reasons for this accomplishment is that the current movement, in a completely self-motivated fashion, did not seek any coalition with the present political structure, because fundamentally, it had no relation...