Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The Great Hope of Social Democracy stood and  championed the funders of a genocide with nary a word of criticism  — indeed, she even defended Harris on the question of the genocide, saying she is ‘working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home’. “With this speech, AOC solidified once and for all which side she is on the struggle to end the genocide in Palestine — the side of the establishment, the side that wants a temporary cease-fire and the continuation of the occupation and oppression of Palestine. She doesn’t want to end the apartheid system of Israeli domination; she stands with the Zionist oppressors and strongly endorses some of their strongest backers. AOC has betrayed the movement for Palestine; she is an enemy of that movement. We cannot continue to support politicians who may propose progressive domestic programs but support imperialism abroad . ]my emphasis N.M.] “ The incorporation of AOC into the establishment i...

“As multi-polarity grows, there are some who see this as a new stage of non-alignment, and even the creation of an anti-imperialist bloc. But the economic and political elites of the Global South are too deeply tied to transnational capitalism to be truly independent. Instead,  multi-polarity is a struggle within global capitalism  for a larger share of markets, profits and political power.”

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an...

Is he really trying to redistribute wealth to workers? ‘Redistribute’, not ‘distribute’ implies that wealth was once distributed to workers. No, what happened between 1945 until the ascent of the neoliberal form of capitalism was a social contract based on compromise between the state, capital and trade unions.  Are the profits too high? I don’t think so. One of the reasons we are in an “era of anaemic economic growth” is that the low rate of profit/of return to capital is not high enough to incentivise the capitalists to invest. Thus some governments are intervening and pouring money into the economy and corporations as well as giving financial support to families and individuals, especially because of the pandemic. As Cédric Duran put it: “  Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finan...