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 .”

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...

A dangerous fantasy

You should be able to access this article when you type  “Universities challenged FT” on google search rather than through the FT website. Universities Challenged

Cristiano Ronaldo’s annual salary is 31 million EUR. He currently plays in Italy. When an Italian earns 32,000 EUR after tax a year, Ronaldo earns that sum in 8 minutes. Like a few other things, this has been normalised and generally accepted and unquestioned by the general population. When a system succeeds in instilling such consent or acquiescence, it is those who question such injustice are looked at as old-fashioned, utopian, or people with extremist ideas about social justice and freedoms. Who are going to vote for in the next election in order to preserve the “democracy” and “freedoms” of the “free market”?