Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Dr Siân Lawrence  says we’re not sliding back to the days of class privilege – we never left them behind . Related What is PPE?

An interview with Cihan Tugal 

Old but excellent and still relevant Exiting the Vampire Castle

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

“The refusal to actively resist the authoritarian tendencies of regimes like China, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Iran structurally prohibits us from organizing against imperialism as a global system. Focusing on only certain aspects of US influence at the expense of addressing the complicity of other states in the global economy—working alongside the US’s  other  aspects of dominance— only  selectively  critiques global imperialism .”

 Interesting. Édouard Louis's latest book

“Sir Keir’s record shows his evolution into an unabashed authoritarian. As a young lawyer from a Labour-voting family, he dedicated significant time and energy to liberal causes, using his natural diligence to win a number of worthy cases against powerful interests […] his identification with socialists and environmentalists was always secondary to his ambition and the conformist reflexes that came with it.” A Journey to the Right

Is it because of ‘bad ideas’?

 From Roasted Beans to Social Revolution

“ The left is White. It is Eurocentric. It believes itself to be materialist but it is actually idealist. For example, it is anticlerical, and this is understandable in the historical context of a powerful church at the heart of the state. But, as a materialist, you understand that neither Islam nor Muslims dominate the French state. Muslims are the poorest section of the working class. These two elements should have made the left the main allies of Muslims. Without discussion. But there was discussion, on the backs of the poorest classes. The left did not see the wretched of the earth, they saw the veil. Again this Eurocentrism. The White experience prevailed over everything. Liberation would be the way White people experience it. The experience of White women would be the experience of humanity. But the veil affair showed that this particular experience of gender relations is not the experience of everyone. When our parents came here, they were the poor relations of class struggle. T...

This was written in 1909: We must  know how  to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses  in a materialist way . The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; ...

Here’s is what we learnt about the working class and democracy