Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Those who preach socialism,” Shivji wrote in Intellectuals at the Hill , “must first learn to practise democracy.” A review of Development as Rebellion

 Pointless jobs, technology, capitalism

From the archive This piece needs updating since it was written 70 years ago. Although genetics and AI are far from changing our biological structure, it is not anymore an impossibility.  Most people know Albert Einstein as a world-famous physicist. He was a socialist, too.

The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and consuming this ‘data’. ‘Data’ has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, ‘the information that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless – except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself ’.  New bureaucracy takes...

" A careful assessment of the  Bolivarian Revolution  reveals that Chávez’s socialism only ever manifested itself rhetorically: real gains like income redistribution proved compatible with the global capitalist order." Why Twenty-First Century Socialism Failed

"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?

"One of the most important questions regarding political parties is their “opportuneness” or right-ness for the times”; that is to say, the question of how they react against “habitude” and the tendency to become mummified and anachronistic. In practical terms, political parti es come into existence [as organisations] in the wake of historical events that are important for the social groups they represent, but they do not always know how to adapt to new epochs or historical phases, or they are unable to develop in accordance with the ensemble of the relations of forces [and therefore with congruousm forces] in their particular country or in the international sphere. In this analysis, one must make distinctions: the social group; the mass of the party; the bureaucracy of general staff of the party. The latter is the most dangerous in terms of habitude: if it organises itself as a separate body, compact and independent, the party will end up being anachronistic. This is what bring...