NM's blog

The doubts raised after Mamdani's victory were legitimate. As  Eric Blanc writes , “ history is  full  of examples of movements demobilizing and subordinating themselves to their friends in power. It would be a tragedy if that happened in New York City…” But, Blanc suggests, “a  more useful and important debate is how to organize enough New Yorkers to win Zohran’s agenda — and to counteract the inevitable pressures on him from capital and the political establishment…  Effective Left strategy always should combine an openness to criticism of electeds with a rigorous  power analysis . More specifically, the intensity of our criticism of Left politicians on a given issue should correlate with our degree of power.

I should start reading this book

“ In trying to solve the puzzle of why people vote in politicians that do little to improve their living standards, Seymour goes for a psychological explanation. “this dismissal of the primacy of the economic is not just surprising coming from one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in Britain today, but rests upon empirically spurious claims. “Seymour only tangentially acknowledges the role of elites in the rise of disaster nationalism. While he does point out that its political economy is mainly about furthering the interests of domestic capitalists, that is never really explored. “To get a full picture  of the social forces driving the rise of the far right and likely to benefit from it, we need more systematic and comparative analysis of party elites, their donors and their actual economic policymaking when they enter office. This could help better explain the apparent contradiction of the far right as both a rejection and reinforcement of neoliberalism. We also need to bette...

“How to relate to the Leninist tradition? How to extract its truth? The basis of Lenin’s success was the perfect adaptation of his political strategy to the historical terrain of late Tsarist Russia, with its still quasi-feudal agrarian structure, its absolutist state and its supine bourgeoisie. But the Bolsheviks mistakenly drew from this experience the conclusion that they had discovered a general formula for revolutionary transformation: a cadre party of full-time revolutionaries aimed at the seizure of state power. This generalization was of course a distortion since Lenin was a highly sophisticated political thinker, who understood the importance of linking the socialist project to the democratic movement against the Tsarist autocracy. But after the revolution a certain schematism set in, especially with the establishment of the Communist International and the demand that all affiliated parties adhere to the 21 points. This forced an unhealthy process of splitting which severely w...

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 .”

The enduring influence of Marx’s masterpiece

It looks a very interesting dossier Alameda

Old but excellent and still relevant Exiting the Vampire Castle

Another of the BBC’s failures I would say. 20 years on and the Corporation feels it must repeat a lie. The intelligence argument is an argument that reinforces the belief among many that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. The BBC is actually reinforces a lie. It is an argument to justify past and present British involvements in wars and conflicts: “our intention has always been the intention of a good player that supports ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ all over the world.” Removing geopolitics, the political economy and American hegemony and ‘imperial’ functioning , help provide a narrow picture that reinforces the belief in the government and the ideology behind  interventions, ‘regime change’, aid, etc. The fact is that Britain is a junior player and has material and geopolitical interests with the US, the decisive power. A criminal needs an alibi . That is what happened prior the invasion of Iraq. Previous criminal actions also required alibis. Think of British support of Saddam i...

Karl Marx, Sergei Eisenstein and Bourgeois Vampires Unite in Bloodsuckers

“ From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like  boni patres familias,  they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. [E]xploitation  and squandering of the vitality of the soil (apart from making exploitation dependent upon the accidental and unequal circumstances of individual producers rather than the attained level of social development) takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.” — Capital Vol. III Part VI

The Other and the Ordeal of the World Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature? The Other’s burden having become too overwhelming, would it not be better for my life to stop being linked to its presence, as much as its to mine? Why must I, despite all opposition, nonetheless look after the other, stand as close as possible to his life if, in return, his only aim is my ruin? If, ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude? In a world characterized more than ever by an unequal redistribu- tion of capacities for mobility, and in which the only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving, the brutality of borders is now a fundamental given of our time. Today we see the principle of equality being undone by the laws of autochthony and common origin, as well as by divisions within citizensh...

A very good analysis. “ If the analysis of the skewed distribution of consumption, decision-making power, and financial capacity all lead us to the same place, it is not by accident. Where we have arrived is at the analysis of class identities, class relations and class power.” I don’t think one can separate the capitalist mode of production and how exploits and generates things and class. After all, upper classes existed before capitalism. It is what capital and capitalism endows that class today makes it a bigger consumer and destroyer of the environment. Climate, Carbon and Class Related “By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity's stewardship of the planet. But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 - too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems, some sci...

This book is definitely a must read. It implies though that there is no alternative to capitalism. State intervention should remedy the ills of the system. The review concludes with a typical misleading suggestion: “If Biden truly intends to establish a more just and egalitarian economic order, he would do well to consult both the achievements and the tragedies of U.S. development documented in Levy’s book.” The use of the comparative form implies that there is already a sort of ‘just and egalitarian economic order’, which an absurd thing to say. Biden could make that order more just and egalitarian. Why does one not just state: “if Biden truly intends to establish a just and egalitarian order...”? Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country

Football: a people’s sport?

 An event organised by SSK-GNU research team in South Korea.

  Marx’s debt to people of African descent Related The Africana paradigm in Capital

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsular

The Philosophers' Epidemic