Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Our deepest conceptualisation of the world to our ways of relating to one another, is in part a product of the (neo)imperial boomerang effect .”

What is interesting in engaging with ChatGPT is not the answers themselves as the way it does generate them. My questions and comments are in red. _______________ “Human species, intractably divided on questions of value and definitions of the best regime.” How accurate is this? The quote —  “human species, intractably divided on questions of value and definitions of the best regime”  — is broadly accurate and reflects a deep tension in political philosophy, anthropology, and international relations. Here’s a breakdown of how and why this is accurate: Why it's accurate Historical Evidence Across history and cultures, humans have been deeply divided over: What constitutes justice (e.g., divine law vs. secular law). What makes a good society (e.g., hierarchy vs. equality, liberty vs. order). Who should rule (e.g., monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, technocracy). Competing Philosophical Traditions From  Plato and Aristotle  to  Rawls, Foucault, and Fanon , political...

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually reinforcing.  The progress of the humanistic era of the Enlightenment”, she remarked sarcastically while commenting on German colonialism at the end of the 18th century, could be seen in how the captain of a ship transporting slaves from Guinea to Guyana in South America, “to alleviate their [the slaves] melancholy and to keep them from dying off, allowed them to dance on the ship’s deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the more brutal Spanish traders had not resorted. Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 209])

“If MSF [ Médecins Sans Frontières]  secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. “What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity an...

“The struggle for a Free Palestine is a fight against the same systems driving climate collapse: extractivism, militarism, and capitalism . Palestine's struggle mirrors every frontline community fighting to survive capitalism's fires and floods. From  Yemen  to  Niger Delta  to  Central India , the lesson is the same: our chains are linked.” Build more weapons

“Elon Musk possesses a huge fortune not because he ‘earned’ it but rather because the rules of the game under capitalism permit capitalist investors like him to accumulate vast personal wealth at the expense of the larger working population. Musk has proven to be a particularly lucky and adept contestant in the game. But an appraisal of his personal attributes should in no way obscure this simple fact: outside of the socio-economic order based on private ownership of the productive assets of society and the pursuit of private profit through the exploitation of wage labour, a success of Musk’s type and magnitude is simply inconceivable.” —  Murray E.G. Smith and Tim Hayslip in Thinking Systematics, 2024

Sean Starrs’s key points : The global nature of US-led capitalism since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, means that some states can extract vast resources from others. GDP tells us where the world’s production of goods and services is geographically concentrated, but in the age of globalization, it does not tell us who owns and therefore profits from it. Global profit share is a more appropriate measure of national economic power, as it encompasses the global profits stemming from production and finance owned abroad, not just within the home territory. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). The United States c...

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. — Stephen Hawking , 2015

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. [Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. — Albert Einstein,  Why Socialism?

“He knew there was something about the way Switzerland operated that made it uniquely useful to the forces of capitalism: not as a lead actor, but as an enabler working from behind the scenes.  “Some years later, Ziegler would use the term ‘secondary imperialism’ to define his country’s modus operandi. “Ziegler’s thesis, which he stands by to this day, is that Switzerland’s role in the world is that of accomplice – handmaiden, of sorts – to capitalism. “The transgressors included the banks that welcomed suitcases of cash from dictatorships in Portugal and the Dominican Republic; the real estate agencies that helped Gulf sheikhs and Guatemalan colonels buy lakeside apartments in which to hide; and subsidiaries of the American firms Dow Chemical and Honeywell, which oversaw the international sales of napalm and landmines. “To this day, is that Switzerland’s role in the world is that of accomplice – handmaiden, of sorts – to capitalism .”

“The Brutalist  is the story of modern America’s derision of art, of any creative endeavour that has no immediate monetary value. America has no place for a man of Laszlo’s ilk, for defiant art that refuses to abide by the rules of the market – the real god of America.” A review by Jospeh Fahim

Blinken and co should “talk less about the rules-based international order and more about defending the free world. That is a more accurate and comprehensible description of what western foreign policy is actually about…  As in the cold war and the earlier struggles of the 20th century, the world’s democracies do not need to apologise for being ruthless in defence of free societies.” —Gideon Rahman, Financial Times, 27 May 2024   ‘Democracy’ instead of capitalism or at as, his colleague Martin Wolf calls it, ‘ democratic capitalism ’. Manipulation of history: the 20th century was a struggle netween ‘democracies’ and non-democracies. In fact, the 20th century saw struggles between empires, advanced capitalist state, and movements of national liberations, class struggle in the heart of bourgeois democracies, even struggles against dictatorships such as in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Greece … to overcome capitalism and aiming at establishing genuine democracies. ‘Defending the free ...

“In the book, Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crises are the result of the economic system we have built – ‘a toxic melding of public and private power’. It’s not a broken system; it’s working exactly as planned. It can’t be fixed. It must be replaced. From Amazon’s attack on employee wages through its domination of regional economies, to how Boeing flies in the face of free markets despite its 737 Max disasters, and from the likes of Henry Ford to Margaret Thatcher,  Blakeley considers the past and present of our current crises  to pinpoint exactly how it all went wrong.”  “The 30-year-old describes her book as a critique of modern capitalism from a Marxist perspective, which isn’t a phrase that major writers on the left tend to attach to themselves these days. Instead of reduced taxation, the Office for National Statistics is forecasting that by 2027-28 the UK will have the highest level of...

[ An English woman once asked me: “why are we here?” I answered: “I am more interested in how we got here and where we are going to.” In the context of Syria and the MENA region as a whole, by historicizing everything, as Walter Benjamin advised, we understand how Syria got to where it is today. In the following Munif rightly makes the role of class relations in the Syrian society fundamental, especially class conflict and alliances after independence. The conclusion is:  a weak bourgeoisie that is unable to carry out economic development a nationalist regime that is unable to pursue an alternative path to capitalism due to the failure of economic development resorts to repression to maintain its rule a regime that pacifies significant layers of the population and contains active discontent through subsidised commodities, namely bread, and ideological means but it cannot sustain itself when a crisis hits. “The state and capitalist assemblages became ineffective when the 2011 revolt...