NM's blog

The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The prob...

Context: “California warehouse worker accused of arson raged online against capitalist greed.” (NBC News) The same day that Chamel Abdulkarim burned down his workplace, the president of the United States threatened to permanently annihilate “a whole civilization”—a statement which can only be described as a threat of genocide. “The people who carry the boxes, stock the shelves, scan the packages, and drive the routes know what Abdulkarim’s quote means. Not because they think arson is justified—they don’t. Because the sentence did not sound foreign. It sounded like something millions of people say in less catastrophic ways every day, in kitchens, in group chats, in cars outside warehouses before shifts they cannot afford to quit … Criminal acts deserve criminal consequences, full stop. But punishment does not answer the question underneath all of this, the one nobody in power addressed this week: what happens to the people who cannot afford to live in the economy being built above them?...

A review of Adam Hanieh’s A. Crude capitalism : Oil, corporate power, and the making of the world market

Western Hemisphere

The achievements, the limits and the contradictions of Chavez’s government in an analysis from 2016. 

An old article, but a very interesting one . “It’s sort of a supreme irony here that we now have the technology such that not that many people have to work and we can produce a lot. We have the technology that would allow us to address the vexing environmental problems with probably far less of a cost than we’re going to have to end up paying. We have the technology so that we could have a much higher standard of living. The output per worker is radically higher than it was fifty years ago. Yet the standard of living for most people is lower. There are endless calls for cutbacks, and stagnation at the same time. This is an enormous paradox, and it’s only understood by understanding the contradictions built into the way capitalism works.” A fascinating and a deep analysis indeed. However, I suggest that we abandon the dichotomy ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. They are not two, but one called capitalist democracy.   “This tension between capitalism and democracy,” as McChesney puts it...

Excerpts from a long, very engaging and thought provoking interview.  The colonisation of Palestine is an intrinsic “moment” in the history of European imperialism (beginning with the British Empire, followed by the French Empire, and continued to this day by Israel’s close association with the “Western” powers, which provide it with funding, weapons and diplomatic protection). It enacts its extreme forms (settler colonialism, which replaces the indigenous people with settlers, directing their expulsion and then elimination) and extends the imperialist enterprise even beyond its supposed historical endpoint. It uses the consequences of the extermination of the Jews of Europe as an opportunity, a (demographic and intellectual) resource, and an ideological cover. I would propose a critical variation on this scenario which, I hope, does not disregard its general truth. It is certainly true that Zionism, since its founding fathers (Herzl, Weizmann), has been both a typically “European”...

Mill “arguing that a just liberal society must experiment with different types of socialist organization to better the situation of the least well off… [H]e  endorsed worker cooperatives as superior to capitalist-managed firms and insisted there was ‘nothing in principle in economic theory’ that spoke against experimenting with socialist principles and forms of organization. “[H]e  was one of the first major liberal and socialist writers to take seriously the problem of women’s equality and, in  The Subjection of Women. “But he was also trepidatious about the uneducated and unintelligent having too much of a say in politics, and supported British colonialism, viewing the non-European subjects of its empire with condescension. “He seemed doggedly uninterested in analyzing the power dynamics of the bourgeois liberal state, its history, and the way imperial powers like the United Kingdom worked to spread capitalism at the barrel of a gun.” The writer thinks that Mill's “idio...

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. — Albert Einstein

“The emphasis on Christian identity is deeply weird in a country where public expressions of belief are slightly embarrassing. It points more to the Americanisation of the European far right than to any national spiritual awakening: Robinson’s reinvention as a “citizen journalist” owes much to  American cash  from outfits like the Daniel Pipes–founded Middle East Forum. Yet this also helps the new far right solve a problem. Christianity as an ethnic rallying point cuts across the old racial lines while sustaining a Kulturkampf against Muslims. “ The Unite the Kingdom rally was the product of years of international networking and funding, backed by wealthy, racist Americans.  But the fact that so many people turned out to Robinson’s fascist jamboree cannot be blamed on his donors, or even the platforms that profit from his propaganda. The UK has been on a course to rightist radicalization for years. “‘Unite the Kingdom’ was built during a summer of racist agitation outside...

“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?