Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

1% own 45% of the world’s personal wealth while nearly 3bn people have little or no wealth at all Related The Great Lockdown hits the Third World

Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finance has been kept out of new domestic infrastructure projects, the US is still driving privatization and deregulation in the global south and intensifying its new Cold War on China. Will it propel a new phase of economic expansion? I doubt it, due to the sheer scale of global overaccumulation and the fade-out of the industrialization bonanza. 1979 in Reverse

“Foreign policy=imperialism” Foreign policy, who cares?

Historical records and appraisals are not always reliable. Many are deceitful. As we all know, in a long dynasty, heroes abound; in a short one, most are villains. Why? Because a long dynasty chronicles its own history, hence eulogy; a short dynasty has its history written by its conqueror, hence denunciation. Lu Xun told his audience, in one of his 1927 lectures on the Wei-Jin era (coinciding roughly with the late Roman Empire). This is interesting but access to the full review is not free. Meanings of June the Fourth

A leading liberal economist’s latest book. The wrong assumption, and not hardly questioned by the reviewer, is that socialism and communism existed in modern times. “ Capitalism, Alone  demonstrates the limits of studying capitalism’s empirical effects without a theory of how the system actually works—or especially, how it doesn’t.” Surely, without (referring to) theory–the Marxist tenets and analysis–then our description of the socio-economic system that existed in the Soviet Union, would be the mainstream one: socialist/communist. A fundamental pillar of capitalism is the rate of profit, not just profit-making. This also has not been even hinted at. How any form of capitalism that is dominated by private capital invests and therefore achieves growth is determined by the rate of return.  “ Where the globalization literature of the 2000s was exultant with promise, Milanovic’s book frankly admits the limitations of actually existing capitalism and resigns itself to making the best of th

Opposing the  saber-rattling and militarism of the US’s China hawks without downplaying the oppression of the Uyghur

  Study Links Nike, Adidas and Apple to Forced Uighur Labour Related Britain: MPs criticise companies over China forced labour

A very interesting paper. Unfortunately, the author has done a disservice to socialism by calling China socialist. The Structural Roots of China’s Effectiveness Against Coronavirus Pandemic

  Stuck between Chinese persecution and US imperialism

Undoing Lenin

He was 98 percent right in what he said 10 months ago.

光棍儿 Unmarried Man

 82 major brands have slaves working in their supply chains

 

“ The recent surge cannot be blamed on a mutant virus alone; in fact, government mismanagement of the pandemic meant that many more people became infected, creating the conditions for mutations to occur.” A string of failures helped Covid-19 to mutate

 

 Record number of journalists jailed worldwide

 Young Chinese brush up on ‘Das Kapital”

 A very engaging review of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism

 How has it embraced ethnic nationalism?