Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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 ...

Michael Mann, 1999 The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially antimodern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the c...

“[W]hether demographic, democratic or cultural, the central tropes of the ‘looming crisis’ approach are monolithism—migrants are African for Smith, Muslim for Caldwell, Mexican for Huntington—and scale: the unprecedented numbers that are about to set forth.” Some figures are crucial to dispel myths and misconceptions. “[T]he latest figures for international migrants—defined as those who have been dwelling for at least a year outside their country of birth—is just over a quarter of a billion, or 3.6 per cent of the global population. Around 60 per cent of these are ‘labour migrants’, roughly 20 per cent are people displaced by war, repression or natural disaster, while 6 million are international students. “[O]ver half the cross-border migrants in Europe—44 million, out of a total 87 million—come from other European countries, mainly in Eastern and Southeastern Europe; ‘irregular’ arrivals by land and sea totalled only 189,000 in 2022. “Economic migration has grown and changed, but the ...

“Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the  bourgeois bloc  anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as [Gaetano] Mosca would have put it.” A bonapartist solution

Dr Siân Lawrence  says we’re not sliding back to the days of class privilege – we never left them behind . Related What is PPE?

Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.” “But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?” Marx : “ Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Mediating the error between class and race

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

“Sallam interrogates the changing roles of leftists and Islamists in relation to political power in Egypt. Why, for example, did the Islamist movement dominate the political arena in Egypt since the late 1970s? Why, in the era of neoliberal economic assault on the working class, did the Left fail to organize a class politics around economic disenfranchisement? And finally, did autocrats provide Islamist groups with a space for political organization and maneuver denied to those that challenged the state’s economic liberalization schemes? ” The Egyptian Left, “without a mass political movement to lead or organize, became obsessed with culture rather than class war, tailing the state in its fight against “terrorists” and “religious fascists.” This alienated the Left from exactly the social groups that it historically needed to challenge economic and social inequality — a recipe for political irrelevance.” How ironic, and how similar to most of the Western Left! “On the eve of the revolut...

Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation  is a riveting account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. But it ignores class and capitalism and fails to explain the reasons behind Egypt’s mass mobilization and why it was defeated . Related Class in the 21st Century

For Martin Wolf the only possible world system is the neoliberal model

A very interesting essay The Left is too gentrified to care about work

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

The question remains a question of class.

“America on the Brink” review

Is it because of ‘bad ideas’?

The life of a great Marxist

Introduction by Joel Beinin Political economy addresses the mutual and historical constitution of states, markets, and classes… In this perspective, causes are simultaneously effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestation. The historical development of social formations dominated by capital is inextricably intertwined with genocides, slavery and other forms of unfree labor, racialization, patriarchy, national oppression, and empire. Capital accumulation by individuals, partnerships, and even contemporary corporations can occur through exploiting many different forms of labor as well as cheap nature. The ambit of political economy also includes the legal, political, and cul- tural forms of the regulation of regimes of capital accumulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; the so- cial structure of reproduction; the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; technopolitics;...

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Rodinson argues that both in its traditions and history Islam was no more and no less able to control borrowing, lending, interest rates, merchant entrepreneurs than any other religious program; the stereotypes of Islamic submission to God's will, or Islamic belief in predetermination, have played little part either in the acquisition of Islamic wealth or in its administration. Islam was frequently a way ruling classes had of keeping their power, and Rodinson suggests that this is as likely to be true now as it has been historically. Maxime Rodinson explains the mysterious Near East