NM's blog

A 'black' woman said that she didn't knew she was black until she was 16. Does that mean 'blackness' is like 'whiteness' a social construction? Yes, an individual not realising they are Black until later in life directly illustrates that  both "Blackness" and "Whiteness" are social constructions rather than biological absolutes.  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]  While the physical trait of skin pigmentation is biological (determined by melanin), the act of grouping people into rigid racial categories and assigning meaning, status, or identity to those categories is entirely a human invention.  [4, 6]  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ HUMAN VARIATION │ └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘ │ Is organized by society into: ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ ...

  Palestinian “struggle today continues to be one between a collaborationist PA and a pro-liberation resistance intent on ending settler-colonialism.” Related Google AI summary of the number killed, wounded or sent into exile. The figure of 8,000 Palestinians killed in 1939 alone [ as mentioned by Massad ] is  not historically accurate , but it closely mirrors the total estimated casualties suffered by the Palestinian Arab population across the entirety of the  Great Arab Revolt (1936–1939) .  [1]  Historical data from British archives, Palestinian historians, and independent researchers outline a more precise breakdown of the casualties and dynamics of this period. Total Casualties of the Arab Revolt (1936–1939) The Great Arab Revolt was a nationalist uprising against British colonial rule and its support for Zionist immigration. The cumulative death toll for Palestinians over the three-year uprising is generally accepted by historians to be around  5,000...

“A complex social field of millions of people is reduced to a symbolic reserve for regional politics.”  The image of Kurdistan “does not emerge from the real complexity of society. It is produced through selection, erasure, and compression. “Erasing class is necessary if a deeply uneven society is to be turned into a single unified body that others can speak for.”

A sharp critique of  Hamid Dabashi’s   After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises:  What, exactly, is the West?  Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon —  “white civilisation.”  But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not  explain  power; it  assigns  essence. Instead of asking  which institutions, with...

Interview with Jean-Numa Ducange

“The focus on ethnic or religious identity has surely undermined any prospect of a class-based politics developing . Civil society — once vibrant in the early days of the uprising — has been stifled by state violence, while political parties and trade unions have been dissolved in the name of national transition.” “ While the HTS leadership maintains strict control over many Sunni militias in Idlib, it must now negotiate with non-Sunni communities, such as the Druze and Kurds…” Here the writer is inaccurate. The Kurds are not a non-Sunni community; most if the Kurds are Sunni. According to some estimates,  Kurdish forces lost an estimated 11,000 fighters in the battle against ISIS (a Sunni too), with over 22,000 wounded. 

“ 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 the right seized the narrative

I have read only one of his novels – That Smell . Incorruptible novelist

Capitalist Colonial  departs from Kaminer's previous work by “ centering questions of coloniality and race , but the departure is not a total about-face, because the last thing I want to do is abandon the labor process or class analysis. At a fundamental level, the book is proof of Stuart Hall’s well-known theorem that “race is the modality through which class is lived.”

By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...

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 ...