Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

According to research by the London School of Economics, if you’re a working class graduate with a first class degree you’re less likely to land an elite job than a middle class graduate with a 2:2. And even if you do succeed in getting the position, you'll earn on average 16% less than your middle class counterparts. Why? In this "investigation " Amol Rajan, media editor at the BBC, either has failed to answer why or he was censored (an editor edited him!). The main reason according to Rajan is "class prejudice". Class, thus, is like racism "a prejudice". not a production of socio-economic structure of property and power: how production is organised, who gets the profit, who owns what, and what power relations govern the producers and the owners of capital.  Furthermore, class society has to reproduce itself in terms of power relations and ideas, (i.e. ideology). This main division in society has to be deflected towards "identity politic

One of Iran's Beverly Hills  It is a piece on Aljazeera about a rich enclosed mini-town occupied by Iranian "aristocracy", reflecting obscene wealth in a country with swamps of poverty. Brazil and other countries too come to mind.  However, for obvious reasons, you wouldn't find on Aljazeera an account of the atronomical amount of wealth squandered by the Qatari monarchy whether on weapons or as money invested in Western cities, including bailing out Western banks, instead of being invested in real development and industrial projects in Arab countries. We know what class interests the Qatari rentier ruling class represents and embodies.  "باستي هيلز" 

“There was this vagueness about the word that just seemed to be not just corruptible but almost inherently corrupt,” says the writer, film-maker and activist. “I was attracted to words like liberation, emancipation, equality, revolution, socialism. Any other word would get my pulse going more than democracy.” For her, democracy was a word imperial America used to sell free markets and push its agenda. Writer and film maker  Astra Taylor on US democracy, socialism and revolution

Britain needs new council houses–not musicals about them

Class was the key for Erik Olin Wright

The local and the globa l Göran Therborn employs a very interesting approach. I recommend the following articles: - Class in the 21st Century (2012) - New Masses (2014) - Age of Progress? (2016) - Dynamics of Inequality (2017) Note: you may not find free access to all of the articles unless you have a subscription.

The multiculturalism the European right fears ...

Egyptian Novelist Salwa Bakr dares to say it aloud on revolution's successes and failures

"Ultimately, the greatest power of Fahmy’s adaptation is its ability to provide the audience with few obvious escape points, fewer firm assumptions to which to return safely. Even the characters’ best dreams for themselves seem illusory, almost ill-gotten. “Let us get out of Cairo. Out of the Yacoubian Building,” Busayna muses to Zaki, “we’ll be free. We’ll be together.” But few in this world have the luxury of escaping their own history: that history lives above you, works at your feet, sticks to you like the residue of centuries, and is liable to kill you in the end." A new adaptation of the Yacoubian Building

UK: class and "social mobility" [Only] five generations 'before poor reach average pay" That is not bad! We can live with that.

Very good! "It is fair to say that what these essays achieve is the denigration of the very concept of agency, something at the very heart of the postcolonial project. In obscuring the effects of social circumstances, in denying — implicitly or explicitly — the role of structure, the theorists under consideration whisk away what makes political praxis distinctive as a volitional act. For what is political agency if not a form of practice aimed at the structures of power within which it is embedded? Whether it aims to reproduce them, as in ruling-class strategies, or seeks to transform and undermine them, as is the case with subaltern classes, political agency is defined by its relation to these fields of power. But with Spivak and, in particular, Guha, it seems that it is the simple exercise of will that enables the actions of their protagonists to serve as political agency — even those actions are an acquiescence to their subjugation. Our reading confirms the observation made

A recommended read "If what I call vanguard neoliberalism established this phase of capitalist development (in the UK: 1979–97, and social neoliberalism then consolidated it (1997–2007)), the current period of crisis neoliberalism (2007–) is primarily defensive, an attempt to preserve the now decaying order through ever-more generalised attacks on the subaltern classes – not as ‘occasional’ incursions to enable budget cuts here or prevent industrial action there, but as permanent aspects of the political regime (Davidson, 2017)." Neoliberalism as a class-based project You may need to open a free account to access the essay

Managers rule, not capitalists?

Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a  2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,”  or “NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and “their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ʻshareholder-valueʼ conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic activity.

On Michael Roberts' blog

"The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview. Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia." Ta-Nehisi is the neoliberal face of black freedom struggle

I like this to-the-point piece. It hits the nail on the head of what is fundamental: capital, class and the state. " Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome." Think that governments can no longer control capitalism? You've been duped.

Remembering the unfinished work of Papiya Ghosh

الكتابة كفعل تحرري عند غسان كنفاني وإميل سيزار (Writing as a liberating act in the writings of Ghassan Kanafani and Aimé Césaire)

How Global Entertainment Killed Culture  From Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa Llosa is one of Latin America's best novelists, who moved from the left to become an advocate and enforcer of neoliberal policies in Peru.