Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A communist life

“As ill-defined as the term might be, in the cultural sphere the real value of the Global South is to open a space for decolonising conversations, articulating the kind of hybridity and complexity of modern identity that a nationality cannot, a conversation held far from the old imperialist orders of the Northern hemisphere. A utopian geography that may never be real but can serve a purpose.” A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the ‘Global South’

“Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time. Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word...” Coming to terms with communist history

  Obituary

Contrasted Revolutions in Southeast Asia

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

"There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." —Stathis Kouvelakis, New Left Review, March-April 2018 Today, the same powers that preached "freedoms" and "democracy" for the Eastern Europeans, have erected more and longer walls and fences. Fortress Europe, the American-Mexican border, and the Apartheid Wall built by the Israeli state have killed thousands of people, "unwanted", ...

According to this BBC clip, China became communist in 1949 . And we know through schooling, the "cold war", the media, the common people we meet everyday and the experts that China was "communist" until very recently. According to the man in the interview, "there's a long way to go to reach the final goal of building a communist society." Now who should I believe the BBC's journalist or a Chinese 'illiterate', who has never been educated in how to describe socio-economic formations and did not know that "communism" existed in many countries and failed. Could it be that he is just brainwahsed and still believes in an ideal? Here is what the British Academy wrote in an introduction to a conference last year: "2019 will mark the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, which aimed to create the world's largest socialist society. " (my emphasis) However, a few lines down we read, "This confe...

The End of Anti-Fascism Related: The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth-Century

State violence and migration Many think that with the coming of Trump things have got bad. Before that there is a rose picture of the U.S. as a good force in the world. Digging into history, not the one of the school curriculum, might be a start for questioning. The article does not tell the whole story, but it provides an idea or two. Also, I would qualify the role of the US regime depending on the country: sometimes the violence was/is significantly stoked by the US, other times it was/is partly caused by American intervenrion and backing of allies. The violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by the US

If you believe that "Communism" had already existed in the Soviet Union, for example, that capitalism goes with our "human nature", and that poverty exists because of laziness and cultural factors, do not read this article. "We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism" (An opinion in The New York Times)

"Wood’s narrative pokes a finger in the eye of most pat thinking on the subject by trying not to center Putin in its analysis. Putin of course still dominates the book, though not in the same cartoon supervillain style that predominates in most political writing today. But Wood is at pains to stress that he is simply one part of a larger system of oligarchic authoritarianism inherited not from Communism but the Boris Yeltsin years, when the ex-Soviet Union was buried under a mass of radical neoliberal reforms that spread grinding misery throughout the country and left it a shriveled husk of what it had been before 1991." Russia beyond supervillain

"Not so long ago, socialism in the USA was equated with Communism, which in turn was equated with Stalinist Russia, which in turn was equated with the Evil Empire, which, as we all know, was equated with the sinister realm of Satan, the Antichrist and everything that was contrary to apple pie, motherhood, and every other well-known American value." Trump's advisors slander socialism

"Bolsonaro won mainly because of the disillusionment of the working class with the Workers Party.  After the collapse of commodity prices in resources and agriculture, the economy went into recession. The blame for this and corruption has been laid at the door of the Workers Party." Brazil's Tropical Trump

The Young Karl Marx (movie) It is not easy to find a free online version. You might experience annoyance with pop up windows, but will evetually get it play.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

" There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Europe's Iron Curtain

From the archive Dedicated democracy

There have always been Marxists in Labour but it has never been a Marxist party (or even, by some definitions, a socialist one). Its 2017 general election manifesto was social democratic in nature, vowing to reform rather than replace capitalism. But in his speech, McDonnell couched the party’s pledge to renationalise “water, rail, Royal Mail and energy” in more radical terms: “It’s a significant development as a result of the new exploration of the ideas of Marx.” John Mcdonnell and the rebirth of British marxism?

Happy birthday, Karl Marx In Opinion section on the New York Times By a professor at a South Korean university