Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  There could be a happy world, where cooperation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by benevolent and beneficent machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of pain. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere. — Bertrand Russell , Last Essay: 1967

 A Short Guide to Marx’s Capital   in 150 pages A book by Colin Chalmers

To say . . . that wars are caused by the ammunition industry, would be a cheap assertion. The ammunition industry is by no means a branch of production existing for itself, it is not an artificially created evil which in turn calls forth the ‘battle of nations’. It ought to be obvious . . . that armaments are an indispensable attribute of state power, an attribute that has a very definite function in the struggle among state capitalist trusts. . . . [J]ust as it is true that not low prices cause competition but, on the contrary, competition causes low prices, it is equally true that not the existence of arms is the prime cause and the moving force in wars . . . but, on the contrary, the inevitableness of economic conflicts conditions the existence of arms. —Nicolai Bukharin,  Imperialism and World Economy

Global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist. The problems we associate with globalization - the social injustices, the growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological degradation, and so on - are there not simply because the economy is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people. Even the most benign or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these compulsions but must follow the laws of the market in order to survive - which inevitably means putting profit above all other considerations, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These compulsions also require...

For decades the dominant view in academia and outside academia has been blaming corruption for the ills and problems in the MENA region. Up until the 1970s, cultural factors had blamed been for the failures of the region to develop. Cultural factors were also used to explain China's underdevelopment from a capitalist perspective. It's been convenient for the centres of powers in the West and the international institutions to dessiminate such a view so that the structural roots and the form of capitalism (rentier economies) as well as imperialist domination is masked and not questioned. I am glad to see that an opinion on bloomberg , a hardly Marxist website, that is sceptical of that dominant view. One thus has to think of the class structure in the MENA region, the lack of the political will to pursue a development path based on productivity and acquire the technology to be able to compete globally in a world where technological know-how and markets are monopolised by a h...

The neoliberalisation of (sex) work in the UK

A critique of solidarity

Behind Trump's trade war The AI arms race Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read this FT article.

The Market is God, say the "free market" fundamentalists "I am determined to pursue an aggressive strategy of opening up the markets in all the regions of the world."* — Bill Clinton, firmer U.S. president, address to the WTO, May 18, 1998.  Quoted in  Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank  by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 One can scratch her head and thinks about what effects that has had in the U.S. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, and other countries. Clinton in fact was not pursuing something new, the "shock doctrine" was already apace, and it would be soon complemented by "shock and awe". 

The future of universities

A talk in London Anwar Shaikh talk on Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises and in New York Marx and Capital: The Concept, the Book, the History

Monopoly or competition: which is worse? The case of the US