Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A good review , especially that it questions the authors’ ‘alternative’ and its limitations.

Karl Marx and Capitalism at the  Deutsches Historisches Museum

Essays by Arundhati Roy

"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition... The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property", is "an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race." — Marx, Capital , vol. 3 "It seems to me axiomatic that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism . . . is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace." Capitalism "may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental prote...

Another review of  Against the Grain

A great scientist. I recommend The Richness of Life . When I started reading it I couldn't put it down. " Homo sapiens, I fear, is a “thing so small” in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event well within the realm of contingency. Make of such a conclusion what you will. Some find it depressing; I have always regarded it as exhilarating, and a source of both freedom and consequent moral responsibility." Remeasuring Stephen Jay Gould

The writer, from the London School of Economics, is questioning the existent profit-based economic system. I wonder whether we can have capitalism without profit. I am curious to know if that is possible. Clean energy won't save us

  A few interesting things in this narrative ,   but why does it avoid to mention the global capitalist system as the context?

"This process of appropriation includes many others: framing the Law of Value as something morally and politically valuable; mapping natural resources, translating Cheap Nature into a portable, readable format; codifying the limits of nature and society in laws and bills, so as the first remains cheap, and creating new institutional arrangements, which  allow the market and the state to produce this logic through space and time . Appropriating Cheap Nature is not only a process of violent material dispossession. It is also a way to see the world which naturalises – and makes desirable – this process, upon which capitalist accumulation depends." Capitalism as Ecology: Mexican Resistance at the Frontier