Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Long Depression in Italy

France BBC website: Mr Fillon is " proposing dramatic economic reforms that include slashing 500,000 public jobs, ending the 35-hour week, raising the retirement age and scrapping the wealth tax. On foreign policy, he advocates closer relations with Russia." It sounds great! Probably 40% of the electorate will vote for that.

After Brexit, here we have another product of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism). So far the effect has been in the two most aggressive countries where neloliberalism have been implemented.  " Trump has won because a (just) sufficient number of people are fed up with the status quo.  Apparently 60% of voters asked at the polling booths reckon that the country “is on the wrong track” and two-thirds were fed up and angry with the Washington government – something Clinton personifies. Like the vote of the Brits for Brexit, against all expectations, a sufficient number of voters in America (mainly white, older and in small businesses or working in failing industries in smaller central US states) have overcome the vote of the youth, the more educated and better-off in the big cities.  But remember hardly more than 50% or so of eligible voters turned out to vote.  A huge swathe of people never vote in American elections and they constitute a sizeable part of the working class.

Russia falls into old habits

Protests erupt in the Egyptian city of Port Said

Britain’s university system now “serves a renewed patrimonial capitalism and its ever-widening inequalities.”  —  John Holmwood’s 2014 valedictory message as British Sociological Association president.      The Rise of the Corporate University in the UK

Algeria:  The political economy of regime survival

Britain May emerged as the preferred candidate of the Tory establishment. Her job, it seems, is to organize the transition to a new form of Conservative politics with less emphasis on austerity and economic competence and more on racist populism. Amid a record period of declining living standards and economic stagnation, the currency of politics today is resentment; it is never just “the economy, stupid.” Theresa May's Le Pen Moment

The Structure of Modern Imperialism

This is an  edited extract from Neil Davidson's forthcoming book  Peregrine Worsthorne, then associate editor and columnist with the ultraconservative London Daily Telegraph wrote in response to a survey conducted on the centenary of Marx’s death: “Being very conscious of the existence of the class-war, I have to admit to being very influenced by Marx without whose writings this idea would never have become so all pervasive. ... I am a Tory-Marxist, in the sense of accepting the need to take sides in the class war, even if, so to speak, on the other side.” More recently, Niall Ferguson has commented in an interview: “Something that’s seldom appreciated about me...is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I’m on the side of the bourgeoisie.” However–and where conservatism becomes interesting–in so far as it supports the existence of capitalism, it embodies a contradiction which has from time to time produced intellectually fruitful results. Al

From a defender of the system " The years ahead will be ones of economic dislocation and stagnation.  Britain has moved over the past 50 years from being one of the most equal countries in Europe to the most unequal."

Global turbulence ahead

Warned us about the shock doctrine then he was assassinated

Britain's bourgeois democracy This Bunkered Island

Here is of the things the Liberals have done in the last 20 years. IMF chief,  Christine Lagarde, also blogged  that  “Weak global growth that interacts with rising inequality is feeding a political climate in which reforms stall and countries resort to inward-looking policies. In a broad cross-section of advanced economies, incomes for the top 10 percent increased by about 40 percent in the past 20 years, while growing only very modestly at the bottom. Inequality has also increased in many emerging economies, although the impact on the poor has sometimes been offset by strong general income growth” . And what is their solution now? More globalisation. Some of them even argue for the colonization of Mars . That is what we can call a global economy of priorities that serves humanity!

The City: London and the Global Power of Finance

How accurate is this? " Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" ( The Causes of World War III , 1958, p. 75).

Economic performance in two dimensions: How Europe beats the US

The Middle East and North Africa "Why do governments last? What kind of governments last? Increasingly, studies on the stability of regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region focus on how elites enfold the middle and working classes into socio-political orders. Such enfoldment happens through turning the state into not merely an instrument of violent class rule through extraction, but also part-and-parcel of everyday social reproduction." Critical Readings in Political Economies: Resilience

Globalisation and whose recovery? Yes, some of the so-called recovery is based on low-paid jobs. Some of it is based on precarious jobs.  A Bogus Concept?