Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Yves Hayat. — «   Brexit   », de la série «   Parfum de révolte   », 2016. Courtesy Galerie Mark Hachem, Paris The COVID pandemic slump and the underlying weakness of British capital are much more damaging to the UK's economic future than Brexit. Brexit is just an extra burden for British capital to face; as it also will be for British households. The Brexit deal

How the EU is complicit in Egypt’s brutal regime

Targeting minorities, again. The European Court of Justice bans kosher and halal slaughter

 A Syrian gravedigger recounts a genocide, but is anyone listening?

A poor conclusion and no alternative, but to implicitly expect the liberal parties to change track. How Europe works to keep Africans in Africa

A memory refresh Not the world order we wanted

The myth of a progressive EU

Prisons in the Aegean

The other "virus threatening Europe"

"Get Brexit done" has won! Related: The UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy. Our analysis finds stark regional differences in productivity, income, unemployment, health and politics. We are not the only country to have regional divides, but our regional inequalities in productivity, income and health are far worse than in any comparable country.  

Britain "It was conflict inside the Tory party that led to the current political paralysis, a fact that Johnson wants the public to forget. In an insightful TV documentary made by the former Tory Minister Michael Portillo, party grandees explain that the Tory party is the oldest and most successful ruling party in the world. It ruled before the majority of British people had the right to vote, and it crystalized its power and philosophy in the period of an expanding British Empire.  However, as the Empire ended in the wake of two world wars, the British ruling class, its elite school networks, its aristocracy, its landowners, its bankers, and its large capitalist barons, could no longer rule in the old way. And during the same period popular reverence and respect for the elite faded away.  After WWII, British capitalism was forced to submit to the sway of American global power. Britain became the staunchest U.S. ally and pursued economic policies that came to be known a

I accessed this article by typing the title in google search How the US is weaponising the world economy

The contours of the geography of the crisis I am proposing here are written down  by names and places: Lesvos, Calais, Ventimiglia, Lampedusa, Paris, Molenbeek ( Belgium), Nice, but also Brexit, Syria, Turkey and Libya. I believe there is an important  historical matter at work beneath this “imaginary geography”. This geography  interpellates us a “geography of war”: war against migrants and asylum seekers and to  their desire of mobility and welfare; but also, and usually forgotten, war against “post- migrants” or postcolonial Europeans, that is against European sons of decades of a  racist state management of European territories and populations. This specific geography is showing a Europe gripped into what can be called a “manichean securitarian delirium." Policing the Refugee Crisis: Neoliberalism between Biopolitics and Necropolitics (You might need only a free account to access this analysis)

The social fabric of Chavismo

A good background of the current state of affairs The EU: from social-democratic dream to neo-liberal nightmare

"It is not capitalism that is the problem in Habermas’s Europe, but its management. What is wrong with the Europe of monetary union, Habermas implies, is not that it is pro-capitalist, or subservient to capitalist interests, but that it is – contingently – non-democratic, thereby subverting the struggle against the real enemy, nationalism. Democracy is to correct this by making the demands of ordinary people heard as decision makers attend to ‘systemic demands’, refilling the system’s supply of legitimacy. No need to confront the increasingly insatiable demands of the profit-dependent classes for precedence of their interests over those of the rest of society. In fact class interests do not really appear in Habermasian European theory, only biased cognitions of decision makers in need of democratic correction."  A critique of Jürgen Habermas's democratic Europe

"Johnson’s command of detail when it comes to his projecting himself is unmatched. The would-be leader of the country’s independence revolution is a narcissus who sees no further than his own reflection. The shine is wearing off, however. Most papers declined to act as his mirror. Mogg "is an extraordinarily wealthy hedge fund speculator who has made tens of millions without the ability to sharpen a pencil let alone manufacture one." A halitosis of a rotting body politic

"what’s happening today marks a dangerous new development in European politics. Until now, the effort to filter out and deter unwanted migrants from reaching  Europe  has generally been pursued by politicians of the liberal centre, and part of their justification for doing it is that these unpleasant but necessary policies will stave off a rightwing populist backlash." The irrational fear of migrants ... But is it really irrational?

Britain records biggest rise in gender pay gap

Italy's Ides of March