Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Elon Musk possesses a huge fortune not because he ‘earned’ it but rather because the rules of the game under capitalism permit capitalist investors like him to accumulate vast personal wealth at the expense of the larger working population. Musk has proven to be a particularly lucky and adept contestant in the game. But an appraisal of his personal attributes should in no way obscure this simple fact: outside of the socio-economic order based on private ownership of the productive assets of society and the pursuit of private profit through the exploitation of wage labour, a success of Musk’s type and magnitude is simply inconceivable.” —  Murray E.G. Smith and Tim Hayslip in Thinking Systematics, 2024

Mechanistic and reductionist Related Vendana Shiva

Blinken and co should “talk less about the rules-based international order and more about defending the free world. That is a more accurate and comprehensible description of what western foreign policy is actually about…  As in the cold war and the earlier struggles of the 20th century, the world’s democracies do not need to apologise for being ruthless in defence of free societies.” —Gideon Rahman, Financial Times, 27 May 2024   ‘Democracy’ instead of capitalism or at as, his colleague Martin Wolf calls it, ‘ democratic capitalism ’. Manipulation of history: the 20th century was a struggle netween ‘democracies’ and non-democracies. In fact, the 20th century saw struggles between empires, advanced capitalist state, and movements of national liberations, class struggle in the heart of bourgeois democracies, even struggles against dictatorships such as in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Greece … to overcome capitalism and aiming at establishing genuine democracies. ‘Defending the free ...

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

“It operates like a food chain: the French at the top, followed by North Africans who run  the subcontracting companies, and at the bottom, the exploited workers .”

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

Trivialising class struggle

A practice that exists in ‘peripheral’ as well as in ‘advanced’ capitalist power relations. Sexual abuse on Kenyan tea farms Related Italy: raped, beaten and exploited Spain: ‘If you don’t want to work like a slave, you’re out’

“Exploitation under temporary migration regimes is far from exceptional and should be understood as structural. Certainly, we should highlight exploitation and be enraged about abuse, but this should not be exoticised as something uniquely Qatari. This, after all, is not about Qatar. It’s about the geographies of exploitation inherent in a global economy that succeeds or fails based on its ability to gain the most for the least amount of cost.” The Orientalist discourse hides structural exploitation Related Italy’s Migrant Boot Camp Raped, beaten, exploited “Italy’s Sikh Slaves” Spain: “If you don’t want to work like a slave …”

Attacks on and violations of workers’ rights by governments and employers Related ‘Made in Tunisia’

Marx’s Law of Value

Beyond Exceptionalism

  The real link between racism and class

  Fanon Can’t Save You Now

Some call it exploitation. Others call it meeting target and productivity. “We have borrowed a lot of money to come here, we passed long distance, left our relatives, not to get this. We came to work but we can’t work, earn money, we can’t save money and help our families. Sometimes there is a feeling that we can’t prove anything, that no one will help us.”   Low-paid migrant workers ‘trapped’ on Britain’s farms

  How Bangladesh sold its future to the Gulf states

“ The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. [T]he bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. [F]or exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and...

 Fashion retailer Boohoo selling clothes made by Pakistani workers ‘who earned 29p per hour’

It must be clearly established ... that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population.     —Che Guevara, from a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, 11 December 1964

1952-2020 An obituary