Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

By Richard Seymour At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority. This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut. Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal an...

“The myth of ‘Western values’ died in Gaza. Myths do not die. They are debunked or refuted. They often persist for a long time and are adaped to new contexts; they are part of a belief system. I remember well after Iraq and Afghanistan how people invoked ‘democracy’ and ‘Western values’ in a way not dissimilar from what the Bushes and Blairs and later the Obamas and Bidens articulated them. Recently, a student at the ‘best’ European university in social sciences told me that the myth of sectarianism in the Middle Ast is still being repeated. A white liberal, ‘MeeToo’ English woman what Russia was doing in Ukraine was ‘a Russian thing. It's in their history’. Zelenskyy's recent rise in ‘popularity’ among many is built upon ‘the myth of Western values’ defending Ukraine against an authoritarian Russian regime. Myths are strentghned through amnesia. History is brushed aside and Pavlovian conditioning is enforced.  We should remember how the emergence of ISIS was analysed. How ...

Peter is emphatic that a focus on class politics means organising the working class in all its diversity. He contrasts the position taken by the PTB with that of Sahra Wagenknecht, who split off from Die Linke in Germany to form the anti-migration BSW Party. ‘I’m not happy with their tendency, this kind of socialism and chauvinism combined, because they are locking themselves up inside of Germany…  And I think that the basic thing of the Left is to empower people, to make them proud, to make them feel part of something again, part of a bigger history, a bigger collectivity, a class, a movement that they can be proud of.’ It sounds a new and promising leftist experience. Note though that there is not a single internationalist mention/discussion. Is class only national? 

As ever, the ‘legitimate concerns’ brigade includes a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, such as Carole Malone, Matthew Goodwin, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. Notably, however, these ‘concerns’ aren’t about the ‘bread and butter’ issues that many leftists seem to think will defuse racist agitation: as I’ve said many times before, it isn’t the economy, stupid. What the two recent moral panics have in common is the coprological image of matter out of place: borders and boundaries eroding and people being were they ought not to be. As was proven when the court revealed that the suspect is a British minor and the riots persisted, it doesn’t matter what ‘the facts’ are: we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion. It would be instructive to ask one of these ‘whiteness’ or ‘Englishness’ rioters what they would have done had the suspect been white. One of the rationalisations of rioters claiming not to be racist was that, because the suspect killed children, he was not ...

The modern far-right is not a return to fascism, but  a new and original threat The writer is the author of  Disaster Nationalism The Liberal Defense of Murder

New Atheism, Old Empire

  We shouldn’t be surprised by the chaos

 “It’s clear that Trump’s strategy of polarisation on the basis of a far-right agenda has allowed him to strengthen and expand his popular base. Whoever scrapes into the White House, the US is going to be very hard to govern on the basis of the liberal internationalism that has served big capital so well since WWII. The crisis of the neoliberal version of this hegemony that started under George W. Bush with Iraq and the Global Financial Crisis is going to intensify.” —Alex Callinicos, 04 November 2020

France "Populism"? Avoid this word and focus on the processes that have led to revolt. "Populism is the liberals, and some leftists, buzzword.  A reaction to the explosion of inequalities between the super-rich and middle classes

Reposting Emmanuel Macron is a Silicon Valley-loving, union-hating, Third Way centrist. He’s no bulwark against the far right. "Emmanuel Macron is not your friend"

No easy answers, just bad history A reply to  Why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

"You can spew your visceral hatred for Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Gert Wilders or other far-right “populists” – whom I prefer to call racists –  all you want, but an abandonment of the Syrian people using the age-old adage of “it’s all America’s doing” and absolving the crimes of such people puts you in cahoots with these very same bigots." That father

Why Do White-Working Class People Vote against Their Interests?  They Don't.

Neo-liberalism's far-right across Europe in figures

"[T]he Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant, or increasingly a legal immigrant, who has been added to the ranks of the category of 'criminal’ while being housed and ‘protected’ by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of ‘Political Correctness’. Migration is therefore a central issue here. And neoliberalism contributes to the revival of far-right politics through the global, structural changes that it has carried through over the last 40 years. In particular, it is the connection between domestic socio-economic change, as reflected in the rescaling of welfare assistance, and the compulsions toward labour market flexibility, with the accompanying sense of individualized social insecurity for workers (Theodore, 2007: 252–53).  Neoliberalism, then, has rested upon the opening up of labour  markets within the mature capitalist economies to competitive pressures on the social wage through both offshoring production sources in low...