Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The enduring influence of Marx’s masterpiece

The military industrial complex The NGO-industrial complex And now the ‘citizenship industry’ ‘Citizenship provides the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality can be built’.  —Thomas Humphrey Marshall, 1950

Money, rights, violence

Bring class struggle back in

Manchester: Students join lecturers on the picketline

"Stolen  [by Grace Blakeley] leads the reader through the various periods of Anglo-American capitalist development from 1945 to the Great Recession of 2008-9 and beyond.  And it finishes with some policy proposals to end the thievery with a new (post-financialisation) economic model that will benefit working people. This is compelling stuff. But is Blakeley’s account of the nature of modern Anglo-American capitalism and on the causes of recurring crises in capitalist production correct? An accessible read/economics made simple Theft or exploitation — a review of Grace Blakeley's  Stolen   Related: It's not just profitability

Financialisation or profitability?

"property in Britain, and especially London, is part of the plumbing of the international financial system. Without tackling this financialization of housing, no amount of construction will end the crisis." Britain's housing casino

Financialisation and the UK economy (An audio interview)

"was there nothing wrong with capitalism before finance (and ‘financialisation’) emerged after the 1970s?  Were there no crises of overproduction and investment, no monopolies and rent-seeking before the 1970s?  Was there a wonderful productive, competitive, equal capitalist mode of production existing in the 1890s, 1930s or even in the 1960s? And why did finance suddenly emerge in the 1970s, leading to the GDP measure being altered to account for it? Mazzucato offers no explanation of why capitalism became increasingly ‘unproductive’ and ‘rent-seeking’.  But Marx’s value theory does.  From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, there was a sharp fall in the profitability of the productive sectors of all the major capitalist economies. Capitalism entered the so-called neoliberal period of the destruction of the welfare state, restriction of trade unions, privatisation, globalisation – and financialisation.  Financialisation (looking to make profit from the purc...