NM's blog

Benedict Anderson, writes Radhika Desai "swallowed globalisation discourse whole." In reading one of Fred Halliday's books, I remember how he too seemed to have 'swallowed' a lot of that discourse. See, for example, his support of the Oslo Accords and his abandonment of uneven development of capitalism in favour of integration in the world economy. Am I accurate here? Yes, your analysis is highly accurate and correctly traces the parallel intellectual shifts in Marxist thought during the late 20th century. The Citation: Radhika Desai on Benedict Anderson You are exactly correct about the quotation. Political economist  Radhika Desai  wrote a famous review essay titled  " The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities " . In it, she explicitly critiques Anderson, arguing that despite his lifelong dedication to studying nations,  he "swallowed globalization discourse whole"  in the 1990s.  [1, 2, 3]  Desai argued that Anders...

An interview with Vivek Chibber

“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity. ‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian. “The  essayist Giuliano da Empoli's  argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian ...

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture. The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the  strength  of American capital, not its decline. Trump claims that the  result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy. A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing. Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate. Tariffs on their own are insufficient to r...

By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...

Yes, I Am A Terrorist By Ahmad Matar  The West cries in fear When I make a toy from a matchbox  While they [the West] make a gallows of my body Using my nerves for rope. The West panics when I announce one day That they have torn my galabia While it is they who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture And to announce my joy and my utmost delight When they violate me. The West is sorely grieved when I worship One God in the stillness of the prayer niche [ 1] While from the hair of their coattails [ 2] and the dirt of their shoes They knead a thousand idols that they set atop the dung heaps made of the titled ones  So that I become their slave And perform amongst them The rituals of flies. And he, they Will beat me if I announce my refusal. If I mention among them the fragrance of flowers and grass They would crucify me Accusing me of terrorism! Admirable are all the actions of the West, and of its tails As for me, as long as I am related to freedom Everything I do is...

Against amnesia “Consider the rhetoric in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The swagger and liberal triumphalism. The arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. The world is flat. Market-driven globalisation is inevitable. No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other. Economic liberalisation will lead to political liberalisation. The kaleidoscope has been shaken and now is the time to reorder the world.” Note though that when writing about the ‘Iraq war’, Jason Cowley is ‘Western centric’. He is more concerned with his compatriots killed in an ‘unjust’ war .

There is a focus on capitalism in the UK .  I don’t understand what Michael Roberts means by three socio-economic systems. Is it not capitalism the socio-economic system of our era?

 “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, ‘Do not listen to this imposter.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality  (1754)  Constructing partition Related Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Control

It is a good revisit, and it always reminds me of a colleague who upon mentioning Orientalism and Edward Said in 2010/11, she said: “that a long time ago,” implying that it became outdated. She too was taken by ‘liberal globalisation’, ‘human rights’, etc.  I still prefer and recommend Vivek Chibber’s and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s approaches, for they show the limitations of Said’s analysis. Hamid Dabashi in his The End of Two Myths has also pinpointed what Said was unable to analyse and incorporate in Orientalism. Furthermore, we should not forget that today there is a whole literature on neo-Orientalism. Why Edward Saïd’s book still matters

Pertinent. “This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postul...

For Martin Wolf the only possible world system is the neoliberal model

Capitalism and the Shipping Chaos

The claim was  global expansion and harmonious development of the productive forces and resources of the world .  The 2008-09 crisis, the Arab uprisings and social movements in the West itself, wars and civil wars, migration, fall in living standards for many people, environmental degradation, rise of neofascism and more racism, increase in inequality and corruption, the handling of the pandemic and vaccine apartheid … has exposed what ‘globalisation’ has really meant.

Definition of ‘globalisation’ aside, it is very interesting to follow the arguments of liberals. BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink’s proclamation last week stated that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalisation we have experienced over the last three decades”. As he put it, the war marks “a turning point in the world order of geopolitics, macroeconomic trends, and capital markets”. Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times argues that  “we won’t see a 1930s-style meltdown but rather a new kind of regionalisation that will replace what came before. I’ve been arguing for some time that regional trading blocs are the only way forward given the mercantilist reality of China’s current system, which is simply incompatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization. I think the big question is whether we move towards a bipolar system, with the US and Europe (and whichever OECD nations decide to come along with them) creating some new structures, particularly f...

I highly recommend Sami Zubaida’s book Beyond Islam from which I have chosen these passages: Islamism, the cosmopolitan and the transnational We have seen how the leading Muslim modernist reformers were in many senses ‘cosmopolitan’. They formed part of the elite circles of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians, and focused their efforts mostly within these elites. A subsequent generation of Muslim leaders turned to populism and mass mobilization, deploying a much more puritanical and nativist Islam – notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna, which emerged in 1928; these were the ‘fundamentalists’. Their ideology was one of a return to the purity of early Islam and the first generations – hence ‘Salafi’ ( salaf means ‘ancestors’); but their politics were essentially those of modern populist mass mobilization. Their appeal was largely that of national liberation from foreign rule, but also, essentially, from foreign customs and lifestyles; they rejected not o...

“Far from the world being swept by a wave of rationality, historical accuracy and universality, the very turmoil produced by [capitalist] globalisation, by the collapse and discrediting of the dominant radical ideologies of the twentieth century, of left and right, and by a world where violence in many unexpected forms is prevalent, has led to a strengthening of myth and emotional claims. We are aware, through the work of sociologists and students of nationalism, of the role of such myths in mobilising people and enabling them to make sense of their complex and often bewildering lives. Hence we can recognise that the more rapidly the world changes, and the more interaction and conflict there are between peoples, the more potent these ideas become.”  –Fred Halliday,  100 Myths About the Middle East , 2005, pp. 14-15 Some of the myths  “ The Middle East is, in some fundamental way, ‘different’ from the rest of the world and has to be understood in terms distinct from other ...