Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Algeria The political economy of regime survival

From the archive We tried to help the "Libyans" get rid of a mad man and organise  the first 'free' elections. But, they didn't understand what 'democracy' mean. So, they started killing each other in a civil war. The disaster in Libya and Who said Gaddafi had to go? Book Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya

"The ease with which parts of the international community have recognised Guaido reflects not principled support for democracy, but a global reconfiguration of power. This includes not only the rise of a multi-polar world - exemplified by Russian and Chinese support for Venezuelan sovereignty - but also a rightward swing across Latin America alongside the warring colonial conceits of the US and Europe."  Some truths in the article, especially that those who defend the Venezuelan leader of the opposition are U.S. subordinates and right and far-right governments, but the author ignores the role of Maduro's government and its mismanagement and mishandling of the situation . He write in defence of the Bolivarian revolution, but with no criticism.  More importantly, there is no mention in the articles I have seen,  and which condemn  imperialism and the oligarchs in Venezuela, of the predicament: that Chavez and Maduro have done little to break the power of capital and th

Reviewing The Age of Catastrophe by Henrich Winkler

Then as now I align myself with Orwell's pessimism. "To the British working class, Orwell argued, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, or Madrid had seemed less worthy of their consideration than 'yesterday’s football match.' Even more disappointing to him was the total lack of solidarity that the English working class had shown for “colored” workers in the colonies." Today, despite a tremendous global flow of information of what is happening elsewhere, Orwell's pessimism has an echo when one looks at the extent of the working classes passivity in the "West" before the plunder, inequality, exploitation and ‘Islamophobia’ at home and people's struggle during the Arab uprisings or barbarism in Syrian and Myanmar. " Orwell’s late collaboration with the propaganda apparatus of Western imperialism is a sad, regrettable, and inexcusable fact." I think the following is a good assessment of Orwell. Geroge Orwell and the

"[Y]ou may observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day, but still not have learned the lessons of history. You may be remembering to forget, practicing a spurious innocence, externalising evil, forgetting that, as Adorno argued, as long as we live in the conditions that could produce Auschwitz, we are all guilty . The only thing that could conceivably alleviate that guilt is to act against those conditions. Hence, Stone's preference for many and varied forms of memory, at different levels, detached from the rituals of the great and good. What are those conditions? The Trust identifies "racism and hate" in a general way, presumably intending to be as uncontroversial and therefore inclusive as possible. However, histories of Germany and fascism in recent decades, by Mark Mazower, Enzo Traverso, Jurgen Zimmerer, Isabel Hull, Sven Lindquist, Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga and Shelley Baranowski, to name just a few, have in common that they have foregrounded an emp

 "the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothi

"Today the concentration and centralization of capital is manifested in the growth of international monopoly capital. Capital is more and more mobile (along with technology), as the giant firms become increasingly globalized and financialized. Nevertheless, nation-state divisions remain intact with governments promoting the interests of “their” corporations over those of other countries, along with restrictions on the mobility of labor.  The result is a system of unequal exchange, in which the difference in the wages between labor forces in different nations is greater than the difference between their productivities. This creates a system of “imperial rents” accruing to the global corporations in the center—referred to less directly in mainstream economic circles as the “global labor arbitrage.” (An analogous process affects natural resources, drawn from the global South.) All of this points to the superexploitation of labor in the periphery, which receives in wages less than th

"The world at a fascist moment" "Fascist"? Not even "neo-fascist? I have also noticed that there is no questioning of "democracy", the one used in the mainstream discourse.

Imperialism, globalisation and the profitability of labour

"Internet fibre optic cables around the world trace out the routes of former empires. Cables from Africa route back to their former colonial powers. Lots of cabling from South America still goes back to Spain. Imperialism didn’t stop with decolonisation: it just moved up to infrastructure level. James Bridle is the author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future - a brilliant new work that reveals the dark clouds that loom over our technological future: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy."

Someone has advised me not to feel guilty by living in Britain. Here is an answer: "I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it." — George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell had his reasons at the time. I have my different reasons today. The fundamental remains: Britain is an imperialist state and I am part of it.

"There is no "core" or "periphery" to the global operation of capital and the military forces that sustain it. The ruling elites in the US, the EU, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are as much the beneficiary of the system they violently uphold as those who are disenfranchised by it are dispersed in these very places.  Racism  is a mere ideological veneer to the hardcore economic logic of colonialism and imperialism. Predatory capital is colour-blind and gender-neutral. It abuses white and coloured labour identically and it makes no difference to its maddening logic if you are a Donald Trump or a Saudi prince, an Egyptian general, an Indian entrepreneur, a Russian oligarch, or a Chinese businessman. Those who are abused and maligned by the selfsame system are as much among the poor of the US and Europe as they are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Colour and gender codification of power is a mere false consciousness to the economic logic of power and domi

Calculus of Power

Very good! I recommend it to "Westerners" and non-Westerners.

A rarity from the London School of Economics. I don't necessarily agree with the idealization of Rojava 'revolution' , though. American imperialism is involved in it, among other problems. Syria and our brutal world order This is a summary of the predicament: “It is the capitalist-statist-nationalist-patriarchal system that forces people around the world and at the moment especially in the Middle East to choose between lesser evils in the name of freedom. Forcing millions of people to pick between ISIS or Assad; religious fundamentalism or secular militarism; monarchy, caliphate or racist nation-states; women's pornification or complete veiling; Sisi or Morsi; Atatürkism or Erdoğanism; etc are not choices but perfect weapons of breaking the people's will. To force people to settle between death by drowning or by burning is the perfect way to make them lose the most fundamental human power: hope." — Dilar Dirik

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion

The early days of imperial decline I doubt it. I have commented on this article. I think it does not cover some other crucial areas of the war and the players involved: the nature of the Russian regime, Iran and Israel as regional players, the defeat of Western imperialsim in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ideological reasons of that section of the Western and Arab left that supports Al-Assad either actively or passively...

The 'anti-imperialism' of idiots

1. This is a 7-year war with half of the population either displaced or made refugees, and with about 400,000 killed (93% of them killed by the regime). 2. This is a brutal regime which crushed an uprising and a revolutionary prospect, supported by one regional power, which was the main winner from the destruction of Iraq, a furure winner in Syria and "a threat" to Israel, and an authoritarian state, which is a  big global power, but not a super-power, and it is in a geopolitical power struggle with the big imperialist states for spheres of influence. It used to be a friend of the main imperialist powers when a drunkard man opened the gates to "free market" and sold half of the country to foreign capitalists and newly-born local  ones, some of them now live in London. It is a regime that waged a  brutal war on the Chetchens and his "democratic" friends of the time looked the other way. 3. On the other side, known imperialist states, agents of glob