Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Marc*: “We believe that there is no material problem … that cannot be solved by more technology. We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.”  Göran**: “Sixty years after the Green Revolution, around 733 million people were hungry and undernourished in 2023, according to the World Health Organization — an increase of 152 million since 2019.” Marc: “We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.”  Göran: “Almost half of sub-Saharan Africans — 600 million — live without electricity.” Marc: “We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.”  Göran: “There is still a pattern of increased winter mortality in the UK.“ Marc: “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.”  Göran: “Social isolation remains a debilitating human condition.” Marc: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.”  Göran: “Excess mortality as a result of COVID-19 has been found to cor...

“The identitarian creed has since been removed from its anti-capitalist roots, Sarkar argues, and used to justify the persistence of inequality and split the working class…  It is ultimately the ruling classes who fix the terms of engagement of the so-called culture war, and use it as a strategy for discouraging dissent.” Splitting games Related What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules

Extremism The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money.

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

Why I have not taken part in protests for years. In UK alone hundreds of thousands demonstrated prior to the war on and invasion of Iraq. They were sent/went back home on the same day. They did not stop the British regime from being part of the crime, and the destruction of Iraq that ensued and lasted for years. May times demonstration/protests in support of the Palestinians took part in London. They did not change the British regime’s policy in supporting the Israeli state. In this regard, Mark Fisher’s argument is still valid : radicals in Britain should direct their efforts to mobilise working people around social issues at home and attack the British regime’s socio-economic policies.  A regime change at home is the way forward. We have seen that even with a self-proclaimed socialist like Bernie Sanders , leaders can side with the oppressors and be complicit in crime. Sanders would have not changed American imperialist support of the Israeli state. Social movements in the beginn...

“It would take human jobs faster than the Kardashians ‘dump boyfriends’.”

The crisis of development: uneveness, polarization and contestation

Counteroppression by Alpa Shah

What remains constant is Fukuyama’s reliance on transhistorical psychological models of immutable human nature, rather than an analysis of material and economic relations, to explain the current fragility of liberal democracy. While Fukuyama does not abandon a commitment to the capitalist market, he avers that, under neoliberalism, the “valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed as a matter of principle.” The review has a misleading title. Fukuyama, according to the review itself, does not argue that or has reached the conclusion that “socialism is the only alternative to liberalism.”

A review from 2020 by a Western-centric Marxist economist and blogger might help us understand the situation of today’s global economy. Review of Trade Wars Are Class Wars Part 1 Part 2

You can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives. with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a wo...

“ Whoever controls the institutions that distribute wealth in the world economy controls who gets what.” The pandemic is very bad. Yes, but not for everybody.

Bring class struggle back in

  A liberal view. There no global economic-system and it’s crises, there is no uneven development, migration and capital, there is no class, there is no demographic pressures, especially of the youth, no lack of prospects for many, no precarity … Only abstract concepts such as ‘inequality’ and ‘lack of democracy’, without even being able to define what democracy or real democracy is. Asked what defines “real democracy,” Burke admitted it was somewhat subjective: “One person’s democracy is another person’s autocracy.”

I am in the fourth episode and I already agree with Mike.  Squid Game 

Can inequality be blamed on the Agricultural Revolution? Related Against the Grain

This is not a radical anti-capitalist analysis, but it’s an interesting read. Why neoliberalism needs neofascists

Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finance has been kept out of new domestic infrastructure projects, the US is still driving privatization and deregulation in the global south and intensifying its new Cold War on China. Will it propel a new phase of economic expansion? I doubt it, due to the sheer scale of global overaccumulation and the fade-out of the industrialization bonanza. 1979 in Reverse

The Crisis of European Social Democracy