Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

–Ishmahil Blagrove, Facebook, 22 April 2022

Very interesting development  in Nigeria "Mr Sowore’s Coalition for Revolution movement is calling for Nigerians across the country to take to the streets to demand an end to insecurity. They also want free education and healthcare for all as well as for key economic sectors to be nationalised."

Very good! The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza/Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that exploits them, appropriating their productive powers while granting them less and less control. On labour and human bo...

"[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...

Insecurity and the New World of Work " Since 2007*, almost all the aggregate increase in employment in the UK is accounted for by ‘ non-standard jobs’ , according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These included low-pay self-employment, ‘flexible’ and zero-hours contracts and part-time work."