Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Loose translation/interpretation by  Michael R. Burch Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men who did manual labor for bread. When I saw him recently, the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence and I felt defeated. But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said: “Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,  and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.  This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters. Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!” Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen, but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain. At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back. “Burn down his house!” some commandant screamed, “and slap his son in a prison cell!” As our town’s military ruler later explained this was necessary for law and order, that is, an act of love, for peace! Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house; the coiled serpent completed its circle. The bang at h...

“Colonial constructions of the ‘threat’ and who are considered to be of ‘good character’.” A threat to a modern construction called the nation state. Would a Labour government undo so many of cruel anti-migration laws and mark a more ‘progressive’ chapter in migrant rights? The    Migrants’ Rights Network is not optimistic

A society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man’s relation to man. To understand and judge a society one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labour, ways of loving, living, and dying. —The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The violence of the last week has been unusually vicious and frightening, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Fourteen years of Conservative rule have seen minority communities used as a scapegoat for worsening inequality time and time again. The history of institutional racism in Britain goes back much further, but you could begin the most recent version of this story at the introduction of the Hostile Environment, a set of policies that aimed to make Britain feel inhospitable… Labour right must also take its share of responsibility. New Labour helped to embed the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 years, with new, stronger powers of policing and surveillance and campaign literature that demonized asylum seekers. Keir Starmer appears to be taking up this mantle… Just this week, Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, referred to the town’s Holiday Inn as an “asylum hotel” and said that the town’s people wanted “their hotel back.” Days later it was set alight by the far rig...

Another nationalist analysis: the UK as an island. No imperialism, no gaza and Israel, no Ukraine, no nature, no climate change … After the rituals, comes reality

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...

“Rather than dividing the right from the left, migration splits both right and left formations internally. Upon gaining power, the only way for both left and right to resolve this tangle of contradictions is through hypocrisy: to adopt practices that contradict public proclamations. In reality, whoever is in government, it is always the labour market, in turn determined by relevant legislation, the business cycle and the geopolitical situation, that determines migration policies . Barbed wire

This is very stimulating and requires focus, and the exchanges are also very engaging. I couldn’t read everything although the topic is so important to most of us. 

A very illuminating essay. The myth of the ‘national bourgeoisie’

The Haymarket affair

Majidi in Context

Race, Labour and Citizenship

How some liberals/neo-Keynesians are digging to justify why governments should play a big role in the economy. A ‘new’ form of capitalism is a necessary in order to get out of the crisis and prevent any possible social unrest.  What 2008/09 and the pandemic have demonstrated is that monopoly capitalism has to change for the system to survive. That Biden, for example, has introduced a big stimulus package and revoked Trump’s cuts in corporate tax reflects the uneasiness of the ruling classes and that a few things have to be done. The Woman Who ‘Shattered the Myth ’

 How unscientific is the labour theory of value?

  Review of Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructure History of BP in Iran

 Weaponisation of Labour Anti-Semitism

Sinews of War and Trade  – an interview with Laleh Khalili

A very illuminating interview. "The Fundamental Questions About Capitalism Seem to be Coming Back" An example from the US and UK that the effects are asymmetrical. The BBC here does not mention any socio-economic background (education, marginalisation, inequality, overlapping of race and class.) which is structural and precedes the current pandemic for a long time. Are minorities being hit harder by coronavirus

On the effects of Coronoavirus and lockdowns, etc. "Now we are being reminded that contemporary capitalism is fuelled, not by financial appropriation, but by labour." —Alex Callinicos, March 2020 The exploited are the creators of wealth.

Knowledge Commodities