Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Nancy Fraser: Marxism and feminism

Is capital or labor winning at your favorite company? The New York Times

K for Karl – machine [episode 5]

Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production . The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism Marx and 'capitalism' by John Lanchester

Alienation [episode 1]

Did Marx have a labour theory of value?

Michael Roberts replies to the Financial Times' "Activist Manifesto" Recent empirical work on the US class division of incomes has been done by Professor Simon Mohun .  Mohun analysed US income tax returns and divided taxpayers into those who could live totally off income from capital (rent, interest and dividends) – the true capitalists, and those who had to work to make a living (wages).  He compared the picture in 1918 with now and found that only 3.8% of taxpayers could be considered capitalists, while 88% were workers in the Marxist definition.  In 2011, only 2% were capitalists and near 84% were workers.  The ‘managerial’ class, ie workers who also had some income from capital (a middle class ?) had grown a little from 8% to 14%, but still not decisive.  Capitalist incomes were 11 times higher on average than workers in 1918, but now they were 22 times larger.  The old slogan of the 1% and the 99% is almost accurate." From communism to activism?

"New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public ser

Hegemony and Resistance in West Asia An interview with John Chalcraft (the London School of Economics)

I like this to-the-point piece. It hits the nail on the head of what is fundamental: capital, class and the state. " Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome." Think that governments can no longer control capitalism? You've been duped.

Capitalism without capital – or capital without capitalism?

Iran: Free trade union leaders Reza and Ismail

"Take a step or two further back in the production process, and the picture gets bleaker still. To function at all, the smartphone—like all electronic devices—requires raw materials that have been wrested from the Earth by ruthlessly extractive industries. The cobalt in its lithium-ion batteries was mined by hand in the Congo, often by children; the tin in the soldered seams that bind it together most likely comes from the Indonesian island of Bangka, where the water table is irreparably fouled, 70 percent of the coral reefs have been destroyed by mine runoff, and on average one miner a week is killed on the job. The damage caused by the processes of extraction fans out across most of a hemisphere, mutilating lives, human communities and natural ecosystems beyond ready numbering. And so the polluted streams, stillborn children and diagnoses of cancer, too, become part of the way in which the smartphone has transformed everyday life, at least for some of us. Though these facts

Labour's share

When communism inspired Americans   (NYT)

England On Owen Jones' Doncaster day out

21st century slavery propping up in Sicily: rape, beating and exploitation

Capitalism's next crisis

Why the system will still win

Visualizing Capital I still think that reading Capital volume 1 gives a better idea than Harvey's illustration.