NM's blog

Work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life.   And  this life activity he [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. — Karl Marx

No one wants to hear what the people of Gaza actually want . The anti-Hamas voices in the West only amplify their suffering when it serves their agenda. They were silent when Gaza was screaming in agony, in mourning, in starvation.  They want to use our voices when we chant against Hamas, but they mute us when we cry out for our murdered families. They never want to hear us demand an end to Israel’s slaughter.”

There are two kinds of philosophy in the world: one of them is to the effect that there is nothing in the world which is ours, so we must remain content with a rag and a mouthful of food. The other is to the effect that everything in the world is beautiful and desirable, that it does and ought to belong to us. It is the second which should be our ideal … as for the first, it is worthless, and we must pay no attention to it.   Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī  (1838/39-1897), quoted in Kedouri’s Afghani and ‘Abduh , p. 15, 1966. Al-afghānī did not conceal his opposition to Ismai’l Pasha [the viceroy of the Ottoman sultan in Egypt], exclaiming in a speech he delivered to the fellahin [peasants] in Alexandria,  ‘Oh! You poor fellah! You break the heart of the earth in order to draw sustenance from it and support your family. Why do you not break the heart of your oppressor? Why do you not break the heart of those who eat the fruit of your labour?’ Ibid., p. 25

By Sameer Khalili, a Syrian from Homs living in the Netherlands. December 2020

If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.  —Life And Fate by Vasily Grossman

Bruno Latour  What we need is not only to modify the system of production but to get out of it altogether. We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is important and who is not important. If I could change one thing, it would be to get out of the system of production and instead build a political ecology.   However, "the bad guys are better organised and clearer in knowing what they want. The war we are engaged in is a difficult one. It is not that we are powerless; it is that many of us don’t know how to react.           

I hate New Year's Eve and I hate New Year's Day

Religion "I cannot imagine life without neoliberalism." — a student at the London School of Economics, March 2018

I hate New Year's Day

Ways of Seeing (episode 4)

Marx's revenge

Bare life in Aleppo and in the Mediterranean and "Demystifying the Syrian Conflict" At the time Erdogan receives a Syrian child who got out of Aleppo ...

“The connection between the human condition and labour is frequently forgotten, and for me was always so important. At 16, I went down a coal mine in Derbyshire and spent a day on the coal face – just watching the miners. It had a profound effect.” What did it make you feel? “Respect,” he says quietly. “Just respect. There are two kinds. Respect to do with ceremony – what happens when you visit the House of Lords. And a completely different respect associated with danger.” He says: “This is not a prescription for others, but when I look back on my life I think it’s very significant I never went to a university. I refused to go. Lots of people were pushing me and I said, ‘No. I don’t want to’, because those years at university form a whole way of thinking.” And you feel free from that? “Yes.” John Berger: 'If I'm s storyteller, it's because I listen'

The War on Syria's Doctors

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between  by  Hisham Matar

Soviet Lithuania in Pictures (1970s - 1990s)

Life's Longing for Itself: The Art of Adnan Yahya,  An essay by Will Cloughley, MFA (Jan 2016)

In my reading list:  Guns, Germs and Steel  (Jared Diamond, 2010) The book sounds as a confirmation of the following premises. "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set ...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".