Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it's as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between  detournement  and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their  precorporation:  the pre-emptive format...

" Mainstream economics is not fatally flawed — but would achieve much more of its potential by questioning itself and listening to other fields." Of course it is not flawed. It just teaches and trains students how to manage capitalism. Yes, there are some malfunctions of the system from time to time, but mainstream economics should justify that and find solutions not to question the functioning itself. Does mainstream economics teach students that there are intrinsic relationships between profit-making as a driving force of capitalism and how 8 people own more than half of the world population, uneven-development, wars, and other crimes? Or, does it teach how to have entrepreurial spirit and business ambition, i.e. individualism, promoting NGOs to massage power relations rather than challenge them, "free-market" as a universal recipe, and "balancing the relationship between labour and capital to serve capital"?

" Lorna Finlayson’s book has the deceptively simple aim of showing that there is no distinction in kind to be drawn between the methodology of political philosophy and the philosophy itself.   And, she suggests, since the methodology is in turn really just a way of trying to sustain the distinction between political philosophy and politics, the collapse of this distinction also supports the claim that the political philosophy/politics distinction is itself untenable. Political philosophy—or, it turns out, mainstream analytic political philosophy—has a mistaken understanding of itself as standing outside or above the messy power-ridden realm of actual politics, Finlayson argues; this misunderstanding is ideologically motivated, and the methodology of political philosophy serves to exemplify and buttress it. Showing that the distinction between the methodology of political philosophy and political philosophy is ideological, in the pejorative sense familiar from critical theory sinc...