Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"So long as we persist in our tendency to hive off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx, will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the frangmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment."  — Mark Mazwoer, Columbia University,  reviewing Gareth Stedman Jones's book  Karl Marx, Greatness and Illusion , the Financial Times, 5 August 2016.

Good! Marx deserves better critics

A book review  "In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.  
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a

Financialisation or profitability?

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

K for Karl – machine [episode 5]

"But then –the third event—globalized capitalism that exhibits all the features that Marx so eloquently described in  Das Capital , and the Global Financial Crisis, made his thought relevant again. By now he was safely ensconced into the Pantheon of global philosophers, his every extant word published, his books available in all the languages of the world, and  his status, while still subject to vagaries of time, safe—at least in the sense that it could never fall into obscurity and oblivion. In fact, his influence is inextricably linked with capitalism. So long as capitalism exists, Marx will be read as its most astute analyst. If capitalism ceases  to exist, he will be read as its best critic. So whether we believe that in another 200 years, capitalism will be with us or not, we can be sure that Marx will." The influence of Karl Marx – a counterfactual

K for Karl — Exploitation (episode 4)

Marx and Keynes in Berlin

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

The Communist Manifesto as a graphic novel

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

Managers rule, not capitalists?

Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis

Alienation [episode 1]

Did Marx have a labour theory of value?

In those early years, Dewey formulated three ideas that would come to define his mature vision of democracy: individualism offers a distorted vision of human freedom, genuine freedom is found in social cooperation, and true social freedom is impossible in a class society. John Dewey

"Marx's Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value"

In  The Road to Serfdom , there is a rather chilling passage in which Hayek writes that “the manager of any plant” needs to be given “considerable” power, and approvingly quotes an engineer on the importance of economic spontaneity versus planning: “there ought to be surrounding the work a comparatively large area of unplanned economic action. There should be a place from which workers can be drawn, and when a worker is fired he should vanish from the job and from the pay-roll. In the absence of such a free reservoir[,] discipline cannot be maintained without corporal punishment, as with slave labour Freedom for whom?

One of the main problems with the disciplinary quality of contemporary academia is the way in which the fragmentation of disciplines carries over into a fragmentation of analysis. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned intellectual laborers everywhere, “interdisciplinarity” rarely succeeds in its aims, often remaining littlemore than the sum of its parts. Reading Social Reproduction into Reading Capital