Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The bourgeois world, blown up by gunpowder, will when the smoke settles and the ruins are cleared, arise again, with some modifications, as another sort of bourgeois world, because it is not yet internally exhausted and the new world is not ready to replace it. — Alexan­der Herzen, the father of Russian populism Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history. —Rosa Luxemburg in Anti-Critique

Sudanese communists and aftermath of July 1971 in Kober

 An event organised by SSK-GNU research team in South Korea.

 Young Chinese brush up on ‘Das Kapital”

  Marx’s debt to people of African descent Related The Africana paradigm in Capital

 Ignore the statue, read the man. Engels comes of age

The twentieth-century question is back. We saw it in the Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, in Occupy, in Greece, in France, etc. And we see it now in the U.S. " The rebellion [in the U.S.] has accomplished more in two weeks than have decades of slow, incremental electoralism." —Ahmed Kanna

  Via Edward Maltby How to explain Marxism to a Financial Times reader Similarly, take the idea/l of democracy, you wouldn't blame it for the 20th century horrors that wrecked Europe. Those were the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism. Or, in a more subtle way, they were the "dark side" of capitalist democracy, not of the ideal of democracy per se. In wikepedia entries on the nature of former Eastern European regimes, pervasive and unhelpful conflation of "socialism", "communism" and "Stalinism" is abound. Poland, for example, according to wikipedia, was socialist before 1990. 

Class was the key for Erik Olin Wright

China's leaders confront ardent young communists

Nancy Fraser: Marxism and feminism

In “Mistaken Identity,” Asad Haider argues that contemporary identity politics is a “neutralization of movements against racial oppression” rather than a progression of the grassroots struggle against racism. Haider, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, puts the work of radical black activists and scholars in conversation with his personal experiences with racism and political organizing. He charts out the process through which the revolutionary visions of the black freedom movement — which understood racism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin — have been largely replaced with a narrow and limited understanding of identity. How identity politics has divided the Left

Marx bicentenary

It is sad but true to say, as Marx Wartofsky has, that "communist politics, as well as anticommunist politics, left the tradition of Marxist scholarship enfeebled."  This is a good piece. Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

" Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion." Indomitable Terry Eagleton assessing Eric Hobsbawm "Hobsbawm himself always argued that his historiography was inseparable from his Marxism and, indeed, only made possible by it. I argue below that he was essentially right in this judgment. For those of us on the anti-Stalinist left, Hobsbawm’s orthodox communism meant that his political judgements—his extraordinarily narrow conception of the working class, for example, or his belief that nationalism could be harnessed for progressive ends—had to be treated with deep suspicion; but much of his historical writing has to be afforded a great deal more resp...

"I'm a Marxist — we are misunderstood on both the left and right"

Not just being right, but getting free

"The point I try to make in that article is that the debate on whether Jews should be accorded full political rights in 1840s Prussia presents some striking similarities with the debate on Muslims’ integration into French society today. More precisely, my point is that the French state’s demand that religious minorities (and let’s be frank, Muslims in particular) respect the principle of secularism in the public space is reminiscent of Bruno Bauer’s position on the Jewish Question. Bruno Bauer believed that the Jews deserved to be granted political rights only if they stopped being Jews and embraced Enlightenment thought. In other words, he conceived of political emancipation as a kind of award that individuals receive only if they renounce their own religious identity and embrace the identity that the secular state deems as appropriate. Likewise, the French state demands that Muslims get rid of their religious/cultural practices if they want to show willingness to integrate into...

Does the FN has an economic strategy?

A very interesting book. And what has made it more interesting is this review in the Financial Times (a very revolutionary socialist website!) 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, August 5 2016 My comment: the fragmentation of social thought is not an accident; it is part and parcel of the substance of the dominant ideological thought which manifests itself, for example, in the academic sphere and how subjects of studies have been fragmented and delivered. That has a lot to do with the capitalist market and its relationship to reproduction of ideas and commodities.