Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" In the last twenty-five years (since when, in February 1991, a ship loaded with 26,000 Albanians entered the port of Brindisi) we have known that the great migration had began. Two paths were possible at that point. Opening its borders, starting a global distribution of resources, investing its wealth in a long lasting process of reception and integration of young people coming massively from the sea. This was the first path. The second was to reject, to dissuade, to make almost impossible the easy journey from Northern Africa to the coasts of Spain Italy and Greece. Europeans have chosen the second way, and they are daily drowning uncountable children and women and men. Auschwitz on the beach." Is Bifo being harsh on the "civilised Europeans"?

Do passports restrict economic growth?

This is not considered violence and it doesn't appear on the frontpages. Violence is mostly the one that hits the 'peaceful' cities and kills rich countries.

Why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

"[T]he Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant, or increasingly a legal immigrant, who has been added to the ranks of the category of 'criminal’ while being housed and ‘protected’ by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of ‘Political Correctness’. Migration is therefore a central issue here. And neoliberalism contributes to the revival of far-right politics through the global, structural changes that it has carried through over the last 40 years. In particular, it is the connection between domestic socio-economic change, as reflected in the rescaling of welfare assistance, and the compulsions toward labour market flexibility, with the accompanying sense of individualized social insecurity for workers (Theodore, 2007: 252–53).  Neoliberalism, then, has rested upon the opening up of labour  markets within the mature capitalist economies to competitive pressures on the social wage through both offshoring production sources in low

Just another news item "As the rescuers approached, they found overloaded wooden vessels and rafts that evoked scenes of the slave trade."

"A fractious Europe, a failing currency, a challenged economy, populist parties on the rise, a divided left, migration from the east, an atmosphere of fear combined with social and sexual liberalism. The parallels between Britain today and Germany in the 1920s may well make this a compelling moment to revisit those postwar German thinkers who gathered in what was known as the Frankfurt school for social research – something akin to a Marxist think tank, [...] Little wonder, given the history of the 20th century, that the Frankfurt school gave us intellectual pessimism and negative dialectics.  Jeffries’s biography  is proof that such a legacy can be invigorating."   –  Lisa Appignanesi,  Guardian

A Brief History of Fortress Europe

[Upon] closer scrutiny, the operation of retrieving, commemorating and mourning proves to be deeply problematic and hypocritical. For this tragic loss of life was not an unfortunate “accident” but the result of political decisions taken, amongst others, by the very state actors who are now claiming a high moral ground by recovering and mourning the dead. The forgotten 22,000 First of all, the 18th of April shipwreck is only one among many more incidents that have led to more than 22,000 documented deaths at sea over the last 25 years. These have been the structural product of EU migration policies that have denied legal access to EU territory to the impoverished citizens of the global South since the end of the 1980s. The militarization of border controls and their externalization to North African states has forced migrants wishing to reach EU territory to resort to smugglers and to take longer and ever more dangerous routes. Italy, as a “frontline” state of the EU, has for many

Brexit: A Fake Revolt "Leaving the EU won’t guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, or a fall in NHS waiting times and class sizes. The only thing it guarantees is more rightwing Tory control." Yes, Paul. It's a fake revolt and I would add that it is reactionary. Remain is not progressive, either. It is a ruling class crisis as the referendum itself is a product of an economic and social crisis. 

Let Them Drown The Violence of Othering in a Warming World