Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

The Club

Undoing Lenin

"Salvini is attempting to mould an aggressive Catholicism around a hyper-masculinised personality cult. The crucifix and the rosary become emblems of far-right Crusader-style military erotica, to be wielded by real men against the limp humanitarianism of Pope Francis who has spoken out on behalf of refugees and, most famously, in 2013  lamented ‘ the globalisation of indifference’  at an open-air mass in  Lampedusa, held against the backdrop of the hulks of shipwrecked migrant boats." Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology if Fascism comes to mind. White supremacy, racial patriarchy: two sides of the same coin

Berlin, Germany It seems that the police of the strongest economy in Europe, which exports submarines, trains and surveillance equipments lacks the technologies to make arrests of far-rights criminals! Ferat Kocak believes this is one reason why the violence here has flared up. "This is traditionally a very white middle-class area, but that's now changing, it is becoming more multicultural, with people with different lifestyles. These far-right guys don't feel comfortable with that." I thought the problem was with the uneducated, the unenlightened! Far-right violence in a Berlin district

“It’s a snapshot of the old Middle East with its incredible multiculturalism,” says Dr Wagner. “This whole idea of one nation, one faith, one language is a very European concept that then penetrated the Middle East. These letters came before the time when this kind of thinking began poisoning things. Letters from Arab merchants hidden for more than 200 years

The multiculturalism the European right fears ...

From the archive The contradictions of identity Gary Younge will be speaking at the British Academy , London, 17 September 2018

"In East-Central Europe, and especially in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, an anti-immigrant left has formed that is conscious and proud of how it departs from received images (allegedly received from the West) of the left as the defender of marginalized peoples and cultures. In attacking the “multiculturalism” that liberal elites have championed, this anti-multicultural left positions itself as the defender of the hard-working nation against dangerous outsiders, both rich and poor. [T]he anti-multicultural left accepts, once again, the terms set by that liberalism which it sees as its chief competitor. The central principle of liberalism is the principle of separation—the insistence on looking only at one sphere of social reality at a time, and on looking at entities within these spheres as separate entities pursuing separate interests. The anti-multicultural left likewise takes each aspect of the system separately, rejecting out of hand internationalist talk of interconnecti...

Nancy Fraser: Marxism and feminism

Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a  2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,”  or “NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and “their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ʻshareholder-valueʼ conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic a...

There is an irony in this, as Farris observes. The European feminists’ insistence that migrant women’s autonomy would be furthered by the work of domestic service defined as liberating the very household drudgery that these feminists had long sought to escape. There is both a racist and a sexist element to this, Farris says, because “they reinforce the conditions for the reproduction at the societal level of Muslim and non-Western migrant women’s segregation, traditional gender roles, and the gender injustice they claim to be combating.” The Culture Veil

Some fucking Italian hispters