Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Spain: how much of state violence will be used? "To move forward we need to understand: why are regions, states and peoples beginning to re-pose the question of national self-determination now? For Spain and Italy it is clear: the mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the centre has limited the reality of regional democracy. It has pushed autonomous regions such as  Catalonia  towards independence and places such as Lombardy and Veneto towards seeking fiscal autonomy from an essentially dysfunctional central state." The big picture Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland ... Why they fight for self-determination now?

Nationalism Painted Red

"It imperative that loyalty to a state be secured, and the nation is the means. Workers have often been asked to accept rises in interest rates, cuts in wages and services, or participation in imperialist wars, but never for the benefit of capitalism, always for the benefit of a particular nation, for “the national interest”. It is not only the state which makes such appeals. The organisations of the working class themselves reinforce reformist class consciousness within a national context. At the most elementary level this is because such organisations are unwilling to challenge the nationalism within which political discourse is conducted, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. More importantly, however, it is because they seek either to influence or determine policy within the confines of the existing nation-state. Typically, therefore, nationalism is invested with the contradictory character of the reformist world view." The National Question, Class and the European U

Does the FN has an economic strategy?

" Following what we’ve seen in Europe, it makes sense that when the populist right is in power, the center-left  moves to the right . The Democrats are a little bit different, in that you’re going to see some semblance of a leftward movement — doubling down on the social inclusion part of the Democratic Party — and resisting some of Trump’s nativism, while moving rightward on issues of political economy to try to win over moderate segments of the capitalist class. I think you’ll see a leftward and a rightward movement at the same time." Full interview here

Mutations of fascism

Remembering Husayn Muruwwah

Russia plans Syrian name change in draft constitution

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , pp. 25-6, Verso 2006 ed. No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her s

The spectacle consists of daily photographs and news items from a ten-time Guernica, Aleppo;  terrorist attacks in France, Egypt and Istanbul; countless refugees drowning in the sea; decades of a form of capitalism which have spawned more social dislocation, racism, Islamophobia, and far-right chauvinism, and more yet to come; Jennifer Lawrence's butt-scratching, which upset some viewers yearning for a merry Christmas.

  Nationalism "in any imperialist society is bound up with chauvinism, and Britain is an imperialist society, with England its historical core, which has always been defined by its status in the imperialist hierarchy, whatever William Hague says to the contrary.  Orwell’s efforts to situate the basis for socialism on the terrain of culture and “ Englishness ,” which admittedly had a certain proto-Gramscian quality in its approach to popular culture as a strategic factor in political struggles, surely represent the last serious attempt to articulate something like a left-wing “Englishness.”  It was certainly light years ahead of the mawkish, demagogic detritus that passes for the same attempt these days.  Yet it failed rather badly, for two reasons.  First, because it misjudged the class basis for any post-war socialism, estimating that the perpetual growth of a functionary and technician class would be the basis for a rational yet national post-capitalist system.  This isn’t how

Revolutionary icon finally defeated by infirmity of old age

Benedict Anderson on 'mapping the terrain' of nationalism

Poppies, patriots and pro-Brexit propaganda: Revisiting the myths of Britain's past

"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?

Turkey coup Background and context: Liberalized Islam, Post-Sufis, and the Military in Turkey   Coup Aftermath Between Neo-Fascism and Bonapartism

Turkey Context of a failed coup "This analytical framework is then used to examine the outcomes in four countries where modernizing, nationalist projects took shape under the direction of secular elites: Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, all four had reached an impasse. The Egyptian and Tunisian regimes had largely discarded their nationalist trappings and become Western client states, in thrall to the Washington Consensus—especially Tunisia, which was, in Tuğal’s words, ‘the most orthodox neoliberal regime in the Arab world’ and something of a poster-child for the  IMF ." See book review here Note: It is likely that the failed coup in Turkey going to strengthen the AKP project: Islamism, 'neoliberalism' and more authoritarian rule. Reactions: " Portraying Erdoğan and the fascist AKP dictatorship as if they were democratic after this coup attempt is an approach even more dangerous than the coup atte

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."  — W. H. Auden   Some of the books I have read and I recommend: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb Brutal Friendship - The West and the Arab Elite by Saïd K. Aburish Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States by Adam Hanieh Islam in Liberalism by Joseph Massad Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad Egypt: Spies, Soldiers and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Inside the Brotherhood by Hazem Kandil, 2015 Debt, The IMF, and The world Bank, Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 Man's Fate (or La Condition Humaine) by Andre Malraux 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell Three Penny Opera by Bertolt Brecht The Autumn of the Patriarch by G. G. Marquez The Slave Trade by Hugh