Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Towards freedom or tyranny

Tehila Sasson’s “argument is, roughly, that international aid organisations – influenced by a long tradition of voluntary service, a desire to find a role after empire and a dislike of the supposed soullessness and impersonality of postwar state-led development and planning – devised programmes and campaigns that relied on and promoted entrepreneurialism, consumerism, individualism and anti-statism. Non-profits weren’t simply too weak to defend against those forces of financialisation, marketisation and privatisation that we lump together under the term ‘neoliberalism’, but embraced them. This is the sense in which they were part of the ‘making’ of neoliberalism after empire, with damaging results. As Sasson puts it most strongly in her conclusion, the non-profit sector ‘helped cement post-imperial inequalities and new divisions of labour between Third World producers and British consumers. In a period marked by deindustrialisation and a crisis of unemployment, the solidarity economy ...

This is an excellent taster of the book  

“The revolutionary-seeming uprisings of 2009-2013 had some overlapping and some diverging causes in different geographies. But a general anarchist spirit was their common denominator. At its peak around 2011, this wave received broad support from both the radical left and the liberal center. These uprisings showed that we no longer needed leaders, organizations, and ideologies. Even in their absence, humanity stood against dictatorships and unfair economic practices. But it was too soon to celebrate. The uprisings, which did not give a concrete direction and method to humanity in general or to particular nations and classes, were not only defeated almost everywhere, but led to the further authoritarianization of the rulers.” A summative, but a very engaging read

“1-Syria's new government has told business leaders it will adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control, declared Bassel Hamwi, head of the Damascus Chambers of Commerce 2- Bassel Hamwi was just ‘elected’ to this position in November 2024 few weeks before the fall of the Assad’s dynasty . He is also the chairman of the Federation of Syrian Chambers of Commerce. Remnants of the old regime still in top positions… 3- HTS has no alternative to the neoliberal economic system, most probably with business networks gathering new and former business personalities, also to be connected to the new ruling leaders similar to forms of crony capitalism we had in the past in Syria 4- This neoliberal system accompanied with authoritarianism will lead to continued socioeconomic inequalities and impoverishment, which were one of the main causes at the roots of the initial uprising. HTS is a threat to the future of...

Catching and Falling Behind in the Global Economy (open access)

My introduction: To understand the crisis of the National Health Service, the bad handling of the pandemic*, stagnant economy, weak productivity, a state struggling to invest adequately in the green economy, inability to build enough and affordable houses, expensive rent, decades of poor investment in infrastructure by OECD measures, consumption, and consumerism, driven by debt, Labour/Conservatives capitalist values, one has to look at the economic model of the British economy. In reviewing Brett Christophers’s work, Cédric Durant has provided a good overview of such an economic model of accumulation and its ramifications as well as some criticism of Christophers’s take on capitalism in general and what might replace it. ——— *I doubt it that the recently publish report will ever mention the economic model pursued by Britain for more than four decades and how it played a major role in the infrastructure of health and the well-being of the Brits. ***** Few today will need convincing th...

A coup at 50

An interview with Cihan Tugal 

Lessons from the struggles in Sudan, Syria, and Palestine

I think capitalism in Russia would be more accurate than Russian capitalism. “The narrative emphasising how the hybrid nature of the Russian state – neoliberal regulatory and statist interventionist – led it down the path to war in Ukraine, offers a fragmented (and misleading) explanation of reality. The problem is that the ideological and political features of the state are interpreted as exercised for purposes outside of capitalist accumulation – be it nationalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia – conceived as separate systems of oppression from class.” On expropriation and social reproduction Related On the war and on internationalism The Development of Capitalism in Russia 

A revolutionary movement without a revolutionary change

Deception, disinformation and social media

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

I disagree with Dabashi in calling neofascist and far-right parties’s triumph across Europe fascist parties. Why Americans consistently misread social uprisings

What remains constant is Fukuyama’s reliance on transhistorical psychological models of immutable human nature, rather than an analysis of material and economic relations, to explain the current fragility of liberal democracy. While Fukuyama does not abandon a commitment to the capitalist market, he avers that, under neoliberalism, the “valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed as a matter of principle.” The review has a misleading title. Fukuyama, according to the review itself, does not argue that or has reached the conclusion that “socialism is the only alternative to liberalism.”

“Speaking to CNN yesterday, John Bolton — a national security adviser under Donald Trump, who also served under George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan — volunteered that he’d helped plan coups in other countries. He was drawing a distinction between what Trump had done on January 6, 2021, encouraging rioters to march on the Capitol, and his own portfolio. ‘As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but you know, other places,’ he said, ‘it takes a lot of work and that’s not what [Trump] did. It was just stumbling around from one idea to another.’  The US  has a  long history  of  removing elected  politicians of which  it does  not  approve .” Latin American coups upgraded

Money, rights, violence

How the experience of Syrian exiles can inform resistance to the invasion

From Marketisation to Armed Conflict