NM's blog

A sharp critique of  Hamid Dabashi’s   After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises:  What, exactly, is the West?  Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon —  “white civilisation.”  But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not  explain  power; it  assigns  essence. Instead of asking  which institutions, with...

Those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money … The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it. —John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Key points Hemedti’s war machine is predicated on continual expansion. Since the RSF offers its recruits licence to loot and raid in lieu of wages, absent fresh targets, its forces have a tendency to disperse. In every city it captures, the RSF has employed the same playbook: destroy state institutions, plunder humanitarian resources, raze civilian property. Its assaults have functioned as an enormous engine of primitive accumulation that has destroyed agricultural land, displaced millions of people, and effected a wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to a class of militia leaders backed by Emirati capital… The paramilitaries have generalized the predatory political economy of Bashir’s regime. While Bashir exploited the peripheries to enrich the centre, the RSF has turned the entire country into a periphery to be plundered. The RSF’s mode of warfare has ultimately proved its undoing. The Sudanese army’s resurgence is partly due to its successful solicitation of foreign support. Qatar –...

“It operates like a food chain: the French at the top, followed by North Africans who run  the subcontracting companies, and at the bottom, the exploited workers .”

When the US converts the world into a battlefield, how do Americans know where to draw the line? More precisely put, it is not immensely shocking that a country that inculcates its citizenry with a macho, shoot-’em-up attitude vis-à-vis other human populations might end up with some, well, “murderers” on its hands – particularly when the domestic panorama is one of dystopian capitalism and acute alienation. Capitalism is the culprit

“The statistics show very clearly that the cost of living crisis is not being driven by workers demanding higher wages. The combination of the war in Ukraine and disturbances to supply chains that took place during the Great Lockdown are the main factors explaining higher prices. As I argued in  Tribune  last week, the crisis in  global shipping  is particularly important in explaining why prices have risen so much over the last few years. But the issue isn’t simply macroeconomic changes that are beyond our control — it’s also the profiteering of large corporations in response to the inflationary environment.” Rising prices are not driven by rising wages

–Ishmahil Blagrove, Facebook, 22 April 2022

On the pandemic and the vaccine

A comparison between the left’s programme and Biden’s

 An example of class struggle and how the state sides with capital. At War , a film by Stéphane Brizé Related Class struggle with dark realism

  Finland had a free-patent Covid-19 vaccine—but still went with big pharma Related Get rid of patents on Covid-19 vaccine

 A subscription is required to read the whole article. Mass incarceration and profit-making

  They are not mistakes, Deborah ; they are part of the functioning of the nation state. The HIV disaster was tied to the the drug companies, the market and profit. Related Calling the shots

Yves Hayat. — «   Brexit   », de la série «   Parfum de révolte   », 2016. Courtesy Galerie Mark Hachem, Paris The COVID pandemic slump and the underlying weakness of British capital are much more damaging to the UK's economic future than Brexit. Brexit is just an extra burden for British capital to face; as it also will be for British households. The Brexit deal

 Students plan the largest rent strike in 40 years

 The pandemic and the future of work

A short video about COVID19 crisis, its origins and its remedy (more details in the synopsis below). Video is produced by the North African Food Sovereignty Network and has English subtitles (settings: caption ON). Synopsis Capitalist production penetrates brutally to the depths of the earth and disturbs the balance that allows society to live in harmony with its environment. This is the concern of the North African Network for Food Sovereignty as it works towards alternatives to agribusinesses which have aggravated food dependency but have also caused major disruptions in our ecosystems, ultimately leading to epidemics such as Covid-19.

What sort of a PhD candidate in sociological studies who does mention capitalism and profit, but not the word 'class' even once? Could it be that an editor remove the word from the article? I don't know. Protests – and riots – are rebellion against an unjust system

You can't control what you don't own. Big pharma rejected EU plan to fast-track-vaccines in 2017

A good piece. We can't go back to normal