Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The long depression and Marx’s law – a reply to Pete Green

"This process of appropriation includes many others: framing the Law of Value as something morally and politically valuable; mapping natural resources, translating Cheap Nature into a portable, readable format; codifying the limits of nature and society in laws and bills, so as the first remains cheap, and creating new institutional arrangements, which  allow the market and the state to produce this logic through space and time . Appropriating Cheap Nature is not only a process of violent material dispossession. It is also a way to see the world which naturalises – and makes desirable – this process, upon which capitalist accumulation depends." Capitalism as Ecology: Mexican Resistance at the Frontier

Global turbulence ahead

" A major problem is that global warming, as with the associated environmental problems, can’t be solved within the capitalism that has caused, and is accelerating, the problem. All incentives under capitalism are for more growth and thus more greenhouse-gas emissions, and there is no provision to provide new jobs for the many people who would be displaced should the heavily polluting industries in which they work were to be shut down in the interest of the environment. The private capital that profits from environmental devastation is allowed to externalize the costs onto society, an inequality built into the system. The concept of  “green capitalism” is a dangerous chimera ." Systemic Disorder

Capitalism On productivity, growth, investment and profit

Review of The Happiness Industry , a book by William Davies "What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits. One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away fre e, so as to form a closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay increases they give to their staff as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus greater effort from them. It seems that there is nothing that can’t be instrumentalised. Yet the whole point of happiness is that it is an end in itself, rather than a means to power, wealth and status. For a tradition of ethical thought from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hegel and Marx, human self-fulfilment springs from the practice of virtue, and this happens purely for its own sake. How to be happy is the chie

Richard Wolff and the Deepening Crisis

Let Them Drown The Violence of Othering in a Warming World