Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Domenico Losurdo’s new book I have read and I recommend Losurdo’s  Liberalism – A Counter-History . A book praised even by the Financial Times Related Losurdo on social-political struggle Interview on opendemocracy

A free ebook  Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement

 “ This tension between “equality” and “property” rings through subsequent history and still shapes much discussion today.” It’s true, we ignore parts of our history

 “This Land is Your Land”

Which tactics are appropriate for today’s rebellions can only be determined by a strategic and organizational analysis along the lines [Marin Luther] King proposed, and not according to the moral judgment which he subordinated to that analysis. In fact, with news that Los Angeles is considering cuts in police department funding, Minneapolis city council members openly considering disbanding the police force, and curfews being lifted in several cities, there are good reasons to believe that the current riots are strategically effective. “No justice, no peace,” from King’s vantage point, means that there is no positive peace without justice. Therefore in the context of injustice, there can be no negative peace, in the sense that there must be tension, there must be a “disturbance of the peace” in order to have the presence of justice. Today, when protestors shout “no justice, no peace,” we should understand this as a political principle which takes primacy over the abstract conceptio...

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

Labour's economic policy: the challenge ahead

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) "1. The domestic policies of the BRICS states follow the general tenor of what one might consider Neoliberalism with Southern Characteristics. 2. The BRICS alliance has not been able to create a new institutional foundation for its emergent authority. It continues to plead for a more democratic United Nations, and for more democracy at the IMF and the World Bank. 3. The BRICS formation has not endorsed an ideological alternative to neoliberalism. 4. Finally, the BRICS project has no ability to sequester the military dominance of the United States and NATO... The force-projection of the United States remains planetary. If we look into the entrails of the system, we will find that its solutions do not lie within it. Its problems are not technical, nor are they cultural. They are social problems that require political solutions. The social order of property, propriety, and power has to be radically revised..." ...

States are no different than warlords. Both seek to dominate, where the only difference is that the former maintains a false air of legitimacy by claiming the monopoly of violence, while the other's violence has not yet appropriated that perverse right. The so-called “general benevolence of democracy” ( De Waal, 2017 ) consequently reflects a testament to the need to placate a population so that it does not revolt against the status quo. Property is the mother of famine

The Young Karl Marx (movie) It is not easy to find a free online version. You might experience annoyance with pop up windows, but will evetually get it play.

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst...

Via Michael Roberts A new research paper reveals that over 150 years income and gains from the ownership of capital (property and financial assets) or more exactly wealth is much greater than the expansion of new value (economic growth). Thomas Piketty in his famous book of 2014, Capitalism in the 21st century,argued that if the return to capital exceeded the rate of economic growth, rentiers would accumulate wealth at a faster rate than incomes gr ow. This report confirms that for the last 150 years. The rich get richer from owning things rather than working for it. The only exceptions were in wars or in periods when the rate of profit on capital falls fast as in the 1880s, 1930s and 1970s and in the current depression. The rate of return on everything

Against the Grain and The beginning of elites, tax, and slavery

Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages and the threat of hunger

Ways of Seeing, Episode 3

" Once debts have been subtracted, a person needs only $3,650 to be among the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens. However, about $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%.  So if you own a home in any major city in the rich North on your own and without a mortgage, you are part of the top 1%.  Do you feel rich if you do?  This just shows how poor the vast majority of people in the world are: with no property, no cash and certainly no stocks and bonds!" The vast majority? They are just losers; the are uneducated, they don't know how to be entrepreneurs .. . New figure reached by annual Credit Suisse global wealth report