Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In a region where colonialism, imperialism and authoritarianism are entangled in a web of interests, rebuilding Syria and developing a mass movement against Israel and US as well as an appeal to renew the spirit of 2010/2011 of overthrowing the rotten, authoritarian and crime-complicit regimes are inseparable. A ‘free Syria’ cannot be free in a sea of unfree region.  When I posted a comment similar to the above on alquds.co.uk, replying to an article by someone defending  the leader  of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham’s stance on Israel, my comment about the reactionary forces involved was censored and went unpublished. “For too long,” writes Hicham Safieddine , “the Assad regime invoked the conflict with Israel to justify its repressive measures against its people. Its opponents have long dared it to launch resistance in the Golan. Now that the opposition is in power, no such plan is in sight.” Thus  fighting colonialism and authoritarianism should not be exclusive. The curre...

David Lay Williams’s contribution “inverts the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the thrust of classical Western thought. If anything, it’s the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns with economic inequality that constitute an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.” Note how a universal topic like economic inequality does not include non-Western thinkers from China to India, from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. Williams just restricted his research to Western European thinkers. The reviewer himself mentioned a couple of non-white intellectuals and activists, but not a single non-Westerner came to his mind.

“What Foucault and many intellectuals  at the time  were struggling against  was not only socialism abroad, but also a certain kind of socialism and its legacy in France. More fundamentally,  after 1968, it is the very notion and entire conceptual structure of revolution  that Foucault would reject.” “In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self” The Last Man Takes LSD Michel Foucault Related Foucault and neoliberalism:  “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

A coup at 50

Danny Katch: “Socialism is a society whose top priority is meeting all of its people’s needs, ranging from food, shelter, and health care, to art, culture, and companionship. In contrast, capitalism only cares about any of that basic human necessities stuff to the extent that money can be made of it.” Nathan J. Robinson: “ Because it’s not that capitalism never produces food—you can go to the grocery store—it’s not that capitalism never produces any kind of shelter—you can rent an apartment—it is that it provides it to the extent that money can be made off it, and the moment those human imperatives of the basic needs conflict with the money being made, the money will come above basic needs.” I do not think that is a full explanation; I think it is partially accurate because it forgets that capitalism also provides certain things and maintains others – erosion but not the dismantling of the welfare system, for example – to keep the social peace, and thus the system protects itself from ...

A very interesting essay The Left is too gentrified to care about work

An interview with Mike Davis in 2018

“Those who preach socialism,” Shivji wrote in Intellectuals at the Hill , “must first learn to practise democracy.” A review of Development as Rebellion

“The last Muslim intellectual”

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an...

Nazism and socialism

Views on China

“ We must ask ourselves … equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit must not be the height of our ambition.” – Sheila Rowbotham

According to a research by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think-tank, 67 per cent of young people polled would like to live in a socialist economic system.  Scary! 

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

Why are people so terrified of socialism?

It might not be that left at all

The best article I have read so far  about the current situation in Cuba. “When the Cuban government responded with violence to the claims of the people whose interests they are supposed to defend, it acted like any other government anywhere in the world, rather than following the socialist character that once defined the revolution. For some, this is a difficult truth to accept.” “I year for more solidarity from the global left” Related My diary of a visit to Cuba

  The Great Transformation and the Countermovement to Capitalism

 An event organised by SSK-GNU research team in South Korea.