Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 When the Read Flag flew over Iran

 The struggle for real democracy

 Partners in Crime

Two views on China: Esteban Mercatante argues that China is capitalist while Richard Smith says it is not. The Contours of Capitalism in China Why China isn’t Capitalist

I think arguments that reinforce irrationality and conservatism always find millions of followers. Those millions of people have their prejudices, and their opinions on subjects like Marxism, socialism, human nature, etc are based on lack of knowledge and miseducation or material interest. The contradiction lies in this: in their daily life people generally make rational decisions, but when it comes to subjects like capitalism, hierarchy, human nature, socialism, ‘ordinary’ people have irrational ideas about those subjects. Their ideas has been built over many years, and often since childhood. Most people do not break away from what was inculcated in their minds at home and at school. Like a Muslim preacher who gains fame by hitting the right neurones of a Muslim mind that prone to conservatism, John Peterson is a Western preacher for a Western audience that too has its own conservatism and prejudices. And the more capitalism as an economic and social system enters into crisis and

The last communist to challenge Stalin to his face

  In 2016 the  Washington Post  published 16 articles hostile to Bernie Sanders in 16 hours ... The Sanders-media showdown

The Inequality of Human Rights

John McDonnell, Labour Party: I have been a member of the Labour Party and involved in politics for over 45 years.  I have spent these years as a campaigner in my local community and nationally for what I consider to be basic rights- the right to a decent roof over your head in a safe, secure, clean, green environment, a good quality truly creative education, a job and income you can live on, trade union rights at work and an NHS fully funded in public hands so that we receive the treatment we need when s ick.  Throughout the New Labour years, Jeremy and I stayed in the Labour Party and fought for socialism. That meant in 2015 we were there when our chance came. We suffered a defeat in December. But not because of our policies. Public ownership, ending tuition fees and reversing NHS privatisation are all hugely popular. They're all still Labour Party Policy, as is the Green New Deal, and we need to organise to keep it that way. Party members can be forgiven for feeling demoralis

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

The article was written on 24 of March. A couple of figures are not up-to-date. Covid-19 Pandemic will change everything—for better or worse

Clause IV: the enduring controversy

Bernie Sanders' campaign

"The expropriators constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and they control what happens with that surplus value. It is this relationship of production, Wolff insists, that has thwarted the democratic promises of the American, French, and other bourgeois revolutions. And this system of minority rule over ownership of assets and people’s labour power is also the cause of the staggering inequality that afflicts the world now." Understanding socialism Related: The works of Eric Olin Wright

Hitler by Brendan Simms and Hitler by Peter Longerich And even Adam Tooze, an economic historian cherished by the liberal left, and some revolutionary leftists, has made a blunder. "Contrary to common belief, Tooze argues, in Hitler’s mind the supreme enemy against which his mobilization of the Third Reich for continental war took aim lay not in the steppes to the east, but across the ocean to the far west. Not the bacillus of Bolshevism but the might of the United States, headquarters of world Jewry, was the existential threat to Germany that obsessed him, and governed his ambitions of aggression. The destruction of Communism and conquest of Russia was just a means, not an end, Operation Barbarossa no more than a way-station—the acquisition of a territorial  and resource platform capable of rivalling the vast open spaces of the American colossus, in the battle for world domination. Historically, then, ‘America should provide the pivot for our understanding of the Third Reich

A fascinating story that could make a plot of a novel British soldiers, fresh from fighting Argentina’s fascist junta in the Falklands, were now being asked to help another Latin American military dictatorship eliminate its own opposition activists, by cutting off their arms supply. And incredibly, at some point on the afternoon of Monday 11 April 1983, the British and Belizean authorities agreed to do it. Death of a double agent: British torture and betrayal in 1980s Belize

I am free—but Turkey is not

Giroux reminds us of Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights that liberalism and capitalism have inherent fascist potential, that fascism is a terroristic version of capitalism, that fascist potential has not ceased to exist after the end of World War II, and that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism” (Horkheimer). For almost 19 years in London, the people I have met have never wanted to talk about capitalism. Most of the students I got across hold a strong belief in it. What is mainly required is for capitalism to be managed properly by the right people and, in countries in Africa, Asia and the MENA region, it is mainly about the state and the institutions and the right implementaion of recipes. People want to hear about the "freedom" they enjoy, how "tolerant" their society is, the cheap flights, iphones, music, a T.V series or a sitcom......and don't want to feel uncomfortable hearing about capitalist violence m

“It is worth noting,” [Martin Luther] King said, “that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.” Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx (Click on Free view when subscription message pops up)

From the archive This piece needs updating since it was written 70 years ago. Although genetics and AI are far from changing our biological structure, it is not anymore an impossibility.  Most people know Albert Einstein as a world-famous physicist. He was a socialist, too.