Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Why I have not taken part in protests for years. In UK alone hundreds of thousands demonstrated prior to the war on and invasion of Iraq. They were sent/went back home on the same day. They did not stop the British regime from being part of the crime, and the destruction of Iraq that ensued and lasted for years. May times demonstration/protests in support of the Palestinians took part in London. They did not change the British regime’s policy in supporting the Israeli state. In this regard, Mark Fisher’s argument is still valid : radicals in Britain should direct their efforts to mobilise working people around social issues at home and attack the British regime’s socio-economic policies.  A regime change at home is the way forward. We have seen that even with a self-proclaimed socialist like Bernie Sanders , leaders can side with the oppressors and be complicit in crime. Sanders would have not changed American imperialist support of the Israeli state. Social movements in the beginn...

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A good piece! I disagree with the use of ‘post-socialism/communism though. Morris misses to include capitalism in Russia with the global political economy. “We  should  view Russia as just another ‘normal’ country, just not in the optimistic sense  Daniel Treisman and Andrei Shleifer (2005)  predicted: a middle-income country facing typical developmental challenges. Instead, I would contend that Russia is ‘normal’ in ways that reflect its peripheral-as-vanguard authoritarian neoliberalism. Its characteristics are the dominant politics of “austerity” (the phobia of fiscal expansion, a continuously residualizing social state) accompanied by the other disciplining factor of real incomes falling over protracted time periods; limited social mobility and the privatizing of educational opportunity leading to a small plutocratic class or caste; the expansion of indebtedness and precarity in the population; social reproduction as largely responsibilized and pri...

“ Europe and the US may use different counter-terrorist measures, but both are involved in a more insidious practice, which is gradually taking root due to the climate of fear. The political game of criminalising immigrants, and connecting terrorism with foreigners, Muslims and young second-generation immigrants, often with deprived, religious backgrounds, provides hate figures and creates a climate of suspicion. But the profile that has emerged from police investigations into Islamist terror attacks in Europe reveals different characteristics: most entered Europe legally or were born here, are not very religious but have a deep sense of injustice, have professional qualifications and are often university educated.” The globalisation of state violence  (2001-2007)

This piece is still one of most sober analysis of violence by non-state actors. And it is by a liberal magazine. There is a major inaccuracy in a statement though . “ The history  of the West is every bit as violent  as the modern Middle East, with brief periods of relative peace punctuated by periods of bloody conflict.” As violent as? The violence of Nazi Germany, the Belgian Genocide in Congo or the American war on the Vietnamese, just to cite three events, had no comparable examples in the history of the Middle East. The Threat is Already Inside

 ‘No change for thirty years’

The Philosophers' Epidemic

A long good summary A specter is haunting the West—the specter of authoritarian capitalism

Orwell's 1984 : why it still matters

The New Panopticon

Britain However radical Labour’s 2017 manifesto was in many ways, it said nothing about rolling back the mechanisms bequeathed by the “war on terror.” This reflects a major historical weakness for Labour, which was always its loyalty to the constitutional status quo. This Veritable Arsenal

"Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirro...

The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and consuming this ‘data’. ‘Data’ has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, ‘the information that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless – except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself ’.  New bureaucracy takes...

A book review ... by means of deploying “big data”, neoliberalism has tapped into the psychic realm and exploited it, with the result that, as Han colourfully puts it, “individuals degrade into the genital organs of capital”. Consider that the next time you’re reviewing your Argos purchase, streaming porn or retweeting Paul Mason. Instead of watching over human behaviour, big data’s digital panopticon subjects it to psychopolitical steering. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the Power of New Technologies And here is what John Lanchester wrote in details a few months ago, You are the product

Dispossession and Discipline in Palestine and West Asia 

This is an excellent dissection You are the product

'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper