Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 A Short Guide to Marx’s Capital   in 150 pages A book by Colin Chalmers

You can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives. with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a wo...

Did what Bertrand Russell say in 1916 still relevant today? “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.” —  Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 13: Freedom in Society.

Is he really trying to redistribute wealth to workers? ‘Redistribute’, not ‘distribute’ implies that wealth was once distributed to workers. No, what happened between 1945 until the ascent of the neoliberal form of capitalism was a social contract based on compromise between the state, capital and trade unions.  Are the profits too high? I don’t think so. One of the reasons we are in an “era of anaemic economic growth” is that the low rate of profit/of return to capital is not high enough to incentivise the capitalists to invest. Thus some governments are intervening and pouring money into the economy and corporations as well as giving financial support to families and individuals, especially because of the pandemic. As Cédric Duran put it: “  Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finan...

  Municipal Workers’ Strike in Istanbul

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

"Lehmans, animal spirit and the progressives" Note: the word 'progressive' is very questionable and problematic nowadays.

From a community of scholars to a purveyor of degrees

In less than 10 minutes

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

Portugal 1974-2017

Haft Tapeh sugar workers in Iran

Europe Competition to outperform the other is good. To achieve a high enough rate of profit is good. To have weak or obsolete unions is good. To have a reserve army so the workers accept their conditions is good. If regulations undermine profit, they are not good.   Drivers living in trucks for months

China wages now higher than in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico

What do the states and the rulers of US, Britain, Russia, France, Iran... have in common?

An interesting analysis albeit some narrative of politically blaming mainly the Tories.

180 million workers have gone on strike in India الهند: أكبر إضراب عمالي في التاريخ إضراب مماثل نظم السنة الماضية

The long depression Via Michael Roberts " Back in work, still out of pocket : Labour market recovery since the Great Recession - the jobs gap will not be closed until 2017 at the earliest AND the wages gap may never be closed. Some countries have real wages over 20% below where they would have been without the Great Recession and subsequent weak recovery. The UK scores worse than Greece on this relative measure . According to a study by the OECD, the labour market recovery in OECD countries has been steady but slow s ince the Great Recession. More worrying is the fate of wage growth over the same period.  The jobs recovery has been underway since the first quarter of 2010, when the OECD average employment rate reached its post-crisis trough, with only 58.6% of the population (ages 15-74 years) employed. This was 2.2% lower than the employment rate in 2007, corresponding to 20.3 million missing jobs. Despite the slow and uneven nature of the economic recovery, the jobs de...

Yes, not only in Greece and not only minimum wages.   In the time of the fall in the rate of profit, wages in general and everywhere, have to stay as they are or decrease in relative terms. "Destructive creation" in general has to accelerate if we want investment to resume and capitalist growth to follow suit. That's the recipe. Take it or leave it.

Brexit: A Fake Revolt "Leaving the EU won’t guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, or a fall in NHS waiting times and class sizes. The only thing it guarantees is more rightwing Tory control." Yes, Paul. It's a fake revolt and I would add that it is reactionary. Remain is not progressive, either. It is a ruling class crisis as the referendum itself is a product of an economic and social crisis.