Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A counter-narrative How did the first world war actually end?

Sarkozy/Juppé (status quo), or Trumpette? "The FN has become the party of the working class,” says Bruno Cautrès, a political sciences researcher at Paris-based Sciences Po Cevipof. “The party offers a double explanation for their malaise: Europe has failed to protect their jobs from globalisation and failed to protect their way of life from Muslim immigrants.”  (the Financial Times) England :  Neoliberal vultures contnue their plunder, "legally".  Virgin Care and the NHS Branson's Virgin Rail profits Crony capitalism Branson, The Stuntman

The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social

Britain May emerged as the preferred candidate of the Tory establishment. Her job, it seems, is to organize the transition to a new form of Conservative politics with less emphasis on austerity and economic competence and more on racist populism. Amid a record period of declining living standards and economic stagnation, the currency of politics today is resentment; it is never just “the economy, stupid.” Theresa May's Le Pen Moment

How the Trumps got rich

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

"Today´s ruling classes are not threatened from within. Thus, they can do what even fascists wouldn’t dare to do. They are smashing real wages, pensions, welfare systems, public schools, free healthcare, cheap public transport, cheap social housing and so on. Who will stop the ruling class?" " These are middle class movements that fear and despise the lower classes and the poor. They are open partisans of the class society – class warriors from above. They aren’t proposing anything new, they are just defending the repression, the exploitation and the injustice of today. Look at the situation in Poland or in Hungary. Have these societies had become more generous, more cohesive, and more collectivist at least within the white middle class? Of  course not. This is just rhetoric." " Look at people like David Cameron, François Hollande, Miloš Zeman. These people have no idea, they’re just blundering around. This is really serious. Then look at all the decadence

Working Class Militancy in the Global South

“Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.” " If remain had won, we would already have returned to pretending that everything was carrying on just fine. Those people who have been forgotten would have stayed forgotten; those communities that have been abandoned would have stayed invisible to all but those who live in them. To insist that they will now suffer most ignores the fact that unless something had changed, they were going to suffer anyway. Those on the remain side who felt they didn’t recognise their own country when they woke up on Friday morning must spare a thought for the pensioner in Redcar o

Modern imperialism and the working class

"Our beauty comes from our strength, our strength from resistance" That's one of the slogans used by protesting workers -- most of them women -- who work for the global cosmetics giant Avon in Turkey.  Last month, several were sacked as part of a union-busting drive by the employer. The workers are demanding that Avon hire back the fired workers, register all the workers as permanent employees, and recognize the union. In addition, the union is campaigning for an agreement with the company to provide reasonable wages, hours, benefits and working conditions, and a woman-friendly and harassment-free workplace.   Learn more and show your support for these workers

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Alan Hart (BBC Panorama programme and ITN's News correspondent, researcher and producer of "Five Minutes to Midnight" film) is the author of a recent book: " Zionism - The Real Enemy of the Jews ". Here you will listen to Hart's ideas expressed in the book. The show includes an interview with the author. Labour news from Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and Iran. Related: Dilemma of Palestinian Settlement Builders (the BBC) " PA intends to bypass failing peace talks and establish its own state within two years ." ( The Times , UK)

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) The class nature of the Iranian Revolution. According to Edward Mortimer of the Spectator the Iranian Revolution was "a genuine popular revolution in the fullest sense of the word: the most genuine, probably since 1917." But was it an Islamic revolution? Interviews with Torab Saleth from the journal Critique and member of Hands off the People of Iran (hopi) and Chris Moore from The Socialist Party (Britain). Listen to Torab Saleth Listen to Chris Moore