Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Hasan Al-Turabi "Turabi’s concepts of an Islamic state have aroused significant criticism, not because of  his concepts but rather, because of his practices as a political activist working with military dictators. When he described the nature of an Islamic State, he argued that such a state could take different forms, depending on the specific conditions of particular time and place. However, in accord with the principle of  tawhid , the state would not be secular – separating religion from public life. In whatever form the Islamic state took, it would emphasize justice and avoid oppression. The criticism of Turabi comes from the fact that, in practice, he supported oppressive military dictatorships that claimed to be implementing Shariʻa."

"Reconciliation no longer a taboo?" Sooner or later, and this did happen before, the two reactionary forces, will sit and work together to maintain the status quo, to absorb parts of the crisis.

"... Capitalism for the 150 or so years [sic] of it's existence was based on production of material goods from which surplus value derives that in turn was divided between industry profits, interest payments and rent...The  heyday of this economy in terms of its employment of labor forces in manufacturing (production centered) activities was between 1940 and 1980. Today production centered economies have been dissembled with manufacturing in the US employing at best 10 percent of the workforce...Japan and Germany around 20 percent...top Asian tigers like South Korea about the same...even China overall has never seen manufacturing employment rise above 25 percent of employment. And the rest of the world is experiencing what has been dubbed "premature deindustrialization".  The current economy, if you want to call it that, is based on money games, Himalayan sized debt, leverage, and extraction of "pounds of flesh" from the bones of humanity. It operates ...

Brazil on Edge "In spite of a founding platform that emphasizes ethics in politics, the party has engaged in the same appalling behavior as the country’s other capitalist parties. From phony contracts and mob connections in PT-ruled cities in the 1990s to bribes for votes at the federal level in the 2000s, the party has been transformed into a business-as-usual operation... However, " the treatment the PT has received is hypocritical and unfair, even by capitalist democracy’s shallow standards."

Class and Politics in Post Revolutionary  Iran:  A Brief Introduction

Israel squeezes lifeline of Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinians

" Europe’s silence in the face of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hostile takeover of two of his country’s independent newspapers over the last weeks is being chalked up to the need to avoid jeopardizing Ankara’s finger in the dike of even more massive waves of Middle Eastern migration into the continent. But Europe’s cavalier attitude toward this kind of rising authoritarianism on its eastern border is more than just strategic indifference — it’s symptomatic of a steady erosion of core civil liberties within the EU itself. Government encroachments on free speech are an attempt to tighten control and consolidate power in the face of political stress and rising dissent . Absent an underlying sense of threat or insecurity in the system, even the most revolutionary speech is only words, scarcely menacing and unworthy of a reaction that would attest to its significance. Restrictions on speech meet with least resistance when populations at large feel buffeted by the sam...

Amilcar Cabral, Imperialism and Neo-colonialism "The postcolony is an illusion, reinforced and spurred by native elements controlling political or state power. The postcolony is an illusion because this class is subjected to the whims and impulse of imperialists (Fanon 1961; Cabral 1979). This pseudo bourgeoisie, however, strongly nationalist, cannot fulfil a historical function; ‘it cannot freely guide the development of productive forces, and in short cannot be a national bourgeoisie’. (Cabral 1979:129)."

The birth of Baghdad was a landmark for world civilisation

George Tarabishi (Aleppo 1939 - Paris 2016) The Syrian thinker George Tarabishi passes away today.

We want their parking spaces too, say middle classes

Crisis in Brazil - centre left government could fall "Brazil was teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis on Thursday after a judge blocked President Dilma Rousseff’s appointment of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to her cabinet, prompting clashes in Congress and on the streets. Just as Mr Lula da Silva’s swearing-in ceremony drew to a close, a federal judge issued an injunction, suspending the ex-president’s appointment on the grounds that it prevented "t he free exercise of justice" in corruption investigations. Opposition politicians hailed the decision as a triumph for Brazilian democracy, while the government vowed to appeal, lambasting the order as part of a “coup” by the country’s elite, reminiscent of Brazil’s period of military rule. Brazilian assets rallied as investors bet on the government’s collapse. “Since the end of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy over recent years, this is our most dramatic political mo...

Optimism about a revolution aside ... Speakers' Corner, London

Surnames and Social Mobility: England 1230-2012 "The relative constancy of the intergenerational correlation of underlying social status across very different social environments in England from 1800 to 2012 suggests that it stems from the nature of inheritance of characteristics within families. Strong forces of familial culture, social connections, and genetics must connect the generations. There really are quasi-physical “Laws of Inheritance.” This interpretation is reinforced by the finding of Clark in work with other co-authors that all societies observed – including the USA, Sweden, India, China and Japan - have similar low rates of social mobility when surnames are used to identify elites and underclasses, despite an even wider range of social institutions (Clark et al. 2014)."

Workers and Thieves: Labour Movemets and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

The Egyptian Counterrevolution Despite the best efforts of Egypt’s elite, the struggle for democracy has not been extinguished. "It’s important when discussing counterrevolution to understand what exactly we are talking about. The role played by the Muslim Brotherhood towards the Egyptian Revolution was one of betrayal, was a classical betrayal by a reformist, non-revolutionary movement. It attempted to broker a deal with the old regime to get a place at the table and to share power with the old regime. Yet it failed to do so. The Muslim Brotherhood was not a central part of the counterrevolution. You could say that it was understandably the first beneficiary of the revolution, in the sense that it was the first freely elected political force that came to power — in formal terms, at least — in the wake of the revolution. But it was also  the first victim  of the counterrevolution. It’s important to understand this because some people blithely talk about “two wings” o...

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”  –Assata Shakur

On the Violence of Politics "'Violence has no place in politics.’ People might have legitimate grievances, but they can only be resolved by legitimate means. It is never acceptable to start attacking other people. I want to suggest something different: that in the end, it’s precisely  this  impulse, the horrified rejection of any violence within politics, the keening appeal to legitimacy in all things, which is ultimately capable of bringing about the most horrific forms of repression."

Greece: Syriza's Rise and Fall

Labor Protests Multiply in China as Economy Slows, Worrying Leaders China opens a new university every week