Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

'Though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida.' — Terry Eagleton

Labour was “ a class party and the class is not my class.  The class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.” — John Maynard Keynes ( Skidelsky p371 )

الطبقية في بريطانيا وطبقاً لما جاء في تقرير لمنظمة التعاون الاقتصادي والتنمية لعام 2010، تعتبر بريطانيا حقاً بين أسوأ الدول في معايير معينة للتغير الاجتماعي المتعلق بالانتقال من طبقة اجتماعية إلى طبقة أخرى، حيث وجد التقرير أن ثروة الوالدين تمنح الطفل فرصة لتعليم عالي المستوى ووظيفة براتب ممتاز. رغم ذلك، كان هناك معدل زيادة منتظم في عدد السكان بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية، توقع معه كل طفل أن يكون أفضل حالاً من والديه ولو بقدر يسير. ولسوء الحظ، فإن أعداد الأشخاص الذين انتقلوا بين الطبقات صعوداً أو هبوطاً يبدو أنها تتراجع. ويقول إرزيبيت باكودي، من جامعة أكسفورد: "أعداد أكبر من النساء والرجال ينتقلون من طبقات أعلى إلى طبقات أدنى وأعداد أقل من السابق تنتقل من الطبقات الأدنى إلى الأعلى". ويطلق باكودي على هذه الحالة اسم "الجانب المظلم من العصر الذهبي لحقبة الانتقال الطبقي". فكلما زاد عدد الناس الذين يتبوأون القمة كلما توقعنا سقوط المزيد من الناس إلى الهاوية.

The Caliphate Beyond ISIS: An Interview with Salman Sayyid   (Part Two)

التمييز كأداة للتسيير والإخضاع

Baghdad through Latif al-Ani's Lens

Coffee and qahwa: How a drink for Arab mystics went global Nestlé admits slave labour risk on Brazil coffee plantations

"The so-called Arab Spring has been most often described as a revolt of Westernized, secularized youth, the latest instance of the democratic wave which toppled authoritarian regimes in southern Europe in 1970s, southern cone in 1980s, Eastern Europe in 1990s. This explanation is very popular among Western and Westoxicated audiences. For them the pictures on CNN and BBC–showing young people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, wearing jeans, using social media, seemingly captivated by the appeal of Western prosperity and democracy–was very seductive. This representation confirms for Westerners and the Westoxicated that the West is the ultimate source of liberation. Such beliefs are based on the assumption that liberation can only be achieved by imitating the West. Alas, for the rest of us on this planet, things are far-less clear-cut. Outside Eastern Europe, most of the people of the world have not experienced the West as the vanguard of emancipation; rather they have been the sub...

Six Ways of Conceiving Marx and Foucault

معضلة اليسار الغربي وظاهرة بيرني ساندرز

How Boots Went Rogue

Neoliberalism — the ideology at the root of our problems See also Who Wants to Save Capitalism A Brief History of Neoliberalism (a free e-book)

The English are not so indifferent to those refugees stranded in Calais, those who drown in the sea, those who are sent back to Turkey or Syria. The English value art and history very much. Personally, I see this gesture as an English polite insult.

" Brazil has turned dramatically against the country’s first female president. Once one of the most popular leaders in the world, with approval ratings of 92%, Rousseff has since seen her support plunge as a result of economic recession, political turmoil and the  Lava Jato investigation into corruption at Petrobras , which has implicated almost all of the major parties. On a dark night, arguably the lowest point was when Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right deputy from Rio de Janeiro, dedicated his yes vote to Carlos Brilhante Ustra, the colonel who headed the Doi-Codi torture unit during the dictatorship era. Rousseff, a former guerrilla, was among those tortured. Bolsonaro’s move prompted left-wing deputy Jean Wyllys to spit towards him. Eduardo Bolsonaro, his son and also a deputy, used his time at the microphone to honour the general responsible for the military coup in 1964. Deputies were called one by one to the microphone by the instigator of the impeachment process, ...

Via Michael Roberts " New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included. A new report by Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program, examined the money earned by the biggest industries on this planet, and then contrasted them with 100 different types of environmental costs. To make this easier, they turned these 100 categories into 6: water use, land use, greenhouse gas emiss ions, waste pollution, land pollution, and water pollution. The report found that when you took the externalized costs into effect, essentially NONE of the industries was actually making a profit. The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of shareholders. Sometimes the environmental costs vastly outweighed ...

A Structuralism of Feeling? Alberto Toscano on Frédéric Lordon "In recognizing, with Spinoza, the irreducible role of the passions in human affairs, Lordon hopes to bid farewell to the allegedly utopian tendencies in Marx, insisting instead on the, at best,  regulative  character of communism. Lordon’s wager is that Spinoza’s theory of the passions can both elucidate our psychic investments in the capital-relation and delineate some parameters for the struggle against domination; yet the upshot is little more than schematic recipes for converting sad into joyful passions. Like many of his contemporaries, Lordon tends to over-estimate the psychic power of neoliberalism while under-estimating the force of misery evident in austerity; the relation of Marxian ‘need’ to Spinozian ‘passion’ remains untheorized. In contemporary conditions, Spinozist visions of radical democratic progress, understood as the ‘enrichment of life by joyous affects’, appear as considerably more utopi...

UK firm 'employed former child soldiers' as mercenaries in Iraq

Capitalism and Freedom

Protocols of Maschismo

"The most shocking thing about the Panama papers is not the likely criminality and drug laundering, but that it is legal.  It is legal in most countries to set up an ‘offshore’ account for a company or trust as long as the directors are not ‘resident’ in the country where taxes should be paid. The company may be subject to local taxes but these are minimal or non-existent..." A good post with facts and a solution Opening the Panama Canal