Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Fanon as Example and Figure: A Conversation Between Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Tunisia Relatives, torture victims give first public testimony to Tunisia truth commission If I manage to give my own testimony, I will also expose the French, British and American complicity "The real test facing Tunisia's transitional justice process, however, is whether it will ultimately lead to criminal prosecutions for the crimes of the past decades, which have thus far gone without adequate investigation or punishment," Amnesty said. تونس: شهادات ضحايا انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان على مدى   خمسة عقود تُبَث علانية

Neo-liberalism's far-right across Europe in figures

Britain Part-time Lecturers on Precarious Work

The Liberal Defense of Murder

"This process of appropriation includes many others: framing the Law of Value as something morally and politically valuable; mapping natural resources, translating Cheap Nature into a portable, readable format; codifying the limits of nature and society in laws and bills, so as the first remains cheap, and creating new institutional arrangements, which  allow the market and the state to produce this logic through space and time . Appropriating Cheap Nature is not only a process of violent material dispossession. It is also a way to see the world which naturalises – and makes desirable – this process, upon which capitalist accumulation depends." Capitalism as Ecology: Mexican Resistance at the Frontier

Law says, “Go to the Mullā and learn the rules and regulations!”  Love says, “A single word is enough: shut and put away all other  books!” . . . Law says, “Have some shame and decency: put out this light!” Love says, “What is this veil for? Let the visions be open!” Law says, “Come into the mosque and perform the obligatory prayer!”  Love says, “Go to the wine-tavern, and having drunk, peform the  superogatory prayer!” . . . Law says, “O, Believer! go for Ḥajj—for you will have to cross the Ṣirāt  Bridge!” Love says, “ The door of the Beloved is the Kaʿbah, don’t move from  there!” Law says, “We strung Shāh Manṣūr up on the cross!” Love says, “ Ten, you did well; for you sacrificed him at the Beloved’s  door!”  — ( probably not actually authored by) the most widely sung Su poet of the Panjāb, Bullhē Shāh of Ḳaṣūr (1680–1758). Quoted in Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam?

Islam is thus not the simple structure so often portrayed.  Those who find the present fact of Islam adequately explained by the Koran and the life of Muhammad are simply beyond help. — Carl Heinrich Becker 

Occasionally, I get across a rarity, a non-conformist among the complacents, the career-seekers: " The point that you made about people blaming the ‘ignorant uneducated American’ is also very evident amongst my Facebook friends who are predominantly university-educated people. I feel that most of these people live in their university educated-upper class bubbles, completely oblivious to how neoliberal policies are affecting people that live in the ‘real world’." — Pieter Dockx, an LSE student. Will Trump call Sanders? 

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

دموع الليبيراليين في وداع الإمبراطور "The tears of the Liberals at the emperor's departure"

Did Medieval Muslims Invent Secularism?

Liberal crap Putting the blame on those who did not vote.  Clinton is not a friend of women; she is part and parcel of a criminal state. A state that implemented reactionary policies on wages, working conditions, commodification of women, imperialist policies towards women in the Middle East and elsewhere through killing by drones and IMF adjustment prgrammes, corporate lunder and exploitation, support of theocracies that oppress women... She is not a friend of women. Nor is Mother Theresa a friend of the poor. Those who have been staunch defenders of the status quo wanted a continuation of the very same neoliberal injustice at home and abroad. The 50% or so who did not vote are fed up with the dictatorship of the two-party system. Conversely, those who wanted the status quo, the affluent and the rich support and backed Clinton to the hilt. Paraphrasing Brecht, the liberals wish they could dissolve the people and elect another. Richard Seymour: " This is part of a genre ...

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...

Génétiquement, les Maghrébins ne sont pas des Arabes

"[T]he Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant, or increasingly a legal immigrant, who has been added to the ranks of the category of 'criminal’ while being housed and ‘protected’ by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of ‘Political Correctness’. Migration is therefore a central issue here. And neoliberalism contributes to the revival of far-right politics through the global, structural changes that it has carried through over the last 40 years. In particular, it is the connection between domestic socio-economic change, as reflected in the rescaling of welfare assistance, and the compulsions toward labour market flexibility, with the accompanying sense of individualized social insecurity for workers (Theodore, 2007: 252–53).  Neoliberalism, then, has rested upon the opening up of labour  markets within the mature capitalist economies to competitive pressures on the social wage through both offshoring production sources in low...

Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East It is a good essay, but I wonder why one in concluding a 30-page essay does not insert three lines on the role of Russia and its support of the Assad regime.

After Brexit, here we have another product of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism). So far the effect has been in the two most aggressive countries where neloliberalism have been implemented.  " Trump has won because a (just) sufficient number of people are fed up with the status quo.  Apparently 60% of voters asked at the polling booths reckon that the country “is on the wrong track” and two-thirds were fed up and angry with the Washington government – something Clinton personifies. Like the vote of the Brits for Brexit, against all expectations, a sufficient number of voters in America (mainly white, older and in small businesses or working in failing industries in smaller central US states) have overcome the vote of the youth, the more educated and better-off in the big cities.  But remember hardly more than 50% or so of eligible voters turned out to vote.  A huge swathe of people never vote in American elections and they constitute a sizeable part of the wor...

Winter , chapter 2 from Banquet of Seaweed by Haydar Haydar