Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A revolt of the well-off — not a 'terror campaign'

From the archive Celebrity culture: The Clooneys and human rights

Adolph Reed: "[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascript ive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social po...

How Global Entertainment Killed Culture  From Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa Llosa is one of Latin America's best novelists, who moved from the left to become an advocate and enforcer of neoliberal policies in Peru.

"Identitarian politics" The incident of the decade: a Canadian jouralist saw "religious women with headgear" shopping for lingerie and did a report on it.

US higher education The Fruits of Commodification

This is an excellent dissection You are the product

La visite d’une délégation de l’UGTT au dictateur Assad trahit les aspirations populaires de tous et toutes de Tunis à Damas

I have read the Introduction and it sounds a very interesting book. The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey

DSA has become "the biggest socialist organisation in the US "

Foucault's  History of Sexuality : A Marxist Engagement

“I know of no form of economic organisation based on the division of labour ( he refers to the Smithian view of a capitalist economy) , from unfettered laisser-faire to oppressive central planning that has succeeded in achieving both maximum sustainable economic growth and permanent stability.  Central planning certainly failed and I strongly doubt that stability is achievable in capitalist economies, given the always turbulent competitive markets continuously being drawn toward but never quite achieving equilibrium” .  He went on,  “unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible.  Assuaging the aftermath is all we can hope for.”  — the head of the Federal Reserve Bank (US) Alan Greenspan My comment: you know in life there are only two options. Yes, that how the global bourgeois ideology has made most of us believe.  "Ce...

Understanding Ibn Taymiyyah as a Man of His Time

"Young men in Asia and Africa often joined the army under duress. The war was fought for freedom, but Indian political demands were brushed aside in the 1940s, with nationalists enduring heavy-handed policing and imprisonment. The British state bungled food supply in its empire. In Britain, wartime food shortages caused hardship and great inconvenience; in India, they caused mass starvation. At least three million Bengalis died in a catastrophic famine in 1943, a famine that is almost never discussed. The famine's causes were a byproduct of the war, but as Madhusree Mukerjee has proved in her book "Churchill's Secret War," the imperial state also failed to deliver relief. Many soldiers signed up as volunteers to fill their bellies." Dunkirk, the War and the Amnesia of the Empire (NYT) A new Chinese nationalist action film

The deal: Israel's endgame

An interesting perspective  Salafism and the Politics of Free Market Religion

Pre-2011 Syrian Regime Policy in Culture and the A rts

Reem exclaims to the audience, “We come from the Troy of this age . . . hundreds of thousands of victims . . . millions of refugees . . . everyone wants to bomb us but no one wants to accept us into their homes . . . only the sea opens his arms to us without any preconditions . . . When did it become normal to kill people?” Syria's 'Trojan Women'

The tragedy of Venezuela

Lack of democracy, Lack of solidarity,  Lack of a bold approach to the capitalist state  From today’s perspective, it can easily be argued that Syriza’s attempt at achieving real change not only failed miserably; it also inflicted a major blow to the Left’s credibility on an international scale and " Despite election promises to end military cooperation with Israel, Tsipras maintained and even expanded this cooperation. Tsipras has referred to Jerusalem as “Israel’s capital”, something not even the United States have dared to do and, needless to say, a slap in the face of millions of Greeks in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The architect of Syriza’s foreign policy, the “left nationalist” foreign minister Nikos Kotzias, is a true practitioner of Henry Kissinger’s  realpolitik , constructing strategic alliances with the Israel state, the Egyptian junta and any other regional player perceived to be against Turkey, no matter how vicious and ruthless..." " ...