Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Austria In my last holiday I met an Austrian woman who was spending 6 weeks in Thailand. She had replaced all of her teeth there. She is chauvinistic, but she claims she is not racist. She thinks that "there are too many Muslims in Austria!" "Muslim men taking welfare money and doing nothing all day long!" "A big damage is taking place". The woman herself is not working and gets 500 per month for her 18-month-old daughter. She has been in Mexico, Peru, Argentina and other countries. She didn't know that Londoners elected a Muslim as a Mayor. (Ko Samui, June 2017) Meanwhile, our close friend Saudi Arabia has been the main criminal behind a one million case of cholera in Yemen (a figure by the ICRC). This is not a bad thing in reality. Less Yemenis will make it to Europe. Therefore, Europeans shouldn't worry too much about the rise of nationalism and neofascism!

"It is interesting to note that the majority of the businessmen were from a Sunni background, with the exception of the inner circle of crony capitalists. According to an analysis published in the Syrian magazine Al-Iqtisad Wa Al-Naql in 2011, from the list of the 100 most important businessmen in Syria, 23 percent of them were children of high officials, or their partners or acting as their “interfaces”; 48 percent were new businessmen, but for the majority they had close and corrupt relationships with the security services; 22 percent were part of the traditional bourgeoisie from before the nationalization policies of the sixties, some of whom also had corrupt relationships with the leaders of the state; and seven per cent had their main business activities outside of Syria. In terms of religious sects, the percentage was the following: 69 per cent were Sunni, 16 percent Alawi, 14 percent were Christians, 1 percent Shia, while there was no Druze, Ismaili or Kurdish presence. It...

Another review of  Against the Grain

Apparently, Ahed Tamimi has a history of terrorizing Israeli soldiers (see photo below) and making their lives and the lives of their families unbearable. She was seen in many occasions dragging soldiers at knifepoint, handcuffing them and even kidnapping some of them. She used to deprive the kidnapped soldiers of sleep and water.  Armed with knives, and sometimes with smart stones, she and her known Palestinian gangs occupied some plots of "the promised lands" of "the chosen people" with the intention of converting those plots of land into settlements, with no outcry from the "international comunity".  The Israelis feel so frightened that they cannot even travel outside Israel by sea, land or air. "I feel I am in prison," an Israeli woman told journalists. "The leaders of the free world" have expressed their concern, but said, "Well, this has been going on for decades, but we cannot stop it because the Palestinians are our ...

Writing history the way it should be written

Sorry, we cannot afford it ! After the Olympics, money spent on bombs, a few billions on the bankers, channelling more wealth to the top, austerity has not saved us much money to house you. Plus, we need to prepare for the second expensive sports event, the Commonwealth Games. Commonwealth my arse!

"While climate change is a disaster for humanity, stopping climate change is a disaster for capital." Burn

"The report presented by GFC,  Financing Investment: Interim report,  provides us with a meticulous investigation of the failure of British capitalism to invest productively to deliver better productivity, incomes and employment.  The report exposes the failure of the UK banks to direct lending into productive sectors instead into speculative financial and unproductive property assets.  Thus, UK productivity performance is extremely poor, R&D spending is low and innovation is limited." Labour's interim report pn the UK economy

Philosophy needs a new definition

Les crimes contre les femmes syriennes dans les prisons d'Assad

"The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview. Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia." Ta-Nehisi is the neoliberal face of black freedom struggle

Dispossession and Discipline in Palestine and West Asia 

The Silent Theology of Islamic Art

The economics of Luther or Münzter?

"What gets dismissed or ignored here are Marx’s arguments that the people who happen to be running the system at any particular moment are not really in control of the situation. What are really in control are the “laws of capitalist production.” Individual personifications of capital––and this includes atypical personifications such as individual state capitals and worker-run enterprises––must submit to these laws or relinquish their “control.” The most important law is the “law of value,” the determination of value by labor-time. It compels a business, whoever owns or “controls” it, to minimize costs in order to remain competitive, and therefore to lay off inefficient or unnecessary workers, speed up production, have unsafe working conditions, produce for profit instead of producing for need, and so on." On the Relevance of Marx's Capital for Today

I like this to-the-point piece. It hits the nail on the head of what is fundamental: capital, class and the state. " Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome." Think that governments can no longer control capitalism? You've been duped.

قصة قصيرة أنطون تشيخوف منذ أيام دعوتُ الى غرفة مكتبي مربّية أولادي (يوليا فاسيليفنا) لكي أدفع لها حسابها  قلت لها : إجلسي يا يوليا … هيّا نتحاسب … أنتِ في الغالب بحاجة إلى النقود ولكنك خجولة إلى درجة انك لن تطلبينها بنفسك .. حسناً .. لقد اتفقنا على أن أدفع لك (ثلاثين روبلاً) في الشهر  قالت : أربعين  
-  قلت : كلا .. ثلاثين .. هذا مسجل عندي … كنت دائما أدفع للمربيات (ثلاثين روبلاً) …  حسناً
  لقد عملت لدينا شهرين
  قالت : شهرين وخمسة أيام
  قلت : شهرين بالضبط .. هذا مسجل عندي .. إذن تستحقين (ستين روبلاً) ..
نخصم منها تسعة أيام آحاد .. فأنت لم تعلّمي (كوليا) في أيام الآحاد بل كنت تتنزهين معهم فقط .. ثم ثلاثة أيام أعياد .
 تضرج وجه (يوليا فاسيليفنا) وعبثت أصابعها بأهداب الفستان ولكن لم تنبس بكلمة.
 واصلتُ …
   نخصم ثلاثة أعياد إذن المجموع (إثنا عشر روبلاً) .. وكان (كوليا) مريضاً أربعة أيام ولم يكن يدرس .. كنت تدرّسين لـ (فاريا) فقط .. وثلاثة أيام كانت أسنانك تؤلمك فسمحتْ لك زوجتي بعدم التدريس بعد الغداء .. إذن إثنا عش...

Jeremy Corbyn's silence on Syria is hypocritical

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt "The Brotherhood was designed to cut across class barriers. Social solidarity was essential to preserve unity. Members are obliged by article 10 of the Brotherhood's General Order to provide such solidarity. Upper-class members are encouraged to purify their souls by helping out those with lesser means, whereas the latter learnt to live contently under the paternalistic care of their social betters. To balance the potentially divisive drives of the upper and lower echelons, middle-class members, an organizational majority, managed the whole ... This brilliant arrangement made evryone happy: spiritual salvation for the wealthy; immediate relief for the poor; and political power for the aspiring middle-class." — Hazem Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood, 2015, p. 76

In his classic The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband wrote: "In an epoch when so much is made of democracy, equality, social mobility, classlessness and the rest, it has remained a basic fact of life in advanced capitalist countries that the vast majority of men and women in these countries has been governed, represented, administered, judged, and commanded in war by people drawn from other, economically superior and relatively distant classes." These words were written in 1969, but, as we are ruled by a government dominated by daddy-bankrolled Etonians, they still seem somehow relevant. Ralph Miliband: six key ideas