Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From the archive

A page from imperialist domination and continuity 
 Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review ( Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09 ), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain. I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East. "Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large." John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role ...

End of the Neoliberal Era? I have selected some key points in an article by David Kotz. [I]f accumulation and profit rates have not been stellar, in some respects neoliberalism was much better for capital than the previous economic regime, in directing a far greater flow of wealth to the capitalist class. By  2010, neoliberalism had returned in the guise of austerity policy. The misery and insecurity of the Great Recession helped to fuel unexpected political developments— a rise of right-wing nationalism and renewed support for some kind of ‘democratic socialism’.  The current structural crisis has taken the form of stubborn stagnation despite unprecedented monetary stimulus, with slow economic growth, a low rate of capital accumulation, stagnating real wages and worsening economic insecurity for working people— conditions that have helped to produce new political polarizations. The main features of post-war [WWII] capitalism in the advanced economies are well known...

Creating a role model A more powerful weapon against "Islamic fundamentalism"?  An Arab-American leading "a global emancipatory feminist movement"

Neoliberal capitalism in Turkey There is a comparison with trade union rights in the EU. Neoliberal capitalism has undermined trade union bargaining power significantly in the US and the EU. In countries like Turkey or Egypt the situation for the labour movement is worse. It has been a "war" by capital globally, and that's why the French Renault in Turkey can get away with it or Perfetti Van Melle in Bangladesh ignores the rights of workers to form a union. In the case of Turkey, especially after the failed coup, workers have sided with Erdogan. Note that Turkey being the country with the highest numbers of journalists incarcerated/persecuted in the world was well-known to "the free world" and "the international community" before the coup, but  Turkey, like Saudi Arabia, has its own role to play within the global and regional dynamic of capital accumulation and a balance of forces within US hegemony. Erdogan's war on workers

"Wood’s narrative pokes a finger in the eye of most pat thinking on the subject by trying not to center Putin in its analysis. Putin of course still dominates the book, though not in the same cartoon supervillain style that predominates in most political writing today. But Wood is at pains to stress that he is simply one part of a larger system of oligarchic authoritarianism inherited not from Communism but the Boris Yeltsin years, when the ex-Soviet Union was buried under a mass of radical neoliberal reforms that spread grinding misery throughout the country and left it a shriveled husk of what it had been before 1991." Russia beyond supervillain

I was shocked, devastated and appalled upon hearing that  Britain continued seeking arms deals with Saudi Arabia in weeks after Khashoggi was mudered I couldn't believe it. How could that happen? It must be a conspiracy by The Mirror and The Independent! 

One of the early books that fundamentally changed my thinking were by Syrian writers. One of them was the original Arabic version of  This review was written 4 years before the appearance of the English translation.

Indian women who cannot wait for white Western missionaries to show them the way to "equality"

This is a good analysis

"The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices." —Charles Péguy

انتظرها محمود درويش

I hate New Year's Eve and I hate New Year's Day

A book review A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (The book is currently half price on Verso website and even cheaper as an e-book)

“Many people in the West don’t understand that there is nothing “natural” or ahistorical in the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is nowadays the most visible political current among Muslim peoples. They ignore or forget that the picture was completely different in other historical periods of our contemporary history – that, for instance, a few decades ago the largest nongoverning communist party in the world, a party officially referring therefore to an atheistic doctrine, was in the country with the largest Muslim population: Indonesia – of course, until the party was crushed in a bloodbath at the hands of the US-backed Indonesian military starting in 1965. They ignore or forget, to give another example of the same kind, that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most massive political organization in Iraq, especially among the Shiites in Southern Iraq, was not led by some cleric but was here, too, the Communist Party” —Gilbert Achcar and Noam Chomsky, 2007 Yes. true. However, fo...

State and Religion in Islamic Societies

Fortress UK A headline on The Telegraph " Return boat migrants to France or face a humanitarian crisis, says ex-Home Office chief" We cannot afford having them, these 1 million plus (non-oligarchic) refugees, probably most of them Muslims): we are a poor country, running out of space, houses have already been taken by (unskilled) immigrants (many of them come here for our "generous benefits" system), we don't have money (we have just sold half of our second biggest airport), we are a loving people that cannot afford more hate !

When will Western academics who write about our region start citing our work, us, the academics and public intellectuals OF the region, the one they are writing about and claim to be experts in and are awarded academic jobs accordingly? When will this Western orgiastic discourse about us stop? When will they consider our own writings about our own families, our own states and governments, our own cultural practices worthy of their consideration? When will this incestuous cita tion fest where Westerners cite other Westerners about the Arabs come to an end? When will this “anti-enlightenment patronizing bullshit stop? When will they think of us as intellectuals worthy of their consideration and not just Westernized dupes and they, the Westerners, know what is good for us better than we do?  The crazy ass part about this is that those who write are constantly fretting about how our own “subjectivity” is not represented in this and that project and to establish the point they cite...

Capital Versus Peace in Mexico

What is the value of the economic reforms imposed on the Arab world?