Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Tolerance"? To explore ... Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

Something I was surprised to discover. Political rights for foreigners

Here is an argument published by foreignpolicy.com exactly a year ago: One mistaken reason to avoid attacking North Korea is the fear of direct retaliation. The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly claimed that North Korea already has ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach as far as the United States. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration, or rather an anticipation of a future that could still be averted by prompt action. It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted. [G]iven South Korea’s deliberate inaction over many years, any damage ultimately done to Seoul...

England: the rule of capital and corporate university "Up to a quarter of students in England are doing degrees that will not give them sufficient earnings to justify the cost of their loans, a think tank says. The centre-right group urges ministers to cut places on those courses offering little financial return and increase those in post-18 technical education." The centre-right group is obviously a defender of capital running universities and determining what education should students pursue. Instead of scrapping fees or make higher education almost free like in most countries, the solution is to scrap places because they are not marketable. The purpose is to create a debt-enslaved, pliable workforce.

The British yellow vests are of a different stock

"Capitalism is killing us" Translated to Arabic as "The capitalist terrorism ... How modern life is killing us without blood"  الإرهاب الرأسمالي ... هكذا تقتلنا الحياة الحديثة دون دماء

من الأرشيف المجلس البلدي

England "Shandor, 48, became homeless after falling behind on his rent following an accident at work." 48 years old and doesn't own a home! What has he been doing in his life? Why didn't he get a university degree and a good job? Why hasn't worked hard, not taking two jobs, not riding a bike looking for a third one, or, at least, why hasn't he managed to take a mortgage and work for a bank for 20/30 years? What is the difference between him and those refugees who come to our country for our milk and honey and our "generous benefits system", and make it unsustainable, dragging productivity down? He should be banished to Libya or Russia and his boy taken into custody!  England needs three million new social homes, a report says What about the developers, speculators, and the house prices? Three millions homes means a fall in the house prices, and a house after all, is not built to live in, but a place to make profits from, attract oligarchies,...

"We can only wonder what Marx might have thought or said to Jones. Four years earlier in the  Manifesto , he and Engels had considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization. He was now collaborating with someone who held the opposite opinion, a situation that pulled him toward what his Hegelian training would have recognized as a position of immanent criticism — that is, criticism that submits to and appropriates the very premises of a competing standpoint in order to transcend it dialectically." The evolution of Marx's thinking on colonialism Further reading Marxism Orientalism Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar

The Swedish model? By 1980 Sweden had the lowest income and gender inequality in the world. As a result of the neoliberal capitalist reforms from mid-1980s, "The current Swedish income distribution bears some resemblance to the English one of 1688. The average member of the richest 0.1 per cent has a disposable income, after tax and transfers, 38 times greater than that of the median-income earner. At the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, England’s temporal lords had an income 30 times that of urban middleclass merchants and traders."  Angust Maddison, Contours of World Economy, 1-2030 AD,   Oxford 2007, pp. 278-9 Wealth distribution has worsened even more, resulting in the most uneven pattern to be found in Western Europe, on a par with those of Brazil, South Africa or the  USA.  In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 per cent owned 18 per cent of all household wealth; by 2017, it had risen to 42 per cent. The National Education Authority (Skolverket) has found that a qu...

A good background of the current state of affairs The EU: from social-democratic dream to neo-liberal nightmare

Bearing in mind the events if the last 18 years (from wars, globalisation, the "war on terror" and its consequences, "economic crisis and stagnation, Arab uprisings, migration and cruel borders, to the rise of the far-right nationalism ... one might find the following conclusion, written in 2000, still pertinent: "The liberal individualist analytical corset does not fit the world as it is. It fails to strap American power into its prognosis of a supra-state order. It fails to identify mechanisms that can pull the social dominance – both economic and political – of the Pacific Union states over other societies under cosmopolitan governance. It fails to spot how the spread of liberal democratic polities is combined with the undermining of the conditions for their organic consolidation. And  finally it does not recognise that intervention by powerful states in the name of liberal individual rights is inevitably and inescapably arbitrary given the haphazard political...

مراجعة كتاب "كيف زرعت فرنسا جذور الطائفية في سوريا؟"

خمسة أشرار أحمد مطر

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