Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The recent events in Algeria and Sudan are more or less similar to what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen.  How do we account for the dynamics of transition... that lie somewhere in between, where powerful revolutionary mobilisation forced dictators to abdicate [or removed] but fail[ed] to capture the governmental [state] power, thus leaving the interests and institutions of the old order largely unaltered? How should we read the logic of transition in such political upheavals that were both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary, reflecting both transition to democracy and revolutionary desires for economic distribution, social inclusion and cultural recognition? —Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring , 2017, p. 209 I do not believe, as so many disillusioned or broken by actual revolution have come to believe, that the suffering can be laid to the charge of the revolution alone, and that we must avoid revolution if we are to avoid suff...

The contours of the geography of the crisis I am proposing here are written down  by names and places: Lesvos, Calais, Ventimiglia, Lampedusa, Paris, Molenbeek ( Belgium), Nice, but also Brexit, Syria, Turkey and Libya. I believe there is an important  historical matter at work beneath this “imaginary geography”. This geography  interpellates us a “geography of war”: war against migrants and asylum seekers and to  their desire of mobility and welfare; but also, and usually forgotten, war against “post- migrants” or postcolonial Europeans, that is against European sons of decades of a  racist state management of European territories and populations. This specific geography is showing a Europe gripped into what can be called a “manichean securitarian delirium." Policing the Refugee Crisis: Neoliberalism between Biopolitics and Necropolitics (You might need only a free account to access this analysis)

The writer here has attempted to refute the Conservative's arguments. However, as I mentioned in my comment below the article I don't understand why he singles out the Conservatives and the Libertarians but does not include the liberals of "free market liberal democracy" and their defence of the system nationally and internationally with its implications from wars to exploitation and preserving the status quo albeit with what they call "reforms" . "Can democratic socialism set us free?"

Britain Typical of a liberal approach, there is no link between inequality and exploitation.  Where does inequality come from? Fear, Lies and Distraction

Gary Stephen Webb Kill the Messenger a movie by Michael Cuesta

UK An account of a worker's experience Joe Attard, 11 April 2019: Debenhams is biting the dust: the capitalist crisis claims another high street staple. My first paid job was at Debenhams, I was there for two years, and I'll be lying if I said I'll be sad to see the back of it.  They ran the restaurant on the cheap, mostly with casual labour, much of it made up of under-18s, and we were always understaffed. I remember double-dosing over-the-counter stress relievers to get through my shifts, where I and one other person had to cover a 200-se at dining area between us, for eight-hours, with a half-hour break.  We were always moving, always covered in crap, stinking, and totally exhausted. Both of us were 16, working a child's minimum wage (about 4.00-an-hour) but an adult's hours (half the lunch-break, earlier starts etc.) Once, my manager came up to me, beaming, and told me that I should be proud because "in light of my good work, I was getting...

An analysis with good insights, but like a typical revolutionary socialist approach it tends to be too optimistic. The Algerian movement against the regime tends to tilt towards reforms, reforms to be granted by the regime under pressure from the street. It reminds me of the Tunisians' demands after the flight of Ben Ali. Given the decades long of entrenched "civil society", NGOs, and the hegemony of international "liberal" order, with focus on entreprenurship, "human rights", etc. and the interests of the major imperialist states in preserving stability with focus on "development" within domination, the project of revolution against an authoritarian unjust system has been depicted as an out-of-date prospect. This has been exasperated by the wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen and the defeat in Egypt. Thus the fear of radicalism to carry out a meaningful real change. There is no intention to challenge the existing institutions and bui...

"In the Middle East of the new millennium ...few Arab activists had really strategized for a revolution, even though they might have dreamed about it. The postsocialist neoliberal ideas and practices had structured the conduct of and deradicalized much of the political class. At the same time that marketization caused social exclusion and dissent among the grassroots, it conditioned the activism of groups like yoith, women, and political opposition, including the Islamists. In pre-uprising Yemen, for instance, activism largely meant 'civil society work' in NGOs concerned with human rights, empowerment of women, charity, and development (up from five thousand in 2008 to more than thirteen thousand by 2013). The effect of which has been "depoliticizing activism and deradicalizing the idea of change." —Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries , 2017, p. 174 The NGO-zation of resistance By Arundhati Roy

Stephen Smith's Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928 (Oxford University 2017) An excellent critical review of the Russian Revolution. He [Smith] sees this revolution as having raised fundamental questions regarding the reconciliation of justice, equality, and freedom even though he thinks that Bolshevik answers were flawed. In today’s world, he writes, where everything conspires for people to accept things as they are, the Bolshevik Revolution upholds the idea that the world can be organized in a more just and rational fashion. For all their many faults, he goes on, “the Bolsheviks were fired by outrage at the exploitation that lay at the heart of capitalism and at the raging nationalism that led Europe into the carnage of the First World War.” Millions across the world, who could not anticipate the horrors of Stalinism, “embraced the 1917 Revolution as a chance to create a new world of justice, equality and freedom.” This entails, for example, an outright op...

"This is exactly how processes of disruption might affect you, if you live somewhere else that is. Not in the sense that you will necessarily be expropriated, displaced or worse. This might happen or not, depending on where (and who) you are. But you too might get trapped in your own singular hell of a future repeating invented pasts, with one part of the population hell-bent on getting rid of another. People will peer in from afar, conclude they can’t understand what’s going on, and keep watching cat videos." Free Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

A disaster has hit Jeff Bezos

Mexico's labour movement

France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks. Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out." — The BBC Even John Mearsheimer, a scholar of the now defunct but still predominant neorealist-International Relations theory, acknowledged this in 2002: "Despite claims that American policy is infused with moralism, Somalia is the only instance during the past hundred years in which US soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission’—and ‘in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers so traumatized American policymakers’ that ‘they refused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994’, although ‘stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and would have had virtually no effect on...

"Twilight of capitalism"? I don't agree with that. It sounds a good book though. Invisible Leviathan by Murray Smith Marx's law of value

From the archive "Islamist violence" An interview with Karen Armstrong Religion Fights Back Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Armstrong's book e-book)

Theoretical laziness

Rome, Italy Neo-fascist violent against Roma

London Viral video shows violence not in 'Sharia Law Zone'

New soil study confirms 1943 Bengal famine was caused by Winston Churchill’s policies, not drought

Britain needs new council houses–not musicals about them