Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Algeria An interview with Hamza Hamouchene

“There was this vagueness about the word that just seemed to be not just corruptible but almost inherently corrupt,” says the writer, film-maker and activist. “I was attracted to words like liberation, emancipation, equality, revolution, socialism. Any other word would get my pulse going more than democracy.” For her, democracy was a word imperial America used to sell free markets and push its agenda. Writer and film maker  Astra Taylor on US democracy, socialism and revolution

French police brutality

A liberal analysis on the "counter-revolution" in Sudan with emphasis on regional geo-politics "The counter-revolution will not be televised"

The banks in "liberal democracies" They are fined and they carry on with business as usual until they commit another crime. Then we fine them and they carry on with business as usual. What else could be done? It is not "human nature" and some "rogue agents"?  Obviously, founding a bank has not ever been better than robbing one as it is today. "Deutsche Bank was embroiled in a vast money-laundering operation, dubbed the  Global Laundromat . Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB, used the scheme between 2010 and 2014 to move money into the western financial system. The cash involved could total $80bn, detectives believe." Deutsche Banks and other banks in Russian money-laundering schemes

Yemen: Death from above

Indonesia Jokowi's challenges

The Last Note A movies by Pantelis Voulgaris (It will play after closing two or three pop up windows)

UK housing Crisis? Well, imagine  what would have happened  if we let those refugees and migrants who drowned in the sea in our tiny country. Unaffordable? Why cannot you work more and harder? Few new houses being built? Why should developers build affordable houses and banks give you a mortgage if there is no profit to make? Where is the incentive? How is our economy supposed to grow?  Jack lives in a cupboard and says that  some people "might find sleeping in such a small space would make them feel claustrophobic but Jack insists he doesn’t mind it." That's the great British patriotic attitude and spirit we need, espcially in times like these (Brexit, etc).  Inside the housing crisis

AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain

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