NM's blog

“ In France, the mostly working-class descendants of postcolonial immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa   were the first victims of the economic crisis that began in the 1980s, and were subjected to segregation, whether in accessing housing or jobs or in their contacts with the authorities (racial profiling by the police). Given the growing importance of questions of identity in French public debate, it’s not surprising that some young people express their rejection of a society that has no room for them by stressing their personal identity — religion, country of origin and race (defined by the colour of their skin). The poorest are deprived, for socioeconomic reasons, of resources that would let them diversify their social connections and affiliations. We will never understand the world we live in if we forget that social class, defined in terms of economic and cultural capital, remains the determining factor to which other dimensions of identity are tied.” —Stéphane Beaud ...

 A guide to students

We need to remember a decade-long song sung by Western and non-Western media, academics and pundits: “Transitional justice”, “transitional justice”, “transitional justice”, ad nauseam.  As long the ‘revolution’ is not about material equality that threatens class interests at home and the major powers and international institutions interests and domination, is championed and “human rights” and “democracy” are the catch words that must prevail in the same way ‘Arab Spring’ phrase has prevailed. And we can talk about development everyday as long as it is the type of ‘development’ dictated by the same socio-economic system and the same ideology.   A return to the police state?

 Release women prisoners of conscience

 A chapter from A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East

“ Marine Le Pen, champion of the French far right, has come within reach for the first time of beating President Macron in next year’s election, according to a poll. The Harris survey, premised on a replay of the run-off in the 2017 election, has alarmed the president’s supporters and the political establishment because it suggests that   Ms Le Pen   is close to breaching the “glass ceiling” of French politics. The barrier was based on the longstanding assumption that an absolute majority of voters would never back a far-right candidate. If the May 2022 run-off were staged now, Ms Le Pen would have 48 per cent of the vote, with Mr Macron on 52 per cent, according to a poll carried out online on January 19...” Source: The Times UK

 

 كيف يخلق النظام من شعبه بركانا؟

Eight politicians from Germany's left-wing party – Die Linke – have signed a  solidarity statement  calling for the immediate release of all political detainees, which explicitly highlights the fate of six detained leftist activists, journalists and trade unionists.  The campaign by German left-wing politicians, in response to Sisi’s reprisals against the labour movement, has coincided with a wave of strikes and protests in Egypt’s steel industry. Germany’s Die Linke Campaign to release political prisoners in Egypt

“With  Charles VIII’s siege of Naples, not one scourge but two entered Italy. Before 1494, Syphilis probably did not exist in Europe; returnees from Columbus’ first voyage from America, who had contracted the disease in America, very likely introduced the disease to Spain. Spanish mercenaries at the siege of Naples (1494-5) suffered an epidemic that almost certainly syphilis , whence it spread throughout the continent. As the plague spread, the French called it ‘Neapolitan disease’, while Neapolitans preferred to call it ‘the French disease’.” —Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States – AD 990-1992 , 1992, p. 77 “A number of scholars have commented on how diseases ‘becomes adjectival’ since the late 1980s when Susan Sontag first highlighted how epidemics become a proxy for social disorder when metaphors are applied to them and ‘the horror of the disease is imposed on other things’. More recently, in a book that examined the legacies of plague in literature, theory ...

  Colour posters since 1930s

While reading the features of fascism in the article below, I am tempted to list some of the internal signs that modern “liberal democracies” exhibit, and how it breeds fascism/lays the fertile ground for fascistic tendencies, especially when the economy enters into a crisis:  - the increase in the number of voters supporting Donald Trump in the last American election.   - the European Court of Justice rule in favour of banning the slaughtering of animals according to the Muslim and Jewish way in two regions of Belgium. - conformism: everybody must follow the liberal form in how they dress, for example in France. - redefining ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘secularism’ in order to repress and marginalise minorities, and ultimately to disable resistance. Example: France. - stifling dissent and alternative views and encouraging conformism:  the Department for Education guidance said schools in England “should not use any resources from organisations that had expressed a desire to ...

Undoing Lenin

 Workers and Change

Persis Love, Lusophine Stories 

 Navalny’s return and left strategy

 ثورة يناير ليست مجرد ذكرى

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that  “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described  “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.” — J ohn Pilger

 The troubling case of Maâti Monjib highlights Morocco’s climate of repression

  A solidarity campaign