Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

1% own 45% of the world’s personal wealth while nearly 3bn people have little or no wealth at all Related The Great Lockdown hits the Third World

The Slippery Domain of Integration

“What relevance does it have for you or me that a long-dead French thinker believed neoliberalism offered a possible escape hatch from the particular problems of normative power? “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

How Germany’s remembrance culture ignores [is complicit in] war crimes German publisher tells Palestinian staff to quit The hypocrisy of Jürgen Habermas

“[Frantz]  Fanon urged us to invent and make new discoveries and not blindly imitate Europe. The struggle of decolonisation, Fanon tells us, must challenge the dominance of European culture and its claims of universalism without being trapped in a romanticized and fixed past. It is these two alienations that colonised people must overcome in their cultural struggle. Decolonising the mind also means deconstructing Western notions of ‘development’, ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, ‘universalism’ and ‘modernity’. Such concepts represent what is called a  coloniality of power and knowledge , which means that ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ were conceived in Europe and North America and then implanted in our continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America) in a context of coloniality (Mignolo, 2012). These Eurocentric ideas and culture have reinforced the colonial heritage of land confiscations, resource plunder, as well as domination of ‘other’ peoples in order to ‘civilise’ them.” Gene...

Race, Labour and Citizenship

Individual or institutional subscription is required to access the article. “The Tutsi notables, who had come to believe in the superiority the Belgians attributed to them, became tools of the colonial administration, responsible for assigning forced labour and punishments. Only Tutsi children had access to education. The colonisers and missionaries unpicked the fabric of the Rwandan nation, even issuing identity cards that recorded the bearer’s ‘ethnicity’. A revolt by smallholder farmers, directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi notables and officials. This ‘social revolution’ was supported by the colonial regime’s top-ranking official. Independence, declared in 1962, was presented as a victory for ordinary people. The Tutsis’ huts were burned, and 300,000 fled into exile. Until 1990 the Belgians supported the Hutus, in the belief that the ethnic majority was also the political majority.  When war broke out on the Ugandan border in October 1990, ...

The ‘astronomical level of abstention’ is good news! Let’s hope it continues. Marine Le Pen described the record-low voter turnout - a projected 66% abstention - as a "civic disaster". She blamed the results on the government's inability to inspire faith in political institutions. "Let's face it, the results were marked by a torrential and also historic abstention of nearly 70% due to the mistrust of an electoral system, which leaves voters with the feeling that nothing can change, that everything has been confiscated," she said .

The US Never Interferes in Other Countries’ Elections? Related Joe, here is a book on the CIA website Killing Hope - US Military & CIA Interventions Since WWII

Very good and insightful. Euphoria of the Rentier?

A homage to the inspirational women of Raqqa

 تخبط الإصلاحي الذي يحكي انتفاخا صولة الثوري

Two strands of anti-authoritarianism and the legacy of the Gezi uprising

Stigmatised but not silenced

A reading of Vasily Grossman’s two novels

 This is a great article. And it happens that I am in the middle of Charles Tilly’s book  Coercion, Capital and European States - 990-1992. Has China rescued the West?

R.I.P. America, America

Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finance has been kept out of new domestic infrastructure projects, the US is still driving privatization and deregulation in the global south and intensifying its new Cold War on China. Will it propel a new phase of economic expansion? I doubt it, due to the sheer scale of global overaccumulation and the fade-out of the industrialization bonanza. 1979 in Reverse

Riz Ahmed on ‘toxic portrayal’ of Muslims on screen

Is he really trying to redistribute wealth to workers? ‘Redistribute’, not ‘distribute’ implies that wealth was once distributed to workers. No, what happened between 1945 until the ascent of the neoliberal form of capitalism was a social contract based on compromise between the state, capital and trade unions.  Are the profits too high? I don’t think so. One of the reasons we are in an “era of anaemic economic growth” is that the low rate of profit/of return to capital is not high enough to incentivise the capitalists to invest. Thus some governments are intervening and pouring money into the economy and corporations as well as giving financial support to families and individuals, especially because of the pandemic. As Cédric Duran put it: “  Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finan...