Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  The Colombian state confirms that 145 social movement leaders were murdered in 2021 alone .

 An apartheid state

Fuelling political violence across the continent

Court overturns criminalising ‘imitation of opposite sex’

On BBC Radio 4

“ Since 2014 the Russian authorities have significantly increased their economy’s ability to withstand a severe shock, especially the banking and financial sectors. The country’s central bank has drastically reduced its US dollar holdings and 87% of Russians now hold a Mir card that uses a national payment system. If the US carries out its threat to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT international payments system, as it did to Iran in 2012 and 2018, financial transactions between Russian banks and businesses can now be made via a homegrown financial messaging system. So Russia feels better equipped to face severe sanctions if it comes to a conflict. On the other hand, the last mobilisation of the Russian army on the Ukrainian border, in spring 2021, prompted the revival of the Russian-US dialogue on strategic and cybersecurity issues. And this time, too, the Kremlin has clearly reckoned that upping the tension was the only way to get the West’s attention, and that the new US administrati...

I was surprised to see this on Aljazeera Arabic. I had read the story of Adam and Even in 1990/1991 in a book published in Syria.  مفاجأة بالنسبة لي أن أعثر على هذا على موقع الجزيرة Translation from Arabic:  “The story of Adam and Eve is a purely human invention. Its origins are Sumerian – one of the oldest civilizations known to man. It is a story like all distorted stories, but its peculiarity is that it is a story that changed the course of the entire world, established the principle of male superiority and legitimized the inequality between human beings and the injustice that women are subjected to today.” Aljazeera Arabic, 2016

“ The Western imperialist powers employ hypocritical language about Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of Russian arrogance — but have no intention of straitjacketing that sovereignty any less. Both the West and Putin view Ukraine only as a pawn in their international competition. As for Putin’s regime, there is nothing anti-imperialist about it: it only defends the interests of Russian capitalism, even if that means subjugating other peoples.”  Neither bluff nor ultimatum

It is not just about stigma towards suicide, it is about stigma towards veterans," he said. "Ukraine is killing her veterans. We have the ministry, where millions are spent on showing off on sports competitions, while in small villages and towns veterans are dying because they don't even have a basic social worker to come to them and ask them how they are." The hidden tall of the war

Karl Marx and Capitalism at the  Deutsches Historisches Museum

 The old is hard to kill and the new cannot be born. A wave of left-wing victories in the region doesn’t guarantee sweeping social progress

A dangerous fantasy

The making of a coronavirus-criminal presidency John Nichols on pandemic profiteers

Pass the bill to the workers

 While Shell announced a "momentous year" after making $20bn in profits…

Introduction by Joel Beinin Political economy addresses the mutual and historical constitution of states, markets, and classes… In this perspective, causes are simultaneously effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestation. The historical development of social formations dominated by capital is inextricably intertwined with genocides, slavery and other forms of unfree labor, racialization, patriarchy, national oppression, and empire. Capital accumulation by individuals, partnerships, and even contemporary corporations can occur through exploiting many different forms of labor as well as cheap nature. The ambit of political economy also includes the legal, political, and cul- tural forms of the regulation of regimes of capital accumulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; the so- cial structure of reproduction; the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; technopolitics;...

How French politics has ended up being a politics of culture. Excerpts from Daniel Zamora’s article on Catalyst The shift is due to the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity. Politicians, media commentators, and scholars from both left and right all seem to agree that the French political debate has been contaminated… What they’ve been labeling ‘Americanization’ is a certain kind of identity politics they believe is threatening French republicanism.  Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. To understand this state of affairs, we need to look at the recent history of identity in France, a history that begins not with woke concepts colonizing French universities but rather with the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and ...

  القومية، ملجأ المثليين المغاربة Le nationalisme, valeur refuge des homosexuels marocains

Painting the unrenewable