Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

According to US liberals,   Trump's imperialism is ugly, whereas Biden's is 'kinder and gentler' with moral authority.

My introduction: To understand the crisis of the National Health Service, the bad handling of the pandemic*, stagnant economy, weak productivity, a state struggling to invest adequately in the green economy, inability to build enough and affordable houses, expensive rent, decades of poor investment in infrastructure by OECD measures, consumption, and consumerism, driven by debt, Labour/Conservatives capitalist values, one has to look at the economic model of the British economy. In reviewing Brett Christophers’s work, Cédric Durant has provided a good overview of such an economic model of accumulation and its ramifications as well as some criticism of Christophers’s take on capitalism in general and what might replace it. ——— *I doubt it that the recently publish report will ever mention the economic model pursued by Britain for more than four decades and how it played a major role in the infrastructure of health and the well-being of the Brits. ***** Few today will need convincing th...

“ Tariq, explain to me how the neck negotiates with the sword.”

Dozens of Indian workers freed from 'slavery' in Italy Related “Italy’s Sikh Slaves” Italy’s Migrant Boot Camp Raped, beaten, exploited Migrant workers in Spain

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the   shooting attempt   on former President Donald Trump To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

So long as we persist in our tendency to hive off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the fragmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment. — Mark Mazower, FT, 05 August 2016

“Given that each of the three forces has roughly two-thirds or more of the electorate who did not choose them, and each of them has thus been rejected by a majority of French voters, the message from the people is clear: we do not want to be governed by any of you. We do not want any of you in power, at least not solely.  The far right will thus not suffer, but on the contrary - it will benefit from the mess, political chaos and possible institutional deadlock that lies ahead, along with the potential policy failures of those who govern.” Yes, Alain Gabon. However, the article ignores French capitalism and imperialism and the French security state and provides a ‘nationalist’ domestic analysis, ignoring geopolitics and inter-societal determinants. 

Another nationalist analysis: the UK as an island. No imperialism, no gaza and Israel, no Ukraine, no nature, no climate change … After the rituals, comes reality

Being on the left means thinking of the world first, then of one’s country, then of ones’ relatives, then of oneself; being on the right means the opposite. Être de gauche c’est d’abord penser le monde, puis son pays, puis ses proches, puis soi ; être de droite c’est l’inverse. —Gilles Deleuze

From The Intercept mailing list of 07 July 2024: “Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since  October 7 , a figure that is likely a stark undercount of the true devastation.  In addition, a recent report from the aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing. And with famine breaking out across Gaza, international aid organizations warn that half a million people or more are at risk of starvation. But seven months into Israel’s war on Gaza, major news outlets in the West have begun prioritizing coverage of other issues, including the U.S. presidential election. Meanwhile, Israel continues to ban foreign journalists from entering Gaza – and 1 in 10 Palestinian reporters on the ground have been killed since the war started. In this moment of catastrophic loss of life and media censorship, The Intercept is doubling down, partnering with courageous reporters on the ground to expose the grisly truth about Israel’s...

“The issue with Iranian capitalism is not economic; it is political, ideological, and governmental .”  You cannot separate the economy from the other three or make secondsry: They are all in the same bundle and in interaction. 

A Jacobin’s article in Capital section. Yet Capital mostly looks nationalist and patriotic, not a web of social relations and geopolitical power. This kind of capital is not connected to the Israeli war on Gaza, Gulf capital in UK, the ‘new cold war’, the stagnation of the UK economy and low productivity … ‘The Big Money’ are treated as an isolated thing that bears no relation to capitalism and the environment as one whole.  Furthermore, capital in the article has no relation with why people vote and why [will] vote Labour – the article was published before the Labour win in the 2024 elections. Why do people vote and keep voting although they know about ‘ the big money ’. Is this big money really the fundamental factor or is it the years if not the decades of interconnected social and economic factors of the British capitalism that makes ‘a government loose and an opposition doesn’t win’, thus perpetrating the power of capital, capital accumulation, an imperialist regime of terror...

The implications of “an approach that captures the geopolitically interconnected and sociologically co-constitutive nature of its [capitalism’s] emergence.” “Uneven and combined development is capable of bringing together – not only theoretically, but concretely – historical processes understood from multiple vantage points into an interactive totality of social relations.” “A rethinking of what historically and theoretically constitutes capitalism.” “Capitalism is neither natural nor eternal: it has been historically constructed by annihilating or subsuming other – non-capitalist – ways of life.” “The conquest, ecological ruin, slavery, state terrorism, patriarchal subjugation, racism, mass exploitation and immiseration upon which capitalism was built continue unabated today.” “In the contemporary period, the divesting machinations of capitalism have continued and expanded into a global system of geopolitical violence and integrated production processes which afford it coercive and di...

Vulnerable to implosion

José Martí lived for much of his life as an exile in the United States.  Here is what he said about the US:  I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.

The Tunisian-British partnership TuNur hopes to build one of the world’s largest thermodynamic solar plants here, on collective lands once home to nomadic groups. TuNur plans to fulfil this ambition by building the world’s largest solar plant. Behind the name are a handful of well-known investors from the City of London who have taken a lively interest in the promise of green finance With persistently high oil prices and mounting supply challenges, Europe has pragmatically tried to speed its transition to lower-cost renewables ‒ by outsourcing. It covets the bountiful sunlight of its southernmost Mediterranean neighbours whose solar potential is among the highest in the world. The country, ensnared in a financial crisis, is struggling to achieve its climate objectives. Many foreign investors are hungry for its solar supply – mostly for export to the North. The electricity-generating mirrors may look green, but they reek of an extractivist Europe greedy for its neighbours’ resources – a...

Charles Glass’s visit to Julian Assange

One of the results of the counter-revolution 

Six signs of breakdown, according to Ilan Pappé

  As a comrade has said: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act "violently" in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution. — Leila Khaled quoted by Jodi Dean