Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The presidency of Jimmy Carter covering the years 1977 to 1980, seemed  an attempt by one part of the Establishment, that represented in the Democratic  party, to recapture a disillusioned citizenry. But Carter, despite a few gestures  toward black people and the poor, despite talk of ‘human rights’ abroad,  remained within the historic political boundaries of the American system,  protecting corporate wealth and power, maintaining a huge military machine  that drained the national wealth, allying the United States with right-wing  tyrannies abroad. Carter seemed to be the choice of that international group of powerful  influence-wielders—the Trilateral Commission. Two founding members of the  commission, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review—David  Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski—thought Carter was the right person for  the presidential election of 1976 given that ‘the W atergate-plagued Republican  Party was a sur...

  The politics of bread and micropolitical resistance (2) The political economy of bread in Syria This section analyzes the political economy of bread in Syria since the Baath party rise to power in 1963. It provides a brief historical account of the political, economic, and environmental cost of providing low-priced bread to pacify the population. Agriculture was the main economic activity in Syria until the mid-1970s. By 2010, it still represented 15 percent of the GDP and 800,000 worked in this sector of the economy, representing 17 percent of the labor force.44 Prior to the uprising, the livelihood of 80 percent of the rural population, representing 8 million Syrians, depended on agriculture.45  When the Baath party took power in 1963, seven years before Hafez al-Assad’s coup d’état, one of its priorities was to alter the food economy in Syria. Wheat and cotton became the two most important crops for the government. Cotton was a cash crop that brought much-needed hard curr...

“Islamism can have many faces: it can be liberation theology, bourgeois democracy, dictatorship, or apocalyptic nihilism. It should not be assumed that democracy in the Middle East will resemble liberal Western democracy, which – following the full backing many Western states have given to Israel’s genocide in Gaza – has lost what little credibility it still had.” Understandably, a transitional destroyed Syria, people’s concerns will be daily bread and butter issues.  “Seriously, whether Syria is Muslim or secular, I just want a country with electricity, food, reasonable prices, no corruption, unity, safety; a country I can actually be proud of and call home.” Yet Leila Shami limits her argument to political arrangements and the political will of the different actors of the Syrian society; she does not conditions the unity and stability in Syria and the success of secularism or Islamism or their failure to the Syrian political economy: will the new regime and its backers provide ...

This is an excellent taster of the book  

It is happening at an alarming rate

Peter is emphatic that a focus on class politics means organising the working class in all its diversity. He contrasts the position taken by the PTB with that of Sahra Wagenknecht, who split off from Die Linke in Germany to form the anti-migration BSW Party. ‘I’m not happy with their tendency, this kind of socialism and chauvinism combined, because they are locking themselves up inside of Germany…  And I think that the basic thing of the Left is to empower people, to make them proud, to make them feel part of something again, part of a bigger history, a bigger collectivity, a class, a movement that they can be proud of.’ It sounds a new and promising leftist experience. Note though that there is not a single internationalist mention/discussion. Is class only national? 

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin,  2024 Released less than two months after Hamas’s attack and the beginning of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. ‘Assassasin’ in the title? Although he was involved in a plot, in the movie Bonhoeffer did not kill anybody.  The movie is available on onionplay.asia

Resist, my people, resist them. In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows to God. I carried the soul in my palm for an Arab Palestine. I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution’, never lower my flags until I evict them from my homeland and make them kneel for a time to come. Resist, my people, resist them. Resist the settler’s robbery and follow the caravan of martyrs. Shred the disgraceful constitution that has imposed relentless humiliation and stopped us from restoring our rights. They burned blameless children; As for Hadeel, they sniped her in public, killed her in broad daylight. Resist, my people, resist them. Resist the colonialist’s onslaught. Pay no mind to his agents among us who shackle us with illusions of peace. Do not fear the Merkava [Israeli army tanks]; the truth in your heart is stronger, as long as you resist in a land that has lived through raids and victory. Ali called from his grave: resist, my rebellious people, write me as prose on the ag...

[ An English woman once asked me: “why are we here?” I answered: “I am more interested in how we got here and where we are going to.” In the context of Syria and the MENA region as a whole, by historicizing everything, as Walter Benjamin advised, we understand how Syria got to where it is today. In the following Munif rightly makes the role of class relations in the Syrian society fundamental, especially class conflict and alliances after independence. The conclusion is:  a weak bourgeoisie that is unable to carry out economic development a nationalist regime that is unable to pursue an alternative path to capitalism due to the failure of economic development resorts to repression to maintain its rule a regime that pacifies significant layers of the population and contains active discontent through subsidised commodities, namely bread, and ideological means but it cannot sustain itself when a crisis hits. “The state and capitalist assemblages became ineffective when the 2011 revolt...