NM's blog

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. — Eugene V. Debs

Refreshing  

Separating sociology from political economy. Surprised to see Hanieh not mentioning 'class' even once. Oil militarism and the global order

“Colombia illustrates not only the impossibility of socialism – ecological or otherwise – in one country, but also the futility of attempts at energy transition in one country. The uniqueness of the Colombian experiment is its greatest weakness: all other major energy producers in Latin America – Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Mexico – are throwing themselves into the global frenzy for fossil fuels and accelerating production as fast as possible, even if governed by parties and presidents nominally of the left. As long as this remains the case, as long as Colombia is an isolated anomaly, there will be no progress, and Colombia itself is likely to slide back into business-as-usual.” Colombia, politics of life, and Palestinian resistance Related   Between the politics of life and the geopolitics of death

The modern age began in earnest when ideas ceased to matter. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest of all modern philosophers, made a rigorous distinction between what he called pure and practical reason. Pure reason investigated the world, while practical reason was a matter of moral and political action, but there was no longer any internal relation between the two. Some previous thinkers had assumed that there was a way of theorising about the world which impelled you to choose a way of acting upon it. To say "This is torture!" seemed to imply "Stop it". Now, however, theory was one thing and practice another. No doubt we shouldn't torture, but there was nothing we could glean from analysing the act of torture which told us that it was a bad thing. We were going to have to get our moral and political values from somewhere else. By no means every modern philosopher signed up to this crippling division. Kant's argument was challenged by his mighty contemporar...

The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions

Ilan Pappé

“Under the banner of " patriotic tech ", this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call  the Authoritarian Stack.  It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules…. “The revolving door no longer spins between government and industry—it locks them together into a new architecture of power .  “Unlike old authoritarianism built on fear and force, this new system rules through code, capital, and infrastructure — making resistance feel architecturally impossible.” Once again 'capitalism' is delinked from 'democracy'. In listing the capitalist companies and individuals, the author use the word democracy seperate from capitalism, implying that we have had 'democracy' (nit capitalist democracy), but now it is under threat. 

“Because working-class politics has so much potential to displace Democratic centrism and Republican authoritarianism, a successful Mamdani administration poses a serious threat to establishment leaders in both parties, to say nothing of hysterical billionaires who see even modest tax hikes as the advent of communism. We should expect elites, starting with President Trump, to do everything possible to stop Zohran from implementing his agenda.” There are cracks and there is space that opens up from time to time, but how much Mamdani keeps his promises and delivers, resists pressure and do not concede, and how much class struggle plays out will decide whether such a victory becomes victories. And one should not ignore that only  one million voted for Mamdani and New York and the US today are nit those of 1910. Yet like in UK, now there are more chances of creating a new party and abandon the criminal and imperialist Democratic Party.

Kanafani was assassinated two years later Then as now the control of the narrative has always been crucial.

Nigel Farage: An Afghan male has 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country.” Ian Boakes I have a degree in Statistics and I'm well aware of how data can be represented in misleading ways. However, I just don't  believe that young men who enter the UK, uninvited and unauthorised (e.g. across the Channel with no documentation), are less likely to commit crime. The opposite is more likely to be true, whatever the stats might suggest as they just aren't a representative sample of the populations they come from because they went by illegal and perilous routes to get here. That said and done, obviously, lots of them pose no threat but why willingly import the risk when we have enough of our own bad eggs to deal with? Andrew Grainger Ian Boakes well, it just goes to show a degree doesn't always guarantee good judgement. You have literally no data, you make  an assumption and "believe" this is more likely to be the oppos...

This not in defence of Maduro or the Nobel Prise winner

  An article subject to subscription . Read here then continue with some excerpts below. ******** Palantir is the data backbone of the authoritarian state, and Anduril is its autonomous warfare command system, turning information dominance into automated military power. Its Lattice platform connects satellite feeds, radar data and battlefield imagery into a single operational network, allowing military missions to be planned and executed at lightning speed. The company claims its systems can function at ‘level 5 autonomy’: launching, identifying targets, striking and returning without human intervention. [Starshield, SpaceX’s of Elon Musk]  When NATO’s battlefield communications depend on infrastructure controlled by one man who openly endorses European far-right parties, defence autonomy becomes theatrical fiction. Other solutions such as GovCloud, from Amazon Web Services, or Azure Government, provided by Microsoft – in partnership with OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic – are now e...

Many a ruling class has sought to erase from historical memory the blood and squalor in which it was born. As Blaise Pascal admonishes with arresting candour in his  Pensées , ‘The truth about the [original] usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do not want it soon to end.’   Kant, too, was wary of speculation on the origins of political power, which he thought a menace to the state.   It is not just that these are bloody and arbitrary; it is also the sheer scandal of an origin as such, for what was born can also die. It is certain, Hume writes in his  Treatise of Human Nature , that at the origin of every nation we will find rebellion and usurpation; it is time alone which ‘reconciles men to an authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable’.   Political legitimacy, in short, is founded on fading mem...

In the words of Suwaileh, “Sonallah Ibrahim’s refusal to accept state prizes became as much a part of his public identity as his novels. He remained, to the end, ‘spotless as the white of a shroud’ — a metaphor as much for moral integrity as for finality .” Related The Egyptian novel in the sixties Ogres and orientalism

Malcom X's warning to Americans

 It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that  prevents us from living freely and nobly . —Bertrand Russell

“The US labor movement has never been neutral: its union officialdom has a more-than-century-long history of allying with Zionism .”

Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training. —John Steinbeck, East of Eden