NM's blog

Nature is man’s  inorganic  body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man  lives  on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. — Karl Marx, 1844

“The focus on ethnic or religious identity has surely undermined any prospect of a class-based politics developing . Civil society — once vibrant in the early days of the uprising — has been stifled by state violence, while political parties and trade unions have been dissolved in the name of national transition.” “ While the HTS leadership maintains strict control over many Sunni militias in Idlib, it must now negotiate with non-Sunni communities, such as the Druze and Kurds…” Here the writer is inaccurate. The Kurds are not a non-Sunni community; most if the Kurds are Sunni. According to some estimates,  Kurdish forces lost an estimated 11,000 fighters in the battle against ISIS (a Sunni too), with over 22,000 wounded. 

Recent reports of an Israeli campaign to win the social media war by granting millions of dollars to TikTok and social media influencers is only a fraction of a massive, coordinated campaign. Many pro-Palestine activists are now highlighting the direct complicity of the Western media, especially in the UK, in attempting to whitewash rape accusations against Israeli soldiers. Instead of using the unequivocal word “rape,” mainstream outlets refer to the horrific Sde Teiman prison episodes merely as “abuse.”

“[A] direct connection to the Munich massacre was no longer needed. Anybody found to be an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian armed struggle or actively involved in the preparation of terrorist events was a potential target of Mossad’s killing team.” Aviva Guttmann,  Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign,  Cambridge University Press, 2023 “ The book,” writes Alain Gresh, “will disappoint readers who expect revelations. The exchanges mostly confirm that the frame of reference (the “war on terror”) used to analyze the Middle East is utterly useless, that on the contrary it has a blinding effect, making the western services incapable of understanding the nature of Black September, its relationship with Fatah and quite simply the meaning of the Palestinian struggle.  For them “the war on terror” was a “technical” campaign with no political content. The author herself is not immune to this simplistic r...

Lucas was widely acclaimed because he furthered mainstream theory that markets could work without crises or distortions as long as individuals has sufficient information to make ‘rational decisions’ on their own interests.  So the reality of crises and inequalities was due not to capitalist markets but to ‘irrational’ decisions by authorities or unions interfering with markets. Lucas had succeeded in his critique in reducing Keynesian macro economics to a weak and feeble beast.   No wonder he got a Nobel prize at the height of the neoclassical, neoliberal ascendancy in 1995.

Total referrals reach record high , with 21% being due to ‘extreme rightwing concerns’ and 10% to Islamist ideology.

Bertrand Russell warns that racial pride can quickly become harmful racial supremacy (1946): “Another passion which gives rise to false beliefs that are politically harmful is pride - pride of nationality, race, sex, class, or creed. When I was young France was still regarded as the traditional enemy of England, and I gathered as an unquestionable truth that one Englishman could defeat three Frenchmen. When Germany became the enemy this belief was modified and English people ceased to mention derisively the French propensity for eating frogs. But in spite of governmental efforts, I think few Englishmen succeeded in genuinely regarding the French as their equals.  Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, or Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective...

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