Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"[It] was the Civil War that brought this system crashing down 150 years ago. 200,000 freed slaves joined with hundreds of thousands of small farmers, workers, immigrants, and others in the Union Army and militarily crushed the slave owners. While slavery was defeated, racism was not. 150 years after the Civil War, there are more black men ensnared in the U.S. criminal justice system than there were slaves in 1850, as Michelle Alexander, the author of  The New Jim Crow , has pointed out. Today, it’s Wall Street and their capitalist system that perpetuates the racist legacy of slavery." 1865: A Revolutionary Turning Point in U.S. History

Despite all that, " you have to remain partial". What a crap!

Britain There is no Left Exit

Britain Union activist sacked in fight for union rights and recognition at British food company Samworth Brothers

"Our beauty comes from our strength, our strength from resistance" That's one of the slogans used by protesting workers -- most of them women -- who work for the global cosmetics giant Avon in Turkey.  Last month, several were sacked as part of a union-busting drive by the employer. The workers are demanding that Avon hire back the fired workers, register all the workers as permanent employees, and recognize the union. In addition, the union is campaigning for an agreement with the company to provide reasonable wages, hours, benefits and working conditions, and a woman-friendly and harassment-free workplace.   Learn more and show your support for these workers

Nation: “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours”. Patriotism, as conservatism, devotes something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. (sorry Orwell) What George Orwell had told me about the Western regimes and societies, especially the imperialist ones, before I lived in one of them. " Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception." People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." " The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

In my reading list:  Guns, Germs and Steel  (Jared Diamond, 2010) The book sounds as a confirmation of the following premises. "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out

Brexit: A Fake Revolt "Leaving the EU won’t guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, or a fall in NHS waiting times and class sizes. The only thing it guarantees is more rightwing Tory control." Yes, Paul. It's a fake revolt and I would add that it is reactionary. Remain is not progressive, either. It is a ruling class crisis as the referendum itself is a product of an economic and social crisis. 

Spain "If the Socialists allow the PP to govern it is likely that big business will be relieved. But they will have set their party on a course towards decomposition. Their social base would never understand it.” According to Mr Garzón, a government led by Unidos Podemos would not push for radical or instant change to Spain’s social and economic model. “We know that capitalism won’t end overnight,” he says. Instead, the group would aim to create 300,000 jobs through a public works programme, financed by raising taxes on capital income and closing tax breaks and deductions for businesses. “Pretty classical social democratic measures,” argues Mr Garzón. Garzon's version of Marxism aside, clearly this is part of a social democratic programme, admits Garzón, opposing austerity and saving the EU's capitalism. A programme which include working with the same people who have implemented neo-liberalism, PSOE. Full article on FT.com Background analyses The Spa

On BBC Radio 4

Football Apart from being the opium of the our era , it is a crminal industry. Here is just one feature of this criminality, which people support and encourage it. Find out how long it takes Ronaldo, for example, to earn your annual wage. Or, how long it would take you  to earn Cristiano Ronaldo's annual wage? 

"People are violent, and people can dress their violence up in any number of justifying causes that seek to relieve people of their personal responsibility because the cause or religion, be it Communism or Catholicism or Islam , is simply bigger than themselves." ( Foreignpolicy.com ) I read that and smiled. The liberals too hide their heads in the sand and turn a blind eye on the violence of capitalism and imperialism since the inception of the system: the slave trade, slave labour, conquests and colonization, two world wars, and to this day the violence of the global system is both direct and symbolic and we can see its effects also on nature and on our Earth. Actually, a serious observer traces the emergence of Daesh not only to the Iraq occupation, but also to the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime, climate change and the drought in Syria.

" The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about trade union rights in the Middle East in which I participated, together with three people who've been featured in LabourStart campaigns: Nermin Al-Sharif, head of the Libyan Dockers’ and Seafarers’ Union, victim of an assassination attempt. Kamal Abbas, founder of the Cairo-based Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services, arrested numerous times by the authorities for his work. Mahdi Abu Dheeb, president of the Bahrain Teachers Association, just released after five years in prison."