Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain’s university system now “serves a renewed patrimonial capitalism and its ever-widening inequalities.”  —  John Holmwood’s 2014 valedictory message as British Sociological Association president.      The Rise of the Corporate University in the UK

" Donald Trump can’t undermine American democracy because it barely even exists." That is a headline on foreignpolicy.com I think I should update my radicalism in calling the US a capitalist, imperialist democracy. Probably a better qualification would be "the US is a capitalist, imperialist plutocracy".

The Alt. University Reading List

Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes

When we condemn and oppose the Western barbarism of the war and invasion of Iraq and the "liberal defense of murder" we are anti-American and supporters of Saddam Hussein. When we condemn and oppose Russian and Assad's barbarism we are dupes of US propaganda. When we condemn Israeli barbarism we are anti-semitic. When we condemn torrorist attacks in France and the US saying that is a product of state terrorism we are called apologists for terrorism. I guess we must be anti-semitic, anti-Russian, anti-American, CIA agent, Trotskyite socialist, Anarchists.

Stability for whom and for what? Syria and the World: Reactionarism is Back and Progressing

" Lorna Finlayson’s book has the deceptively simple aim of showing that there is no distinction in kind to be drawn between the methodology of political philosophy and the philosophy itself.   And, she suggests, since the methodology is in turn really just a way of trying to sustain the distinction between political philosophy and politics, the collapse of this distinction also supports the claim that the political philosophy/politics distinction is itself untenable. Political philosophy—or, it turns out, mainstream analytic political philosophy—has a mistaken understanding of itself as standing outside or above the messy power-ridden realm of actual politics, Finlayson argues; this misunderstanding is ideologically motivated, and the methodology of political philosophy serves to exemplify and buttress it. Showing that the distinction between the methodology of political philosophy and political philosophy is ideological, in the pejorative sense familiar from critical theory sinc

A Dr.  preaching neo-orientalism, imperialism and patronizing other countries , brandishing an empty term ("democracy) of the West, i.e. the capitalist, imperialist democracy of the Western powers that we have seen in practice not only in wars and occupations, but in IMF adjustment programmes, in global capitalism's uneven development, in plunder by corporations, in NGOs working with repressive regimes and perpetuuating power structure, in Western powers working with local regimes in aborting, diverting or co-opting uprisings or confining it to the parliamentary capitalist democracy, oppression within the undemocratic European Union itself, level of corruption on an unprecedented scale, driving down wages, undermining unions (even banning people from joining a union), gambling with pensions, corporatization of education, undermining academic freedom, a development of an oligarchy and a mediaocracy, depolitization, passivity and narcissism, a plague called identity politics in

A reminder How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11 (The Washington Post) Related How the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq

"It should never be forgotten that joining a “school,” or associating oneself with a certain theoretical perspective, means associating oneself to an intellectual field, where there is an important struggle for access to the dominant positions. Ultimately, calling oneself a Marxist in the France of the 1960s — when the academic field was in part dominated by self-identified Marxists — did not have the same meaning as it does to be a Marxist today. Concepts and canonical authors are obviously intellectual instruments, but they also correspond to various strategies for becoming part of the field and the struggles over it. Intellectual developments are then partly determined by relations of power within the field itself. Also, it seems to me that relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since the end of the 1970s: after the decline of Marxism, Foucault occupied a central place. In reality, he offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degr