Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The report presented by GFC,  Financing Investment: Interim report,  provides us with a meticulous investigation of the failure of British capitalism to invest productively to deliver better productivity, incomes and employment.  The report exposes the failure of the UK banks to direct lending into productive sectors instead into speculative financial and unproductive property assets.  Thus, UK productivity performance is extremely poor, R&D spending is low and innovation is limited." Labour's interim report pn the UK economy

Philosophy needs a new definition

Les crimes contre les femmes syriennes dans les prisons d'Assad

"The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview. Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia." Ta-Nehisi is the neoliberal face of black freedom struggle

Dispossession and Discipline in Palestine and West Asia 

The Silent Theology of Islamic Art

The economics of Luther or Münzter?

"What gets dismissed or ignored here are Marx’s arguments that the people who happen to be running the system at any particular moment are not really in control of the situation. What are really in control are the “laws of capitalist production.” Individual personifications of capital––and this includes atypical personifications such as individual state capitals and worker-run enterprises––must submit to these laws or relinquish their “control.” The most important law is the “law of value,” the determination of value by labor-time. It compels a business, whoever owns or “controls” it, to minimize costs in order to remain competitive, and therefore to lay off inefficient or unnecessary workers, speed up production, have unsafe working conditions, produce for profit instead of producing for need, and so on." On the Relevance of Marx's Capital for Today

I like this to-the-point piece. It hits the nail on the head of what is fundamental: capital, class and the state. " Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome." Think that governments can no longer control capitalism? You've been duped.

قصة قصيرة أنطون تشيخوف منذ أيام دعوتُ الى غرفة مكتبي مربّية أولادي (يوليا فاسيليفنا) لكي أدفع لها حسابها  قلت لها : إجلسي يا يوليا … هيّا نتحاسب … أنتِ في الغالب بحاجة إلى النقود ولكنك خجولة إلى درجة انك لن تطلبينها بنفسك .. حسناً .. لقد اتفقنا على أن أدفع لك (ثلاثين روبلاً) في الشهر  قالت : أربعين  
-  قلت : كلا .. ثلاثين .. هذا مسجل عندي … كنت دائما أدفع للمربيات (ثلاثين روبلاً) …  حسناً
  لقد عملت لدينا شهرين
  قالت : شهرين وخمسة أيام
  قلت : شهرين بالضبط .. هذا مسجل عندي .. إذن تستحقين (ستين روبلاً) ..
نخصم منها تسعة أيام آحاد .. فأنت لم تعلّمي (كوليا) في أيام الآحاد بل كنت تتنزهين معهم فقط .. ثم ثلاثة أيام أعياد .
 تضرج وجه (يوليا فاسيليفنا) وعبثت أصابعها بأهداب الفستان ولكن لم تنبس بكلمة.
 واصلتُ …
   نخصم ثلاثة أعياد إذن المجموع (إثنا عشر روبلاً) .. وكان (كوليا) مريضاً أربعة أيام ولم يكن يدرس .. كنت تدرّسين لـ (فاريا) فقط .. وثلاثة أيام كانت أسنانك تؤلمك فسمحتْ لك زوجتي بعدم التدريس بعد الغداء .. إذن إثنا عشر زائد سبعة .. تسعة عشر .. نخصم ، الباقي ..

Jeremy Corbyn's silence on Syria is hypocritical

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt "The Brotherhood was designed to cut across class barriers. Social solidarity was essential to preserve unity. Members are obliged by article 10 of the Brotherhood's General Order to provide such solidarity. Upper-class members are encouraged to purify their souls by helping out those with lesser means, whereas the latter learnt to live contently under the paternalistic care of their social betters. To balance the potentially divisive drives of the upper and lower echelons, middle-class members, an organizational majority, managed the whole ... This brilliant arrangement made evryone happy: spiritual salvation for the wealthy; immediate relief for the poor; and political power for the aspiring middle-class." — Hazem Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood, 2015, p. 76

In his classic The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband wrote: "In an epoch when so much is made of democracy, equality, social mobility, classlessness and the rest, it has remained a basic fact of life in advanced capitalist countries that the vast majority of men and women in these countries has been governed, represented, administered, judged, and commanded in war by people drawn from other, economically superior and relatively distant classes." These words were written in 1969, but, as we are ruled by a government dominated by daddy-bankrolled Etonians, they still seem somehow relevant. Ralph Miliband: six key ideas

" Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion." Indomitable Terry Eagleton assessing Eric Hobsbawm "Hobsbawm himself always argued that his historiography was inseparable from his Marxism and, indeed, only made possible by it. I argue below that he was essentially right in this judgment. For those of us on the anti-Stalinist left, Hobsbawm’s orthodox communism meant that his political judgements—his extraordinarily narrow conception of the working class, for example, or his belief that nationalism could be harnessed for progressive ends—had to be treated with deep suspicion; but much of his historical writing has to be afforded a great deal more resp

An example of the people who have supported Bashar Al-assad's state crimes 

"The battle between Syrian secular activists and feminists" I thought this needed a more in-depth analysis which should have included a summary of the modern sociology of Syria, and the form of capitalism that has shaped men-women relationships and the outlook of "the feminists movement" within its class background.

In less than 10 minutes

"Our way of life" in feeling pity for the homeless once a year . The concept of dignity does not exist. I would take it as a polite insult by the so-called fourth economy in the world, which cannot house its homeless.

Restating Orientalism A Critique of Modern Knowledge