Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Social progress in England Health and social care spending cuts since 2010 are linked to nearly 120,000 excess deaths in England, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected, finds new University College London research. Collateral damage?

"Such terms as “proletarian literature” and “proletarian culture” are dangerous, because they erroneously compress the Culture of the future into the narrow limits of the present day. They falsify perspectives, they violate proportions, they distort standards and they cultivate the arrogance of small circles which is most dangerous." — Leon Trotsky, Revolution and Literature , 1924

Silencing the Past by Al-Jazeera Network

In post 9-11 the U.S. spent $6 trillion, killing half a million people The price was worth it! I live in a town with a statue of Richard Cobden, an English capitalist and "liberal. In the mid-nineteenth century, Cobden exclaimed, "We have been the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman dominion. Since the Revolution of 1688 we have expended more than fiften hundered millions of money upon wars, not one of which has been upon our own shores, or in defense of our hearths and homes ... this pugnacious propensity has been invariably recognized by those who have studied our national charcter."  Quoted in Daniel Pick, War Machine , 1993, p. 21

"Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are  one and the same . Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done." "The earth is in a death spiral" See also how Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

The Brexiteers assert that the myth has been enacted (‘We killed the dragon!’). The Remainers deny the myth (‘You lied, there was no dragon!’). This makes it an argument about myth, and here the Brexiteers are on stronger ground. Every myth has two facets, the story that is told to make events or states of being comprehensible to people, and the underlying events or states that provide the material for the myth; a stylised, simplified dramatisation of change, and the change that demands dramatisation. Reckless, hypocritical, deluded, mendacious and chauvinist as they are, the Brexiteers found a real set of circumstances, and misapplied a popular, off-the-shelf folk myth to it. By simply rejecting the Brexiteer myth, without offering another, better one, the Remainers appear to deny the underlying changes. ‘Look,’ the Leave voter says to the Remainer. ‘Look at the abandoned coal mines, the demolished factories, the empty fishing harbours. Look at the old people lying sick on trolleys i

Social progress! Homeless teens in England

Language oppression in France

 "The British bourgeoisie do not spare any money as far as this institution is concerned, and that is as it should be." — Lenin,  impressed by the British state's commitment to the British Museum library. London's role in the Russian revolution

By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people. In the course of European expansion, the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations were effectively eliminated, Indian and Islamic civilizations along with Africa were subjugated, and China was penetrated and subordinated to Western influence. Only Russian, Japanese, and Ethiopian civilizations, all three governed by highly centralized imperial authorities, were able to resist the onslaught of the West and maintain meaning­ful independent existence. For four hundred years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization. The causes of this unique and dramatic development included the social structure and class relations of the West, the rise of cities and commerce, the relative dispersion of power in Western societies between estates and monarchs and secular and religious authorities, the emerging sense of national cons