Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Universal Basic Income doesn't work

This is the kind of analysis we need: a well-established journalist at the Financial Times argues that there is a risk of "accidental" war in the Middle East. History, and the history of the region in particular, following Gardner's logic, tells us that wars happen by "accident", not by a cumulative process within a historical juncture and with a backgroound at home and abroad of the social-political forces at play. What might be called an "accident" could be a trigger, but not the mechanism. Necessity is the main/fundamental factor, i.e. the cumulative process(es) of drives and contradictions  make war a necessity. I am curious to find how many historians and analysts have found that 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars, the Iraq-Iran war (1982-1988), 1991 and 2003 wars/invasions happened "accidentally". That's apart from the simplistic but convenient mainstream description of the "sectarian" nature of the conflicts. Risks rise o

Egyptian drama production (a report in Arabic) How the military dictatorship is destroying the margin of variety and freedom that existed for decades.  One company, with links to the state, now has a monopoly on the production of drama and owns/controls most of the network channels. There has been a significant drop in production, actors and actresses have withrawn from the art's scene, and 1 million people working in the industry have been/will be affected in one way or another . هل بات الإنتاج الدرامي في مصر تحت سيطرة الدولة؟ Erotic scenes and wearing revealing dresses used to be common in  Egyptian movies. New rules/codes after 2013 coup have been put in place. Example:  Rania Youssef threatened with prison sentence for wearing a revealing dress

" South Africa has a general election tomorrow, 25 years since the end of apartheid and six years since the death of Nelson Mandela. In those 25 years, the aspirations and hopes of most black South Africans (90% of the 58m South Africans) and, for that matter, many white South Africans, have been disappointed. In those 25 years, the majority have not seen any startling improvement in their living standards, education, health and public services." The dashing of a dream

Good, but I expected more on the geo-political economy. Trump's America, Netanyahu's Israel

"Capitalism has a moral basis, to be free, you have to be capitalist”.  God bless M. T.

Social structuring in pre-capitalism "may look as an anomaly to a contemporary eye. But it is an anomaly only because we tend to take such notions as national space, nation, class and citizen as given, as the 'natural' way of social existence. Once one poses the question on the conditions and prerequisites that made these notions come to existence, i.e. once one poses the historicity of such notions, the pre-capitalist categories cease to be anomalies. The coming into age of an enlarged identity: the nation, has not done away with the need to exclude others, it only redefined otherness on grounds that look "natural to contemporary eyes, belonging to a common culture or speaking a common language, thus excluding 'others' from the right to compete for jobs and opportunities within the national space. The non-dominance of capitalism on social formations imposes severe restrictions that prevent carrying a final assault on many forms of pre-capitalist social org