Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain This would be my title: A bit-of-social-democracy vs neoliberal capitalism?

Classical Egyptian cinema Cairo Station by Youssef Shahine

Dubai's Labor Camps from 1950 to 2008

"Onur Ulas Ince combines an analysis of political economy and political theory to examine the impact of colonial economic relations on the development of liberal thought in Britain. He shows how a liberal self-image for the British Empire was constructed in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain's self-image was due in large part to the liberal intellectuals of empire, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Ince forcefully demonstrates that liberalism as a language of politics was elaborated in and through the political economic debates around the contested meanings of private property, market exchange, and free labor." Forthcoming Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism

The Disappeared of Syria

Some good news at last The U.K. Faces Longest Fall in Living Standards on Record

Corpus Separatum?

"Virtually all existing countries have to face difficult questions over how to relate to past instances of violence, injustice and oppression – often publicly sanctioned." I still think that moving statues to museums is a much better way. How to diffuse controversial   monuments So, a statue of Mussolini is considered controversial?

The latest from the book of hypocrisy The so-called international community, world leaders and others talk about "peace" and condemn Trump. Orwellian. Imperialist criminal states that supported a settler-colonial states for decades with different means, in collaboration with so-called Arab leaders who have been complicit and sanctioned one betrayal after another from Camp David to Oslo, disagree with Trump!

"The vulgar economists of capitalism have tried to deny this contradiction of capitalist production ever since it was hinted at by the likes of Sismondi, and logically suggested by the law of value based on labour, first proposed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The apologists dropped classical theory and turned to a marginal utility theory of value to replace the dangerous labour theory.  They turned to equilibrium as the main tendency of modern economies and they ignored the effect of time and change.  Only the market and exchange became matters of economic analysis, not the production and exploitation of labour." Grossman on capitalism's contradictions

Obama says Libya was 'worst mistake' of his presidency Fuck you and your 'international community'

University of Cambridge: Modern Day Slavery Mastermind. Public issue Draft A 311-page report!

Iran Four months without wages! Sugar workers go on strike

This is excellent. Lessons of Zimbabwe

A letter by James Baldwin to Angela Davis (1970)

Syria UK money 'diverted to extremists',says the BBC Well, it must be an exception not a pattern :)

A student of Arabic thought that the word "madrasa" in the Arab countries was like the Afghan "madrasa". No. The Washington Post  reported  in 2002: The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings …. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books …. The Council on Foreign Relations  notes : The 9/11 Commission  report (PDF)  released in 2004 said some of Pakistan’s religious schools or madrassas served as “incubators for violent extremism.” Since then, there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to militancy. Promoting violence — in the form of jihad against the Soviet invaders and their local proxies — was the goal of the U.S.-funded education effort in

After nearly a year of the Trump presidency, do you regret your criticisms of Barack Obama?  "Oh, no. I told the truth. When I said drone strikes are crimes against humanity, when I said Obama bailed out Wall Street rather than Main Street — I shall forever support that. I was just speaking to the reality that people are hurting, and we have to do the same thing under Trump as we did under Obama. They tried to make me the darling of the liberal establishment. I refused it. "  — Cornel West, in an interview with The New York Times

Despite "having adopted a philosophical worldview predicated on the sanctity of individual autonomy and a constraint on sovereign power, Egyptian liberalism has from its inception been a project inextricably reliant on a dictatorial state apparatus to do its bidding." It seems that the author hopes that one day the Liberals in Egypt overcome their contradictions and become a progressive national bourgeoisie. I think not. Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism

Terrorists of feather flock together. How Britain did Gaddafi's dirty work Ian Cobain is the author of

Survivor: Life After Cluster Bomb

"Scholars schooled in the Western canon, but who are ideologically and methodologically anti-imperialist, often struggle with Conrad’s beautiful writing yet horribly racist views. Conrad was honest about the colonial brutalities he witnessed, but his admiration for empire is hardly hidden. Several European writers suffer such ambivalence. George Orwell’s Burmese Days, or his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” are examples: the reality of imperialism is dirty, possibly immoral, but the work must be done and empire must be defended. E. M Forster’s Passage to India and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim can also be mined for such ambiguities and complexities. But isn’t it time to stop feeling ambivalent about empire? Why are we again and again attracted to this ambivalence when the proof of empire’s destructive and dehumanizing power is all around us?" Empire and ambivalence

Germany "The AfD is not classically fascist – and does not need to be. Hitler needed his stormtroopers to take on and defeat the most organised labour movement, and biggest communist party, in Europe – and he did so amid double-digit unemployment. But to construct the essential alliance between the “elite and the mob” –  as Hannah Arendt described it  – the AfD just needs to go on normalising hate-speech, recruiting well-heeled people from business and the military, and disrupting the status quo."

Politics at the tip of the clitoris

The Russian Revolution 100 years on Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1) The full analysis   (91 pages) My reading for this week-end 

England The fat cats have got their claws into our universities The worst place to grow up poor

Legal prostitution in Tunisia البغاء القانوني في تونس

It looks an interesting book. The Violent American Century

Seventy Years of The New York Times Describing Saudi Royals as Reformers

Fawzy al-Qawuqji

Alliance of Middle East Socialists - a founding statement I have no problem with the statement, but the overwhelming majority of the foundrs are not in the Middle East!

Libya: Nermin Al-Sharif

The Arab poet who worshipped wine and fornication with women and boys.

I am reading Debt, the IMF and the World Bank by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet. It is an indictment of the IMF as an international criminal organisation of enslavement. "Following the exigencies of the governments of the richest companies, the IMF, permitted countries in crisis to borrow in order to avoid default on their repayments. Caught in the debt's downward spiral, developing countries soon had no other recourse than to take on new debt in order to repay the old debt. Before providing them with new loans, at higher interest rates, future leaders asked the IMF, to intervene with the guarantee of ulterior reimbursement, asking for a signed agreement with the said countries. The IMF  thus agreed to restart the flow of the 'finance pump' on condition that the concerned countries first use this money to reimburse banks and other private lenders, while restructuring their economy at the IMF's discretion: these were the famous conditionalities, detailed in th

Malala: The West's Unsaved Others and Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

In Iraq, as in the Philippines, as in U.S. occupied Haiti in 1914, we hear echoes of the words of Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop. The English had come to expropriate native land and resources, but somehow convinced themselves that their presence was benign. “So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts…have put themselves under our protection," said the Pilgrim-in-Chief. Throughout the Middle East and in spreading regions of the globe, the U.S. invites the natives to a “feast” of “democracy” – at the point of a gun. Frustrated at native unwillingness to dine on the corpses of their own national sovereignty, the Americans threaten to punish those who demonstrate such “unthankfulness.” In these times, we should remember the unthankful Pequot women and children roasting in the flames of their village, and the Wampanoag man, murdered by the Pilgrim saint Miles Standish, whose spiked head was displayed for years in Pl

I have just discovered some powerful and intriguing ideas by Andrea Micocci. Micocci has  just passed away, unfortunately.

Against the Grain and The beginning of elites, tax, and slavery

Two of yesterday's bbc headlines: Black Friday bonanza and a shooting in Oxford Circus, London (Britain) 230 people shot dead in a mosque (in Sinai, Egypt) The one on the shooting in Oxford Circus is the main headline with a large photo. Next to it a small phone of the shooting in Sinai.  The BBC after all is a national corporation of a nation state. Local news, however minor they are, are more important. What happens in other countries, especially in places where the victims are not Westerners is of a less importance. Another legacy of what the nation state has made of us. The same conclusion persists: Some lives are more precious than others. Black Friday bonanza is also significantly important because it reflects "our way of  life".

Part 3 follows an international solidarity caravan to the third stop of the trip:  Oum Laarayes,  another   polluted and marginalised town  in Tunisia's phosphate mining basin.  Several issues were discussed in this episode – from the neocolonial nature of mining to the urgency of the requests sought by social movements including jobs, better infrastructure and access to water:  Paradises of the Earth - Part 3

Trump and Boko Haram

Security for Whom? Unpacking the Gendered Impact of EU Securitized Migration

The Contradictions of Joseph Conrad

'Revolution against Das Kapital ' and 'the Lonely Hour Economy'

"But  la transición,  as it is known, was left unfinished. Spain’s democracy, in contrast to much of postwar Europe, was not erected upon an anti-fascist consensus. Instead, its foundation required a pact of silence. In exchange for returning to democracy, Francoist elites kept positions of social and economic privilege; the dictatorship’s crimes went unpunished as a blanket of  amnesty and amnesia  extended over the civil war and the systematic repression that followed it. After the 1982 Socialist (PSOE) landslide victory, Fraga and his followers consolidated as the leading opposition party. As a result, the PP became a peculiar conservative party. Unlike their French, German or even British counterparts, Spanish conservatives have never had to worry about electoral competition on their right flank. The party contains everything from center-right liberals and Christian democrats to far-right nostalgics for Franco’s dictatorship. In 2007 parliament passed a law for  historic

Marxism, the Arab spring, and Islamic fundamentalism

Malala: The West's Unsaved Others

Rethinking International Relations