Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

"Over the past few years a number of brilliant scholars have been hounded out of the academy because of their political convictions, their commitments to struggles for Palestinian rights and against white supremacy. At the same time, cowardly administrations repeat right-wing talking points about free speech. It’s indicative of this capitalist, upside-down world that tells us that corporations are people but people are disposable, that we live in a knowledge society but facts, learning, and education are simultaneously devalued and commodified, that success brings freedom when in fact it brings debt and entrapment in the service of the capital accumulation of the very rich." Which side are you on? The Comradely Professor

From identity politics to academic masturbation

Why the labour theory of value is true

"Thus, increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.   All of this is very unfortunate. Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading. What a waste." Academics writes rubbish nobody reads Or Prof, nobody is reading you

"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

" Servicing warfare and neoliberalism is a terrific path to scholarly eminence. Those who condemn warfare and neoliberalism become uncivil goblins, impenitent radicals, sloppy polemicists, immature agitators, scourges on the good name of the profession. Ruling-class sycophants, meanwhile, don’t encounter trouble for their service to power. It’s the same around the world: dissenters are the ones to get fired, arrested, even murdered. It’s almost comically obvious, and yet plenty of academics persist in recycling the mythological virtues of tone and civility as criteria for fitness as an academic, as if those descriptors are detached from norms of power — as if using a civil tone means you can’t articulate ugly ideas." Six ways to unsettle colleagues and irritate administrators Six ways of resistance, but the eradication of corportae universities should be the solution.

Will it really hurt? Stephen Hawking's boycott hits Israel where it hurts: science