Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl

Reconsidering the business of business

"In the context of young parenthood, societies in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet era, were different from Western Europe in two important ways. Firstly, early parenthood in Eastern Europe does not carry the same social stigma that it tends to have in Western countries, as it was much more common. Secondly, Soviet countries had pro-natalist policies and tended to put greater investment into state resources available to families. This meant that relative to Western Europe, socio-economic differences, usually described as levels of inequality, were smaller and in particular young parents suffered fewer relative disadvanatges." The mother of all problems?

I recommend this Contradiction of Capital and Care