Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Poll: UK Class Divide is 'Alive and Well'

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Life's Longing for Itself: The Art of Adnan Yahya,  An essay by Will Cloughley, MFA (Jan 2016)

Another amusing headline from foreignpolicy.com (27 June 2016) " Years after promising democratic reforms, Bahrain’s government is going after its critics with a new vigor. Yet Britain and the United States are doing nothing about it,"

Article Why the British Establishment Wants Jeremy Corbyn Buried Video

"Its perhaps understandable why xenophobic rhetoric appealed to some Brexit supporters.  Resolution’s Bell  found that even though pro-Brexit voters weren't from places that had  ​recently  gotten poorer since the mass immigration wave, they were from places that had  ​historically  been poor — going back to the 1980s. These people have good reasons to be angry about the status quo. They’re looking for someone to blame, and immigrants are an easy scapegoat." "Irrational Xenophobia, not Real Economic Grievances" Here is what is missing in the analysis above: Support for UKIP "is even higher among the self-employed and business owners than the working class, and that is quite high even in the professional and managerial classes, who because are their substantial numbers actually provide the biggest bloc of UKIP’s class-based support . For all of these reasons the Conservatives, not Labour, have most to fear from UKIP ... Working class voters are a li

Spain: Further Stalmate

  One should always keep the bigger picture in mind and not get dragged into the swamp of the mainstream discourse, repeated ad nauseum. Yes, there is the social factor resulting from the economic crisis and the failure of decades of economic policies, but geo-politics too has played a major role. Terrorism, individual or state terrorism, financial terrorism, austerity, racism, wars, social dislocation and marginalization, imperialist reality (mainly Western 'invasions/bombings'), and imperialist nostalgia (e.g. Hilary Benn), the Brexit vote, etc... are all manifestations of a general global crisis of a system, a consensus defended by the liberals, the conservatives and the mainstream left, prolongued by the general passivity and indifference of the people, who accept the existing power structure and power relations and, occasionally, express themselves within those same frameworks of power through the voting process, believing in "democracy". So they vote for thi

" I am going to be a discordant voice and what I am going to say is not meant to provoke or be contemptuous to nobody. I don't pretend to hold the absolute truth. I just would like to advance a different perspective as most of what I have seen or read on this platform in the last few days seem to be very Eurocentric (or at least influenced by a Eurocentric imaginary) and somehow reformist.   Most people were saying that both options (Remain and Brexit) are bad but we need to go  for the least worst for different reasons (including tactics). For me, both options are not only shit but a horror and I cannot be asked to adopt a lesser-evil mentality to choose between the two because I strongly believe that this attitude won't advance the struggle of emancipation of humanity. In the contrary, it always legitimises bourgeois elections (fought on reactionary terms for the interests of the ruling class, not the downtrodden and the oppressed) and ends up breathing new life to th

" Britain – or what is left of it – will now take a sharp turn to the right," Correction: Britain has been right wing for decades. It has been the most aggressive neo-liberal regime in Western Europe both at home and abroad. Both the Conservatives and the Blairites presided of that aggression. Now, it is just going to take a sharper turn to the right. "If you've got money, you vote in. If you haven't got money, you vote out"

"Brexit in the long run may not make a huge difference to the health of British capitalism, but right now it could help accelerate a new global recession.  And that would have a much bigger impact on the lives of those who voted for Brexit than the perceived problems of ‘overcrowding’ from immigration or regulation from Brussels." The Impact of Brexit

Brexit Here is another way to look at it:  17,410,742  have shown that they are radicalised and therefore refuse to integrate. Europe without the Union (01 March 2016)

This adds to Britain's socio-economic crisis , a crisis caused by the form of capitalism adopted by both the Tories and New Labour: corruption, deregulation, outsourcing, banking plunder, speculation, parasitism, austerity, scapegoating the vulnerable, racism, murdochian propaganda, dismantling of the welfare system, tax havens ... The referendum was a diversion by the ruling class from the crimes they have committed. The referendum was within the framework of a specific power structure, and the criminals, in disarray, hoped to maintain the status quo .

"[It] was the Civil War that brought this system crashing down 150 years ago. 200,000 freed slaves joined with hundreds of thousands of small farmers, workers, immigrants, and others in the Union Army and militarily crushed the slave owners. While slavery was defeated, racism was not. 150 years after the Civil War, there are more black men ensnared in the U.S. criminal justice system than there were slaves in 1850, as Michelle Alexander, the author of  The New Jim Crow , has pointed out. Today, it’s Wall Street and their capitalist system that perpetuates the racist legacy of slavery." 1865: A Revolutionary Turning Point in U.S. History

Despite all that, " you have to remain partial". What a crap!

Britain There is no Left Exit

Britain Union activist sacked in fight for union rights and recognition at British food company Samworth Brothers

"Our beauty comes from our strength, our strength from resistance" That's one of the slogans used by protesting workers -- most of them women -- who work for the global cosmetics giant Avon in Turkey.  Last month, several were sacked as part of a union-busting drive by the employer. The workers are demanding that Avon hire back the fired workers, register all the workers as permanent employees, and recognize the union. In addition, the union is campaigning for an agreement with the company to provide reasonable wages, hours, benefits and working conditions, and a woman-friendly and harassment-free workplace.   Learn more and show your support for these workers

Nation: “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours”. Patriotism, as conservatism, devotes something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. (sorry Orwell) What George Orwell had told me about the Western regimes and societies, especially the imperialist ones, before I lived in one of them. " Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception." People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." " The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

In my reading list:  Guns, Germs and Steel  (Jared Diamond, 2010) The book sounds as a confirmation of the following premises. "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out