Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Inequality after 150 years of Capital and An international conference in Toronto, Canada

“Dialogue” is one of those words, like “diversity”, that can mean all things to all people. It is often used to define shallow, skating-on-the-surface conversations which give the impression of an exchange but which touch upon nothing substantive. It can also mean proper, dig-deep contestations through which we test each other’s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested. In universities, and in society at large, there is today too little of the latter and too much of the former; too little real engagement and too great a desire to stay within our comfort zones. Are Soas students right to 'decolonize' their minds from Western philosophers?

Well, you can argue for whatever you think as long as you don't question the fundamental context in which, siyasa, fiqh, maslaha, 'democracy', state, etc operate or determined, i.e. as long as you don't question how the socio-economic structure relates to social justice and law, ownership and social relations and powers. Ms Landes, correctly referred to the "Islamic governments" of the pre-colonial era, but ignored the global entrenchment of the capitalist system in today's "Muslim societies". How can one question the euro centric concepts without questioning capitalist "democracy"?  It's the limit of the liberal thinking. "How to create an Islamic government — not an Islamic state"

From the Middle East achive A CIA document (1983)

Forbes or how to save capitalism and therefore humanity Unless it changes, capitalism will starve humanity by 2050

« La colonisation fait partie de l’histoire française . C’est un crime, c’est un crime contre l’humanité, c’est une vraie barbarie et ça fait partie de ce passé que nous devons regarder en face en présentant aussi nos excuses à l’égard de celles et ceux envers lesquels nous avons commis ces gestes.» La phrase, prononcée à la télévision algérienne,  est d’Emmanuel Macron . Des propos qui ont provoqué de vives réactions, notamment à droite et à l’extrême droite. Même la ministre écologiste Emmanuelle Cosse a réagi ce jeudi matin  en niant le terme de  «crime contre l’humanité » .  Pour l’historien Benjamin Stora, les propos du leader d’En marche n’ont pourtant rien de révolutionnaire.

Visualizing Capital I still think that reading Capital volume 1 gives a better idea than Harvey's illustration.

The Young Karl Marx A film review

France Fscism by another name

Germany "Perhaps due to the academic, middle-class milieu from which many Die Linke radicals emerge, its younger activists in particular tend to accept a false dichotomy of either ignoring people’s concerns or engaging with them at the price of adopting a “right-wing” language and accept an inherently racist framework. That they are immediately repulsed by the slightest sentiments perceived as racist reflects their commitment to a better world, of course. But that commitment has no practical value if it means shutting themselves off from those who do not distinguish antiracism from “political correctness,” or internationalist solidarity from the undemocratic regime of an increasingly cohesive global ruling class." The Wagenknecht Question

The global paradox

The sweatshop feminists

It is interesting to read what the intelligent, but worried, liberals from the ruling class think. Krugman even thinks that only "the people" could stop the slide towards "an American-type authoritarianism ".   How hypocritical of one of the defenders of the system. Krugman is officially known among the mainstream economists as someone who has been critical of this and that policy and how to mangae capitalism and the malfunctions within the system, i.e. a neo-Keynesian. He opposed what others called "the financial terrorism" inflicted upon Greece. He, as the Economist magazine argued, blamed most of the problems on Bush and his administration.

"The Great Shame of our Profession"

" If, according to Zwemer, the truth that Islam fails to grasp is that “Jesus is lord and savior,” and that he must be chosen as such, liberalism demands that the individual, in order to be an individual, must choose liberalism; this, as Massad notes, is a weaponized “choice,” for the only choice that liberalism can accept as a choice is liberalism. The new choice, then, appears as the liberal form of damnation; Muslims who do not choose liberalism, like those who do not choose Jesus, are the new forsaken, to be converted or killed. It is this structure of liberalism, as an ideology of imperial missionary work in the name of secularism, that  Islam in Liberalism  demands that we confront." — Murad Idris

" At its inception, aerial bombardment was a weapon of empire deployed to subdue colonial populations. Soon, during the Second World War, civilians in Europe and Japan came into the bomber’s crosshairs, and ever since non-combatant targets have been at the heart of military strategy. It was a seismic shift in the relations of power: as the state justified the mass murder of civilians, individual combatants, flying high above their victims, were distanced from the act of killing as never before. The ascendance of drones as an instrument of military power is the latest stage in this cruel evolution, which has led to a perpetual low-intensity war on the global scene. As the technology enabling it spreads through the world, the borders of the conflict will grow in proportion." The militarization of everything

"Zionists were demanding Mubarak stay in power back in February 2011 because otherwise extremists were going to take power. No one argues sovereignty to excuse Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen since they were invited in by the Yemeni government. And if anti-imperialism is fine with replacing US imperialism with Russian imperialism, then that’s a bad anti-imperialism. There is also a purposeful ignorance being perpetuated around Syria by those who want us to think the choi ce is either Assad or ISIS, ignoring the existence of local coordination committees and other grassroots formations that could be an alternative and are need of support. "The US left for the most part continued to push the regime change narrative, which again ignored all the actions the United States has pursued to preserve the regime despite all the rhetoric. They mocked the idea that there were moderate Syrian rebel groups, claiming everyone fighting Assad was an extremist and then acted all shoc

I recommend

I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my previous book  Desiring Arabs  in the context of post-1967 Arab intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost disappear, in the framing of the problem of “women in

"A sarcastic response to Syria's militants"