[RSS] Left-wing journal of ideas covering world politics, global economy, movements, theory, history, culture and more.
Alexandra Reza: New Broom in Burkina Faso?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/101/alexandra-reza-new-broom-in-burkina-faso
After ruling for a quarter-century with support from Washington and Paris, Burkinabè leader Blaise Compaoré was ejected by mass protests in October 2014. Alexandra Reza places Compaoré’s regime and its ouster in a historical context of dictatorship and dependency that has been repeatedly challenged by popular mobilization.
Stanford Literary Lab: Mapping London's Emotions
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/101/stanford-literary-lab-mapping-london-s-emotions
What light can be shed by quantitative analysis and digital text-mining on fictional cartographies of happiness and fear? Semantics of space and class in the nineteenth-century novel, polarized between normative landmarks of West End wealth and power, and the East End’s nameless warrens, a literary geography of the unknown.
Wanda Vrasti: Working in Prenzlau
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/101/wanda-vrasti-working-in-prenzlau
Despatches from the frontline of job-market restructuring in the former GDR <em>Länder</em>, as residual social-democratic structures ease the downward passage of redundant workers into a newly fractious class experience.
Eric Hobsbawm : Pierre Bourdieu
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/101/eric-hobsbawm-pierre-bourdieu
A warm but critical appreciation of Bourdieu’s corpus, focusing on his engagement with the work of historians and asking what the latter can draw from his ambitious social theorizing and the conceptual tool-box it supplies.
Kevan Harris: Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/101/kevan-harris-making-and-unmaking-of-the-greater-middle-east
What longer-run dynamics underlie present realities in the Middle East? Kevan Harris traces changing state formations and social compacts, from decaying Ottoman and Safavid empires, through colonization and postwar corporatism to <em>infitah</em>, authoritarian retrenchment and military intervention.
Nancy Fraser: Contradictions of Capital and Care
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/100/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care
Nancy Fraser tracks the reconfiguration of the relations of social reproduction under successive regimes of accumulation—‘separate spheres’, male breadwinner, dual-income household. Are the exactions of financialized capitalism now serving to undermine its lifeworld?
Perry Anderson: The Heirs of Gramsci
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/100/perry-anderson-the-heirs-of-gramsci
Transformations of the <em>Prison Notebooks’</em> fertile problematic of hegemony by a quartet of thinkers—Hall, Laclau, Guha, Arrighi—from Jamaica, Buenos Aires, Bengal, Milan. Coercion and persuasion, ideology and economic interest, national and inter-state systems as means for thinking Thatcherism’s ascendancy, populist strategies, peasant rebellion, post-colonial rule and the geo-political logics of American power.
Tony Wood: Dark Mirrors
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/100/tony-wood-dark-mirrors
Fine-grained reading of the films of Andrei Zvyagintsev, from the abstract allegories of his earlier work to the unsparing portrayals of contemporary Russia in <em>Elena</em> and <em>Leviathan</em>, exemplary of a new social turn in post-Soviet cinema. Reflections of class polarization and fables of power, with Orthodoxy as its prop.
Malcolm Bull: Softening Up the State
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/100/malcolm-bull-softening-up-the-state
What advice might Machiavelli offer critics of the contemporary market nation-state? In this striking reconstruction, lessons on corruption, inequality, immigration, mobilization—from Rome and Sparta, Florence and the Venetian Republic—yield proposals for open borders and universal basic income.
Susan Watkins : Casting Off ?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/100/susan-watkins-casting-off
How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.
Rodrigo Ochigame, James Holston : Filtering Dissent
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/99/rodrigo-ochigame-james-holston-filtering-dissent
Hailed as organizational tools of the oppressed, social media have also emerged as powerful surveillance apparatuses, but could existing power structures be reinforced even by the very algorithms they use to order data? A history of algorithmic filtering and a case study of its role in the land struggles of Brazil’s Guarani and Kaiowá peoples.
Manali Desai: Gendered Violence and India's Body Politic
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/99/manali-desai-gendered-violence-and-india-s-body-politic
Falling demand for female labour and rising dowry thresholds as factors behind mounting attacks on women; gang-rape as an instrument of caste-oppression; a culture of impunity in conflict zones; son-preference, girl-aversion and the missing. Manali Desai surveys the modalities of violence against women since Independence.
Joachim Becker: Europe’s Other Periphery
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/99/joachim-becker-europe-s-other-periphery
The fate of the East European economies in the transition from COMECON to EU. From post-communist slump to the politics of austerity, by way of industrial decline, wage collapses, external debt and buy-outs. The emergence of new dependencies, financial and industrial.
Göran Therborn: An Age of Progress?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/99/goran-therborn-an-age-of-progress
Contradictions of social evolution: climate change, stagnant incomes and social exclusion entwined with rising per capita GDP and lengthening life-spans, challenges to racism and sexism, and a mounting capacity for the human species to take control of its destiny.
Julia Buxton: Venezuela After Chávez
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/99/julia-buxton-venezuela-after-chavez
As Nicolás Maduro clings on to the presidency, a leading analyst discusses the crumbling of Chavista hegemony and a revival of the right amid collapsing oil revenues, a malfunctioning economy, street protests, and the long-term corruption of state structures.
Suhas Palshikar : Who Is Delhi’s Common Man ?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/98/suhas-palshikar-who-is-delhi-s-common-man
The Aam Aadmi Party emerged from mass anti-corruption protests to sweep the board in regional elections for India’s capital city. Can its rule in Delhi open up space for popular mobilization on the national stage, challenging the rise of communalism, or will the party be sucked into humdrum parliamentary routines?
Zöe Sutherland: The World As Gallery
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/98/zoe-sutherland-the-world-as-gallery
First global art movement or mere identity of a New York set? <em>Potpourri</em> of avant-garde practices or formalist tautology? A survey of Conceptual Art’s crystallization, among international neo-avant-gardes and the artistic networks of global centres, between an abstract global imaginary and its concrete contestations.
Joe Trapido : Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/98/joe-trapido-kinshasa-s-theatre-of-power
The DRC’s capital is set to become Africa’s largest city, but struggles to assert its authority over a profoundly fractured state as it expands in chaotic fashion. Dilapidated infrastructure and a disintegrating formal economy have not extinguished Kinshasa’s extraordinary cultural vitality, or its role as a centre of political opposition.
Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre: The Economic Life of Things
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/98/luc-boltanski-arnaud-esquerre-the-economic-life-of-things
Collection and asset—two ideal-typical logics through which value and price are established and objects ‘enriched’. From luxury goods to heritage villages and the mimetic effects of speculation; as industrial production is transferred to East Asia, the emergence of a new kind of capitalist economy.
Susan Watkins : Oppositions
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/98/susan-watkins-oppositions
After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.
Fredric Jameson: Gherman's Anti-Aesthetic
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/97/fredric-jameson-gherman-s-anti-aesthetic
Recent films of the Soviet-trained director Aleksei Gherman read as enigmatic late-modern outcrops—or meteorites from an unimaginable future—resistant to the all-pervasive aestheticization processes of consumer capitalism.
Alberto Toscano : A Structuralism of Feeling ?
►https://newleftreview.org/II/97/alberto-toscano-a-structuralism-of-feeling
Frédéric Lordon’s work combines an elite business-school training with a radical Regulation Theory background, highly effective polemics against the hardening economic and neo-imperial orders in France and the Eurozone with an ambitious social-philosophical agenda. Alberto Toscano investigates.
Stathis Kouvelakis: Syriza's Rise and Fall
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/97/stathis-kouvelakis-syriza-s-rise-and-fall
Why did the Tsipras government sign up to a third Memorandum, within days of the massive popular rejection of austerity in the July 2015 referendum? Stathis Kouvelakis tracks Syriza’s repositioning since 2012 and its self-imprisonment inside the single-currency regime.
Mike Davis : The Coming Desert
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/97/mike-davis-the-coming-desert
Episodes from the history of climate science, where discoveries of secular planetary variation—ice ages, desiccation—have always alternated with emphases on human depredation. Mike Davis draws back the curtain on the landmark contribution of the great anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin, penned from a Tsarist prison.
Benedict Anderson: Riddles of Yellow and Red
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/97/benedict-anderson-riddles-of-yellow-and-red
The bitter oppositions of Thai politics can seem strangely lacking in ideological substance. How might they be explained? In one of his last lectures, Benedict Anderson considers a crucial but overlooked factor: divisions within the country’s Sino-Thai communities.