[RSS] Left-wing journal of ideas covering world politics, global economy, movements, theory, history, culture and more.
Catherine Samary: A Utopian in the Balkans
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/114/catherine-samary-a-utopian-in-the-balkans
Catherine Samary on Darko Suvin, <em>Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia</em>. Bloch’s utopian horizon as measure for the achievements and inversions of the SFRY.
Donald MacKenzie, Alice Bamford: Counterperformativity
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/113/donald-mackenzie-alice-bamford-counterperformativity
If speech can—in the famous argument of J. L. Austin—not only be true or false, but also do things, what about economic models? And what about when models go wrong, or actually undermine their own assumptions? Black–Scholes, gamma traps and gaming—a typology of the perverse effects of some key financial tools.
Richard Stallman: Talking to the Mailman
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailman
Growing domination of companies over users, malicious functionalities, tracking and widespread surveillance. The leading campaigner for software freedom discusses the present technological landscape and the political relevance of the campaign for free software.
Perry Anderson: An Afternoon with Althusser
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/113/perry-anderson-an-afternoon-with-althusser
Notes on a conversation in the summer of 1977, when the philosopher made an impromptu visit to the NLR office. Wide-ranging discussion on Althusser’s relations with the PCF, the condition of Marxism, the Chinese and Russian revolutions compared; Trotsky, Sraffa and the problems with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
David Kotz: End of the Neoliberal Era?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/113/david-kotz-end-of-the-neoliberal-era
Prognosis for the US economy, after a decade of unprecedented monetary stimulus. Does the distempered character of the recovery—soaring profits, feverish asset prices, anaemic wage growth—signal a structural crisis in the existing regime of capitalist accumulation, and transition to a new institutional framework?
Göran Therborn: Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/113/goran-therborn-twilight-of-swedish-social-democracy
Hailed with relief for fear of a bleaker outcome, the SAP’s poor performance in the September 2018 election underlines the malaise afflicting social democracy’s global flagship. Therborn charts the country’s SAP-led neoliberalization—and rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats—against the backdrop of recession and refugee arrivals.
Peter Dews: The Idea of Hope
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/112/peter-dews-the-idea-of-hope
Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.
Catherine Bertho Lavenir : Border Making
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/112/catherine-bertho-lavenir-border-making
From boundary stone and river bank to school-room map and airport security zone: a typology of the border that relates material markers to the institutions which transmit—and enforce—their meanings.
John Willett: Art and Revolution
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/112/john-willett-art-and-revolution
Commissioned by Eric Hobsbawm for Einaudi’s <em>Storia del marxismo</em>, a synoptic survey of avant-garde movements in the era of 20th-century revolutions. Disputing the received view of a series of chaotic, short-lived experiments, John Willett traces the emergence of an internally coherent cultural renaissance, stretching from Moscow and Vitebsk to Mexico City.
Achin Vanaik: India's Two Hegemonies
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/112/achin-vanaik-india-s-two-hegemonies
How to grasp what’s new in the rule of right-wing strongmen like India’s Narendra Modi? Systematic comparison of the predominance of today’s BJP with that of the Congress Party under Nehru and his descendants. Contrasts of leadership style and party organization—continuities of cow-belt base, regional chauvinism and border enforcement.
Robert Pollin: De-Growth vs a Green New Deal
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/112/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal
Can degrowth supply a political economy that meets environmental and egalitarian aims? In a powerful contribution to the debate initiated by Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel (NLR 109), Robert Pollin argues that a green-growth model offers a more viable alternative.
Jiwei Xiao: Belated Reunion?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/111/jiwei-xiao-belated-reunion
One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 realities: decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.
Troy Vettese: To Freeze the Thames
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/111/troy-vettese-to-freeze-the-thames
Are there hints of a solution to climate change in the Little Ice Age? Offering a critique of ‘steady-state’ ecological economics, green nuclear and artificial geo-engineering, Troy Vettese proposes the thought-experiment of a ‘half-earth’ alternative: agricultural land left to nature, egalitarian eco-austerity, green services and veganism.
Kareem Rabie : Remaking Ramallah
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/111/kareem-rabie-remaking-ramallah
From Arafat’s pharaonic tomb and Dubai-style luxury apartments to sweltering refugee camps and landless, beleaguered villages: greater Ramallah as synecdoche for post-Oslo Palestine—and triumph for Israel’s fragmentation strategy.
Simone Weil: Meditations on a Corpse
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/111/simone-weil-meditations-on-a-corpse
Cool post-mortem on the 1936 Popular Front government in France, written while it was still technically alive. Centrality of consciousness and importance of timing, in politics as in music—and Machiavelli as a better guide than Marx.
Robin Blackburn: The Corbyn Project
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/111/robin-blackburn-the-corbyn-project
Given the imbalances of the UK economy—overblown financial sector, gaping current account, delirious levels of debt—what structural changes might a Corbyn government effect? Robin Blackburn discusses prospects and proposals for an egalitarian shift.
Wolfgang Streeck : The Fourth Power
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/110/wolfgang-streeck-the-fourth-power
Wolfgang Streeck on Joseph Vogl, <em>The Ascendancy of Finance</em>. The historic interpenetration of government and haute finance, epitomized in the secrecy of the Federal Reserve and ECB.
Mike Davis: Taking the Temperature of History
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/110/mike-davis-taking-the-temperature-of-history
From Vichy-era rural conservatism, via communism and Furet, to a grand synthesis in ecological history, culminating decades of empirical research. Portrait of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, historical materialist and quasi-reactionary, founder of historical climatology and last outpost of <em>Annales</em>-school historiography.
Fernando Martínez Heredia: Thinking for Ourselves
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/110/fernando-martinez-heredia-thinking-for-ourselves
Leading Cuban intellectual and militant of the revolutionary generation discusses his path through the 26 July Movement to Batista’s overthrow and founding <em>Pensamiento Crítico</em>, a beacon of critical Marxist thought throughout Latin America.
Francis Mulhern: Critical Revolutions
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/110/francis-mulhern-critical-revolutions
In response to a bold reconstruction of Anglophone literary studies challenging the political self-understanding of the reigning historicism and looking to a new, interventionist departure on the left, some critical considerations on disciplinary history, the place of ‘knowledge’ in the fictional order, as well as the discourses that address it, and the precedent of Leavis and his followers.
Stathis Kouvelakis : Borderland
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/110/stathis-kouvelakis-borderland
Against panegyrics to a frictionless, post-national eu polity, evidence from Europe’s multiple borders. Greece as gauge of an emerging order, in which interior and exterior tangle in overlapping jurisdictions and enforcement zones, ultimately dependent on Libyan warlords, Turkish prisons and the mass graves of the Mediterranean.
Alice Bamford: Intaglio as Philosophy
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/109/alice-bamford-intaglio-as-philosophy
Alice Bamford on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, <em>Le graveur et le philosophe: Albert Flocon rencontre Gaston Bachelard</em>. Meditations on art and philosophy, science and reflexivity, sparked by a Surrealist collaboration in postwar Paris.
Geoffrey Ingham: Finance and Power
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/109/geoffrey-ingham-finance-and-power
Geoffrey Ingham on Tony Norfield, <em>The City: London and the Global Power of Finance</em>. A former banker’s Marxist account of the imperialist dynamics of international finance and the preponderance of the Square Mile as the <em>bureau de change</em> of the world.
Emilie Bickerton : A New Proletkino ?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/109/emilie-bickerton-a-new-proletkino
Is it possible to detect the contours of a new genre of proletarian cinema operating across the widely contrasted films of Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Aki Kaurismäki and Pedro Costa? What does this body of work say about contemporary working-class experience and its representations on the silver screen?
Herman Daly, Benjamin Kunkel : Ecologies of Scale
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/109/herman-daly-benjamin-kunkel-ecologies-of-scale
Eco-economist Herman Daly presents a practical programme for an egalitarian, steady-state economy. From Smith and Mill to Georgescu and Schumacher, Daly and Benjamin Kunkel debate problems of development, quantitative and qualitative, and biophysical equilibrium. If the world economy is conceived as a sub-system of a larger eco-system, what are the limits to growth?