[RSS] Left-wing journal of ideas covering world politics, global economy, movements, theory, history, culture and more.
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.
Carlos Spoerhase : Seminar versus MOOC
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/96/carlos-spoerhase-seminar-versus-mooc
Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning.
Verónica Schild : Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/96/veronica-schild-feminism-and-neoliberalism-in-latin-america
Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.
Walter Benjamin: By the Fireside
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/96/walter-benjamin-by-the-fireside
The solitary reader devours the novel, and the lives of its protagonists, as fire consumes the logs in a hearth; big business casts its shadow over a fading world: a life’s meaning is grasped by reflection on its end. In a hitherto untranslated 1933 review of Arnold Bennett’s <em>Old Wives’ Tale</em>, Benjamin reflects on the nature of storytelling and the novel.
Iván Szelényi : Capitalisms After Communism
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/96/ivan-szelenyi-capitalisms-after-communism
A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?
Perry Anderson: The House of Zion
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/96/perry-anderson-the-house-of-zion
The fate of the Palestinians and the fortunes of Israel, after fifty years of occupation, and American and European collusion with it. Realities behind the official tropes decorating a ‘two-state solution’, and hesitations of nascent debate over a single state in the territory once ruled as a mandate by Britain.
Fredric Jameson: On Re-reading Life and Fate
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/95/fredric-jameson-on-re-reading-life-and-fate
Against conventional comparisons with <em>War and Peace</em>, Fredric Jameson offers a path-breaking formal reading of Vassily Grossman’s great fiction of the Battle of Stalingrad. The war against Hitler as crucible for a new collectivity, in which freedom finds itself, or as grounds of social—and thus narrative—totality.
Paik Nak-chung: The Double Project of Modernity
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/95/paik-nak-chung-the-double-project-of-modernity
Ambivalences of national statehood in divided Korea. Is a ‘normal’ modern state desirable or achievable, or is modernity here necessarily a project of both adaptation and overcoming? And might the Korean case offer insights into the problematic of modernity elsewhere?
Daniel Finn: Ireland's Water Wars
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/95/daniel-finn-ireland-s-water-wars
Ireland’s status as poster-child for Eurozone austerity has been shaken by mass protests against privatized water charges, as the discredited Labour–Fine Gael government heads into elections. Daniel Finn investigates the rise of the movement and its political prospects, with local activists pushing beyond a cautious trade-union leadership.
Georgi Derluguian, Zhanna Andreasyan: Armenia’s Fuel Protests
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/95/georgi-derluguian-zhanna-andreasyan-armenia-s-fuel-protests
Political life in post-Soviet Armenia has been forged on the anvil of militarized national defence against its larger neighbour, Azerbaijan. Can a new generation of activists succeed in bringing social questions to the fore? Examination of recent struggles against transport and electricity price rises.
Wolfgang Streeck: Why the Euro Divides Europe
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/95/wolfgang-streeck-why-the-euro-divides-europe
A landmark critique of Smithian notions of money as neutral medium of exchange, naturalized in social theory from Parsons to Habermas. Arguing instead for Weber’s concept of money as weapon in the market struggle, Wolfgang Streeck reveals how the single currency has transformed Europe’s qualitative horizontal diversity into quantitative vertical inequality.
Rob Lucas: Socialism as a Regulative Idea?
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/94/rob-lucas-socialism-as-a-regulative-idea
In <em>The Structure of World History</em>, Kōjin Karatani attempts a radical reconstruction of historical materialism, from early nomadism to post-capitalist society. Mauss, Hobbes and Marx mobilized as companion thinkers of exchange; Kant as ethico-political prophet. Rob Lucas queries the speculative history of one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals.
Malcolm Bull: The Decline of Decadence
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/94/malcolm-bull-the-decline-of-decadence
From Nietzsche to Lukács, decadence was a matter of cultural disintegration and social atomization under pressure of capitalist modernity, but such talk has dwindled. Malcolm Bull asks whether the private languages of conceptual art are decadent or undecadent. And is the market a substitute communicator of shared values?
Marco d'Eramo: After Waterloo
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/94/marco-d-eramo-after-waterloo
Why the Restoration of 1815, sealed in Vienna by Emperor, Tsar and King, brought not the longed-for return to the past but the arrival of a novel form of inter-state relations—presaging the birth of the ‘international community’.
Jan Breman : A Footloose Scholar
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/94/jan-breman-a-footloose-scholar
The descendant of Dutch bargees, Jan Breman has been investigating workers’ lives for half a century, travelling from rural Gujarat to the Javanese uplands and now coastal China. The social relations patterning control of land and labour framed in historical perspective, from colonial plantations to the globalized informal economy.
Perry Anderson : Incommensurate Russia
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/94/perry-anderson-incommensurate-russia
With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.
JoAnn Wypijewski: Home Alone
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/93/joann-wypijewski-home-alone
Costs of America’s imperial project registered in the emotional damage inflicted on its soldiers, and multiplier effects on those around them. Contrasting perspectives—reportage, blockbuster, trauma-group documentary—on men and war, as veterans’ suicides overtake us battlefield casualties.
Francis Mulhern: A Party of Latecomers
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/93/francis-mulhern-a-party-of-latecomers
Over the past decade the American political-intellectual scene has undergone a significant change with the emergence of a lively nexus of journals, ideas and activities, constituting a new kind of cultural left. Francis Mulhern etches the portrait of the Brooklyn-based <em>n+1</em>, which has been both forerunner and intellectual flagship of this effervescence.
Mike Davis : Marx’s Lost Theory
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/93/mike-davis-marx-s-lost-theory
What do we talk about when we talk about nationalism? Too much, it would seem. One sociologist complains that ‘the scholarship on ethnicity, race, and nationalism has become unsurveyably vast’; a leading intellectual historian deems it ‘intolerably protean’.
Pablo Iglesias : Spain On Edge
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/93/pablo-iglesias-spain-on-edge
Responding to NLR’s questions, Pablo Iglesias discusses the regime’s counter-attack, the example of Syriza and the political geography of austerity in Spain. After May 2015’s regional elections, can Podemos forge a coalition strategy to navigate between marginalization and the lethal consequences of a PSOE embrace?
Pablo Iglesias : Understanding Podemos
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/93/pablo-iglesias-understanding-podemos
The general secretary of Spain’s new anti-austerity party sets out the strategic thinking behind its bid to become a national force. Incipient crisis of the post-Franco regime, mired in corruption and economic collapse, and opportunities for a popular-political formation, mobilizing the social discontent of the <em>indignados</em>.