[RSS] Left-wing journal of ideas covering world politics, global economy, movements, theory, history, culture and more.
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>.
Fredric Jameson: The Aesthetics of Singularity
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/92/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-of-singularity
Can postmodernity still define the present age, or is the concept now obsolescent? In a major retrospect and re-evaluation, Fredric Jameson reflects on the cultural logic of globalization and its temporalities. Art, cuisine and financial derivatives as one-off ideas and events; global politics and counter-possibilities as land-grabs, or occupied space.
Franco Moretti, Dominique Pestre: Bankspeak
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak
What can quantitative linguistic analysis reveal about global institutions? From Bretton Woods to the present, the language of World Bank reports has undergone telling modulations. Moretti and Pestre track the decline of concrete referents and active verbs, the triumph of acronyms over nation-states—and irresistible rise of ‘governance’.
Sebastian Veg: Legalistic and Utopian
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/92/sebastian-veg-legalistic-and-utopian
Distinctive features of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, in contrast to Occupy, Tiananmen and Taiwan’s Sunflower sit-in. Sebastian Veg identifies the political-historical specificities of a protest that turned a multi-lane highway into an urban garden and art-production site, in the name of constitutional procedure.
Joshua Wong: Scholarism on the March
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/92/joshua-wong-scholarism-on-the-march
Interview with the eighteen-year-old leader of Hong Kong’s radical school students. Joshua Wong discusses his personal and political formation, the battle against Beijing’s patriotic education syllabus and the Umbrella Movement’s three-month occupation of the city’s streets in the fight for democratization.
Joe Trapido: Africa’s Leaky Giant
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/92/joe-trapido-africa-s-leaky-giant
Recent analysis of Congo’s plight has foregrounded notions of local agency and impenetrable complexity, excluding structural analysis. In a landmark rebuttal, Joe Trapido argues that it is just as implausible to deny the agency of powerful outsiders as that of powerful Africans. Dynamics of a primitive accumulation that never results in sustained development, its gains still leaking overseas.