New Left Review - November / December 2011

Mike Davis:
‘Spring Confronts Winter’

CONTENTS

 

Mike Davis: Spring Confronts Winter

Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?

Stathis Kouvelakis: The Greek Cauldron

Why has Greece proved to be the weakest link in the Eurozone? Stathis Kouvelakis examines the contours of the post-dictatorship model, and the popular mobilizations that have arisen within its ruins.

Robin Blackburn: Crisis 2.0

Atlantic economies remain mired in unemployment and stagnation three years on from 2008. Diagnosing the underlying causes of the crisis as global over-capacity, deficient demand and anarchic credit creation, Robin Blackburn explores proposals for a genuine exit from it to the left.

Ai Xiaoming: The Citizen Camera

A feminist filmmaker discusses the role of documentaries in China’s civil-rights protests. Activism and the digital image, from village struggles in Guangdong to the courtrooms of Fujian, via the plains of Henan and Sichuan’s earthquake zone.

Kenta Tsuda: Academicians of Lagado?

Vast claims have been made for the application of Darwinian concepts—purged of biological determinism—to the study of societies. Kenta Tsuda offers a penetrating and original critique of selection theory, finding a paradigm with limited explanatory value and shaky conceptual foundations.

Perry Anderson: Lucio Magri

Homage to an outstanding figure of the European Left, who fought to preserve the link between radical thought and mass politics as Italy’s Communist tradition dissolved around him.

Pascale Casanova: Combative Literatures

Against both narrowly national and homogenizing global approaches, Pascale Casanova argues for a dual optic on literature, considering national systems as competing entities within an agonistic world of letters.

Susan Watkins: Peter Campbell

Remembering the watercolourist, typographer and writer—resident art critic at the London Review of Books—who redesigned NLR.

BOOK REVIEWS

Hung Ho-fung on Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism. Two Wall Street China hands assess the PRC’s transition from plan to market.

Andrea Boltho on Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege. The dollar’s long reign as global reserve currency and prospects for its continued hegemony.

Alexander Beecroft on Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. South Asia’s shift from holy to vernacular tongues measured against European parallels.

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New Left Review - 71 - September - October 2011

Wolfgang Streeck:
‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism’

CONTENTS

Wolfgang Streeck: The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

The roots of today’s Great Recession are usually located in the financial excesses of the 1990s. Wolfgang Streeck traces a much longer arc, from 1945 onwards, of tensions between the logic of markets and the wishes of voters—culminating, he argues, in the international tempest of debt that now threatens to submerge democratic accountability altogether beneath the storm-waves of capital.

Dylan Riley: Tony Judt: A Cooler Look

Few Anglophone intellectuals have received such posthumous acclaim as the Director of the Remarque Institute, leading contributor to the New York Review of Books, and late champion of social-democracy. Regularly compared to George Orwell, if not Isaiah Berlin, does any careful examination of his oeuvre sustain such panegyrics?

William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness

As the bill for mental health problems—iconically, depression—climbs, economists seek to quantify the efficiency costs of unhappiness. In such quests, capitalism is reverting to classical psychologies of well-being, the better to neutralize the meaning of the new forms of illness—and its authorship of them.

Mark Elvin: China’s Multiple Revolutions

Beneath the dramatic social, political and military turmoil of China’s last two centuries, Mark Elvin suggests, lay a series of existential crises amid the collapse of established pillars of authority, whose most vivid expression can be found in two largely forgotten novels of the 1920s and 1970s.

Andy Merrifield: Crowd Politics, Or, ‘Here Comes Everybuddy’

From Joyce to Lefebvre, sign-posts to a morphology of the demonstration in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Is the city still the indispensable arena of any collective uprising, and what would it mean to claim a ‘right’ to it?

Jacob Emery: Art of the Industrial Trace

Looking down at man-made landscapes from an airplane window: entry-point to an allegorical materialism, mapping art onto its double in production? The role of the indexical in earthworks, crop art and aerial photography, and the limits it places on allegory.

BOOK REVIEWS

Perry Anderson on Patrick Wilcken, Claude-Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. Deciphering the life and thought of the anthropological mage.

Fredric Jameson on Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm. Reunified Germany’s best-seller from the former DDR, and the way time was lived in it.

Steven Lukes on John Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. Heterodoxies, philosophical and sociological, of England’s outstanding post-war emigré.

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New Left Review: July-August 2011

 

Malcolm Bull:
‘Levelling Out’

CONTENTS

 

Malcolm Bull: Levelling Out

Beyond existing arguments about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualize a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.

Kees van der Pijl: Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis

The triple crisis—of Western hegemony, of capital and of the nationstate form—within which the Arab uprisings of 2011 have unfolded, and longer-run history of Anglo-American strategies for containing popular aspirations to sovereignty.

Bolívar Echeverría: Potemkin Republics

In his final essay, the late Bolívar Echeverría considers the bicentennial history of Latin America’s oligarchic states. While elites stage empty rituals of affirmation, might the continent’s marginalized majorities be reimagining national identity?

Ricardo Piglia: Theses on the Short Story

Argentina’s leading novelist reflects on the hidden architecture of the form, and the unfolding of its iterations from Chekhov to Hemingway, Kafka to Borges.

Kheya Bag: Red Bengal's Rise and Fall

After the CPM’s ejection from office in Calcutta, how to explain the remarkable longevity of its rule and causes of its eventual downfall? Kheya Bag surveys the record of its three decades in power, and the mechanisms that sustained—and subverted—the party’s hold on the state.

Achin Vanaik: Subcontinental Strategies

Achin Vanaik explores the specificities of India’s social formation and its lefts, in the only country where both Stalinism and Maoism remain significant political actors. In the wake of recent electoral reverses, what are the prospects for radical renewal?

BOOK REVIEWS

Thomas Michl on Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Analytical long view of the Great Recession, seeing its origins in the stranglehold of finance and elite self-enrichment.

Tony Wood on Anabel Hernández, Los señores del narco. The structures of political complicity and corruption that have fuelled Mexico’s drug wars.

Alexander Zevin on Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects. Restoring Sartre’s engagements with decolonization and anti-imperialism to their rightful place within his oeuvre.

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New Left Review — new issue out now

The July/ August issue of the New Left Review has been released, featuring, amongst others, the following essays:

Malcolm Bull: Levelling Out
Beyond existing articles about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualise a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.
Malcolm Bull is the author of the forthcoming Verso book, Anti-Nietzsche.

Kheya Bag: Rise and Fall of Red Bengal
After the CPM's ejection from office in Calcutta, how to explain the remarkable longevity of its rule and causes of its eventual downfall? Kheya Bag surveys the record of its three decades in power, and the mechanisms that sustained—and subverted—the party's hold on the state.

This issue also features the following two book reviews:

Tony Wood on Anabel Hernández, Los senores del narco. The structures of political complicity and corruption that have fuelled Mexico's drug wars.
Tony Wood is the author of  Chechnya.

Alexander Zevin on Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects. Restoring Sartre's engagements with decolonization and anti-imperialism to their rightful place within his oeuvre.
Paige Arthur's Unfinished Projects is available in both hardback and paperback.

Visit the New Left Review website to access the current issue.

New Left Review 66 - nov/dec 2010

CONTENTS

Richard Walker: The Golden State Adrift

Long at the forefront of US capitalism, the Golden State is now at the leading edge of its crisis. Richard Walker measures the dimensions of California’s slide—housing bubble, fiscal woes, rising inequality—as well as the underlying demographic and economic shifts.

Gopal Balakrishnan: The Coming Contradiction

Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic and its engagement with questions of historicity, narrative and time. Categories and concepts from Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Ricoeur, used to interrogate the impasses of the present—and to envision what lies beyond.

Ho-fung Hung: Uncertainty in the Enclave

Portrait of Hong Kong’s contested political scene. With democratizing reforms blocked by an entrenched alliance of CCP and local magnates, an increasingly radical populace seeks to break the deadlock. Might the PRC’s hyper-capitalist region be its weakest link?

Michael Denning: Wageless Life

Origins of the figures of unemployment and the informal sector, and their inadequacy to contemporary forms of wagelessness. Michael Denning draws lessons from Marx, Fanon and the streets of Ahmedabad.

Asef Bayat: Tehran: Paradox City

Walled citadel of the Shahs, hub of petro-modernity, post-Islamist metropolis: Asef Bayat on the history of struggles to define Iran’s capital, and the successive contests between elite projects and popular resistance that have shaped its spatial pattern.

Sven Lutticken: Playtimes

Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.

BOOK REVIEWS

Tariq Ali on Rebecca E Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World. Level-headed exploration of the Great Helmsman’s life and legacies.
Alberto Toscano on Luciano Canfora, L’uso politico dei paradigmi storici. Dissection of the uses of historical analogy, from Thucydides to Furet.

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