NLR 34

articles
Andrew GlynImbalances of the Global Economy

Wide-ranging account of the growing disequilibria within an increasingly integrated global capitalism. Andrew Glyn takes the measure of China's still gigantic catch-up potential, in comparison to previous Asian NIEs, and assesses the impact of its rise across different sectors of the world economy.

Christopher PrendergastEvolution and Literary History

A landmark engagement with Franco Moretti’s triptych of essays, Graphs, Maps, Trees. What forms of logic underpin the use of evolutionary models to lay bare the survival strategies of the detective story, or trace the mutations of a border-hopping stylistic technique? And what political implications follow from basing an account of literary history on the outcome of the market?

interview
Dongfang HanChinese Labour Struggles

A railway worker caught up in the events of Tiananmen Square, now using his radio show to broadcast the problems of Chinese factory hands live on air. Han Dongfang describes life in the Red Army, student-worker unity in 1989, surviving TB and torture in prison and the China Labour Bulletin’s legal strategy. Can the PRC’s official trade unions be captured from below?

articles
Robin BlackburnCapital and Social Europe

What positive programme can the Left propose for a ‘social Europe’, against the Anglo-Saxon model? Robin Blackburn outlines first steps towards a new financial regime aimed at boosting resources for sustainable health and retirement provision, with a share levy on corporations, redistributed across the continent.

Slavoj ZizekAgainst Human Rights

Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?

reviews
Pax Europæa

Peter Gowan on Mark Leonard, Why Europe will Run the 21st Century. Panglossian manifesto for a Blairite Europeanism as model for the new Atlanticist world order.

The Missing Image

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, volumes 1 and 2. Uncollected writings of the Nouvelle Vague’s prodigal son, with dispatches home from the analog–digital frontier.

The Prisoner

Tsering Shakya on Melvyn Goldstein et al, A Tibetan Revolutionary. Memoirs of an indigenous Lenin from the Land of Snows, and his long imprisonment by the Mao government.