NLR 139

articles
André SingerLula’s Return

An analysis of the class forces aligned on each side of Brazil’s 2022 electoral divide by one of the country’s leading social theorists. With Lula restored to the Planalto Palace—and pulling some surprises—André Singer delineates the hyper-trasformismo operating at the summits of state power and registers the darker overtones of January 8’s pastiche-riot in Brasília.

Perry AndersonTwo Great Losses

With the deaths of Mike Davis and Tom Nairn, the international left has lost two of its most original and far-sighted thinkers—and NLR, two outstanding contributors, whose signature theses profoundly enriched the thought-worlds of the journal. As prologue to fuller commemoration of each, Perry Anderson reflects on what both have meant for the Review.

obituary
Bryan PalmerA Hero From Capitalism’s Hell

A tribute to Mike Davis, perhaps the finest revolutionary-socialist writer the US has produced. From boyhood geologizing with his meat-cutter father in the Californian desert to radical organizing in sixties LA, education in Western Marxism and voracious reading in labour history, political economy and urban ecology, the making of a great organic intellectual of the American working class.

articles
Erika BalsomReflections On An Exhibition

A co-curator’s tour of the ‘No Master Territories’ show at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, presenting an international array of feminist non-fiction filmmaking practice. Erika Balsom explains the thinking—film-theoretical, gender-political, curatorial-technological—that underlay the scale and scope of the selection.

Matthew KarpParty and Class In American Politics

In reply to Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, mapping class and party shifts to a new regime of accumulation, Matthew Karp asks how far they break with conventional cultural explanations for the blue-collar GOP vote. Have deeper transformations in the Democratic Party—its hegemony within the country’s most dynamic capitalist sectors—elicited a backlash from its historic base?

Cecilia RikapCapitalism As Usual?

Responding to Evgeny Morozov’s robust ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, Cecilia Rikap outlines the novel forms of intellectual monopoly exercised by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, reshaping the international capitalist landscape as they subordinate innovation and knowledge production to their sway.