NATO’s twin dynamics—eastward expansionism within Europe, aggregated military operations outside—have brought it to the brink of a major international war, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what is Washington’s real interest in the Alliance? Grey Anderson provides a sweeping historical analysis of a key instrument of American hegemony.

Responding to Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ in NLR 138, Tim Barker probes the analysis of global manufacturing overcapacity and declining profit rates on which their diagnosis of a new regime of ‘political capitalism’ is based. Does Bidenomics entail just another round of politically engineered upwards redistribution?

Can Biden’s green fiscal stimulus kickstart a sustained dynamic of capital accumulation? Replying to critics of Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses’, Aaron Benanav defends and extends Brenner’s account of the long downturn, charting the epochal implications of shifts in demand, from agriculture to industry to services.

An artist considers a new form of machinic representation: the statistical rendering of large datasets, indexed to the probable rather than the real of photography; to the uncanny composite rather than the abstraction of the graph.

Three decades on from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a vivid portrait of the Serbia that has emerged from it. The regime of post-ideological strongman Aleksandar Vučić, erstwhile ultranationalist backed by Washington and the EU, who evenhandedly welcomes LGBT+ rights, military parades and Gulf capital, now under pressure to concede full independence to NATO-occupied Kosovo.

In 1964, NLR produced a set of texts aiming to explain the crisis-ridden state of post-war Britain by analysing the unique class compact that governed its longstanding capitalist regime. Behind the Nairn–Anderson theses stood an earlier formulation of these ideas, ‘La Nemesi borghese’, published by Nairn in the Italian Marxist journal Il Contemporaneo, appearing here for the first time in English.

Does Sayed Haider Raza’s Abstract Expressionist painting, Zamin—widely held to embody the ‘eternal land’ of India—in fact register the traumatic schisms of the Subcontinent? Questions of aesthetics and canonization, history and nation, in a reappraisal of some landmark works of Indian Modernism.