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The New Collectivism: Pension Reform, Grey Capitalism and Complex Socialism
“With the advent of a Social Democrat-Green coalition in Germany, with socialists or social democrats in the governments of thirteen out of fifteen members of the eu and with Communists in the French and Italian Cabinets, the European Left faces an historic opportunity. The swing to the . . .” read more
America the Undemocratic
“The United States, as every American schoolchild knows, is the oldest and still greatest political democracy on earth. Non(Un?)-Americans may disagree, but on one point there is complete unanimity: the United States is different. Just how different can be gleaned from two seemingly innocuous statements by the man . . .” read more
Radical Art at documenta X
“documenta X was an extraordinary event. From June to September last year, the exhibition mounted a fearless challenge to today’s general premise and practice of art, and indeed to the entire art and culture industry. The tenth documenta awaits—and deserves—a sea-change in the predominantly negative responses it . . .” read more
New Labour and its Discontents
“The week before the European Union summit in Amsterdam, Tony Blair delivered a Thatcher-style lecture at the Malmö gathering of European socialist parties. ‘As I said to the Labour Party a few years ago, we must modernize or die,’ he declared; there was no choice for the European . . .” read more
The Figures of Dissent
“Like many of the subscribers to this journal, I have bought it since it first came out. For many years, of course, the latest number has arrived in its tidy polythene wrapper through the post but, in 1960, just having left Cambridge and fired by David Holbrook and . . .” read more
The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics
“Two generations after McCarthyism, the Hollywood Left has almost receded from living memory. Its principal figures now show up mainly in the obituary columns of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, their experiences with the blacklist reduced to a sentence or deleted entirely. The most politically . . .” read more
Politics and Space/Time
“‘Space’ is very much on the agenda these days. On the one hand, from a wide variety of sources come proclamations of the significance of the spatial in these times: ‘It is space not time that hides consequences from us’ (Berger); ‘The difference that space makes’ (Sayer); ‘That . . .” read more
The Regulation Approach: Theory and History
“In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the . . .” read more
A Reply to Edward Thompson
“Despite the evident disagreements between us, and a certain measure of misunderstanding, I find Edward Thompson’s comment welcome and stimulating. The overriding issues that confront us all concern the future, on which, as he himself makes clear, there is far more that unites than divides us. There are, . . .” read more
Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America
“Two years ago, a sports announcer in the United States lost his job because he enlarged indiscreetly—that is, before a television audience—upon his views about ‘racial’ differences. Asked why there are so few black coaches in basketball, Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder remarked that black athletes already hold an . . .” read more
Between Bad Times and Better
“A familiar question in the Age of Reagan—when would the us Left revive once more?—had become by the last years of his regime the source of deep defeatism or, at least, nagging doubt. So much time had passed since the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, itself . . .” read more
The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American Experience
“I wish in this essay to peer through the Latin American looking glass, or abertura, to see what light may be shed on the ongoing struggle to democratize the South Korean political system. In Latin America the richest literature on the problems and prospects of democratization emerged along . . .” read more
A Reply to Lynn Garafola
“Stray phrases are sometimes more revealing than central points. Lynn Garafola in her intemperate review of my book calls me a ‘self-proclaimed leftist’. What she means is that I have not been licensed by her circles that deliver the official proclamations. She is incensed because I lack respect . . .” read more
The Last Intellectuals
“The 1980s have not been good to American intellectuals of the Left. The election of Ronald Reagan brought neo-conservatives to power, and with them a host of new institutions—most notably, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute—that set about rewriting the intellectual agenda. In the ensuing debate . . .” read more
The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?
“It is now virtually a commonplace among left observers and activists that we have recently witnessed the emergence of a New International Division of Labour and the Globalization of Production. For many, these twin tendencies manifest such deep structural transformations in the world economy that group or government . . .” read more
Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition
“The 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson represented a new stage of development in Afro-Americans’ struggle for equality in the context of us bourgeois democracy. Even white American political analysts unsympathetic with the Jackson campaign recognized this, and groped for words to define Jackson’s achievement. After Jackson . . .” read more
Nuclear War Planning and Strategies of Nuclear Coercion
“In March 1954 a us Navy captain, William Brigham Moore, travelled to Nebraska to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. He and some thirty fellow officers were there to be briefed on that Command’s plans for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Some at least of . . .” read more
Behind and Beyond Social Democracy in Sweden
“As the tide of Eurocommunism has subsided, the evolution of labour movements hegemonized by social democracy has come to assume a more pivotal role for the debate on strategies of transition in the advanced capitalist countries. With good reason, the Swedish case is frequently cited in this context. . . .” read more
Space and Agency in the Transition to Socialism
“It is now over a decade since John Saville’s survey of the Labour Party’s history led him to the view that ‘at least some things should become clearer as time moves along: that Labourism has nothing to do with Socialism: that the Labour Party has never been, nor . . .” read more
Jamaica: The Demise of 'Democratic Socialism'
“The landslide victory of Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (jlp) in the October 1980 general elections brought an abrupt end to the People’s National Party’s (pnp) eight-year-old experiment in ‘Democratic Socialism’. The fall of Michael Manley, the Socialist International’s most important representative in the Third World, . . .” read more
Different Conceptions of Party: Labour’s Constitutional Debates
“The Constitution of the Labour Party has for some years been the chosen terrain for an intensifying battle between left and right, over the issues of mandatory reselection of mp’s by their constituency parties, the determination of the party’s election manifesto, and the method of electing the . . .” read more
Marxism and the 'Welfare State'
“The Political Economy of the Welfare State by Ian Gough is the third book to appear in a series of educational texts, ‘Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State’, edited by Professor Peter Leonard. The series is located by Peter Leonard within the ‘crisis’ and . . .” read more
A Planetary Pandemic
“This number of nlr opens with a set of texts on the covid-19 crisis. Coursing round the world, the virus plays the role of an etching acid that reveals the lineaments—political, economic, social, cultural—of the uneven landscape beneath. Less lethal than such zoonotic forerunners as . . .” read more
Letter to Readers
“the scarborough venture, mentioned in this column (NLR 5) proved an unqualified success, and the New Left’s most effective intervention in the current dingdong to date. A team of 12 or more managed to get out a four-paged bulletin, This Week, for every day of the Conference, . . .” read more
Letter to Readers
“we finally managed to get most of our 9,000 copies of the first issue distributed. It was something of a small miracle performed almost entirely by voluntary help during the last month or so. To say that we—and in particular Janet Hase—are grateful would be to commit . . .” read more