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Understanding Podemos

The general secretary of Spain’s new anti-austerity party sets out the strategic thinking behind its bid to become a national force. Incipient crisis of the post-Franco regime, mired in corruption and economic collapse, and opportunities for a popular-political formation, mobilizing the social discontent of the indignados.

Spain On Edge

Responding to NLR’s questions, Pablo Iglesias discusses the regime’s counter-attack, the example of Syriza and the political geography of austerity in Spain. After May 2015’s regional elections, can Podemos forge a coalition strategy to navigate between marginalization and the lethal consequences of a PSOE embrace?

Culture After Google

Emilie Bickerton on Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform. Diagnosis of a cultural production laid low by digital consolidation, and political proposals for a push-back.

The Politics of Exit

Wolfgang Streeck on Peter Mair, Ruling the Void. Diagnosis of Western democracy’s hollowing in the final work of a political-science master.

Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode

Behind exchange there lurks production, but what is more hidden still? The disavowed conditions of capital’s possibility—in reproduction, politics and nature—as sites for expanded anti-capitalist struggle.

Populism and the New Oligarchy

Tracking the terms ‘populism’ and ‘the people’ from the 19th century, Marco D’Eramo offers a striking new interpretation of their current applications—the first levelled indiscriminately at any political force that steps outside the bounds of convention, the second banished from the scene.

Grandeur and Misery of the Social State

Kafka’s day job, defending injured factory workers, as starting point for an illuminating study of the West’s social-protection mechanisms. Mixed legacies and uncertain future of a system built to mitigate the tensions of industrialization.

Political Cultures of South Korea

The presidential victory of Park Geun-Hye, the dictator’s daughter, as bid for a refurbished conservative hegemony in the ROK. Origins of the elite in colonial collaboration and anti-Communist modernization, and its attempts to re-hegemonize the country’s historical trajectory.

Charting Radical Theory

Gregor McLennan on Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?. A balance-sheet of the legacies of radical social theory, and its prospects in the new century.

The Last White Election?

Panoramic survey of America’s political landscape as revealed by November’s vote, with age, gender, ethnicity and geography the volatile determinants of Obama’s victory. Within an increasingly polarized ideological force field, how will the coming struggles unfold between Democratic President and Senate and a Republican House, itself consumed by turmoil?

Order Reigns in The Hague

Daniel Finn reports on September’s Dutch election, where the Liberal and Labour parties rallied to prevent Holland following the Greek example. Origins and orientations of the Socialist Party that briefly threatened the Pax Bruxelliana, and strategic lessons for the left from its campaign.

Ecuador’s Path

The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?

Bernstein’s Heirs

Dylan Riley on Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics and Ashley Lavelle, The Death of Social Democracy. Conflicting assessments of Bernstein’s legatees and the future of a reformist left.

For a Left With No Future

An epistle to capitalism’s immobilized opponents from the author of Farewell to an Idea. Drawing on sources from Bruegel to Nietzsche, Hazlitt to Benjamin, T. J. Clark supplies notes for a rethinking of left politics that would recognize the impasses of the present and the horrific legacies of the past, while abandoning the mirages of futurity.

A Metaphysics of Democracy

Jacob Collins on Marcel Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie, t. III. Europe’s age of catastrophe as struggle between religious and secular political logics, in the vision of a sotto voce liberal.

Presentism? Reply to T.J. Clark

Responding to Clark, Susan Watkins questions the adequacy of a perspective built upon man’s propensity for violence, and defends a historicized politics of social transformation against the cramped horizon of the present.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Reclaiming Human Rights

Robin Blackburn on Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Demystifying the origins and ideological ascendancy of human-rights discourse.

Fetish of Geopolitics

Responding to Gopal Balakrishnan in NLR 68, Teschke underscores the problematic nature of Carl Schmitt’s accounts of colonial expansion and the inter-state system. Against these, a programme for a revised Marxist geopolitics.

On the Concatenation in the Arab World

From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.

The Geopolitics of Separation

Contra Benno Teschke’s critique of Carl Schmitt in NLR 67, Gopal Balakrishnan argues that bourgeois society’s constitutive separation of the political and economic was a central problematic for the strategist of the intransigent right.

Continental Laboratory

Michael Löwy on Emir Sader, A Nova Toupeira. Cycles of revolution in Latin America—laboratory both of neoliberalism and its challengers.

Decisions and Indecisions

Where liberal thought has tried to quarantine the ‘dangerous mind’ of Carl Schmitt, recent revisions have found portents of contemporary imperial hubris in his analysis of victors’ justice. Warning against such 'rehabilitations', Benno Teschke detects a unifying set of preoccupations that render the thinker's transition from hyper-authoritarianism to fascism logical.

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?

The Ways of the World

In an interview recorded earlier this year, Peter Gowan recalls his political and intellectual trajectory, from the end of empires to Marxist militancy, from Eastern Bloc shipyards to the rise of the Dollar–Wall Street Regime.

Death of a Comrade

Tariq Ali pays tribute to Peter Gowan, long-standing friend and mainstay of NLR’s editorial board, and his unique combination of analytical acuity, appetite for debate and generosity of spirit.

How to Begin from the Beginning

Mountaineering lessons from the Bolsheviks’ master strategist provide a metaphor for regroupment in hard times. Slavoj Žižek identifies the principal antagonisms within contemporary capitalism, as the basis for positing anew the ‘communist hypothesis’.

Freedom’s Triumph?

Reviving its classical definition, ‘rule of the propertyless’, Luciano Canfora recasts the story of democracy in Europe as one of successive defeats, with lessons from Louis Napoleon on the use of suffrage as legitimation for oligarchic rule. Dylan Riley assesses a remarkable historical polemic from the Italian philologist.

NATO’s Demographer

Göran Therborn on Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Political demography of the Mid-East youth bulge as threat to Western power.

Obama at Manassas

Does Obama’s victory signal a political turning point comparable to 1980 or 1932? Mike Davis maps county-level changes, from below—minority-majority demographics, subprime suburbs, white-collar financial worries—catalysed by the 2008 campaign. From above, realignment of American capital behind the Silicon President.

Against Diversity

Tears and triumphs for race and gender have dominated discussion of the 2008 US election. Walter Benn Michaels argues that the Obama and Clinton campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it—serving only to camouflage inequality.

The Philosopher and his Blacks

Robin Blackburn on Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. Polemical assault on the French Enlightenment’s record on slavery—Condorcet’s contradictions, Diderot’s compromises, Montesquieu’s motivations.

Twilight of the NPT?

Responding to Dombey, Peter Gowan asks why such an unequal treaty has attracted so many adherents—and why its superpower beneficiary has sought to undermine it. Do impasses around the NPT signal failures for US dominance?

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Repeatedly invoked to choke off emergent nuclear powers in East Asia and the Middle East, the NPT’s actual content has remained largely undiscussed. Norman Dombey itemizes the Treaty’s provisions, and the asymmetrical burdens imposed on signatories, the better to gauge its successes and limitations.

The Weakest Link? Neoliberalism in Latin America

The continent that once served as laboratory for the Washington Consensus now represents the most substantial challenge to its prescriptions. A survey of left strategies, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, and prospects for counter-hegemonic regional integration.

American Duopoly

Tom Mertes on Jerry Hough, Changing Party Coalitions. Ethnic and confessional divisions as the origins of America’s political alignments, and the elite strategies that have culminated in today’s red–blue polarization.

Simplicissimus

Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.

Democracy’s Graveyards?

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A bold theoretical construction of causal relations between democratization and genocide, tested through detailed historical studies.

Jottings on the Conjuncture

A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.

Light from the Fens?

Christopher Brooke on Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought. Enlightenment thinking in France, Germany, England, Scotland and America, as seen by the heirs of Pocock and Skinner.

Structure vs Conjuncture

Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush.

The Democrats After November

With anti-war sentiment growing—if still passive—in the US, how will Democrats use their recapture of Congress? Mike Davis analyses likely outcomes on the questions—Iraq, corruption, economic insecurity—that confront a Party leadership hooked on corporate dollars, and myopically gazing towards 2008.

Ruling the Void

The hollowing of democracies, as ruling elites retreat and voters abstain from mass electoral politics. Peter Mair on the paradoxes of its ‘third wave’ triumph and emergence of a governing class bereft of legitimacy, as parties become appendages of the state.

Depoliticized Politics, From East to West

Reflections on China’s ‘revolutionary century’, and roots of its state-party rigidification in the failures of the Cultural Revolution. What deeper dynamics of capitalist restoration link the contemporary neutralization of politics, east and west?

States of Failure

The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?

Toryism After Blair

Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.

The Landslide in Bolivia

The Left owes its December victory in Bolivia to the popular movements that have stymied water and gas privatizations since 2000. Forrest Hylton surveys the landscape ahead, and the militant formation of Morales’s running mate Álvaro García Linera.