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Life and Death in Annawadi

Jan Breman on Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Close-quarters chronicle of life in a Mumbai slum-settlement.

A Liberal Geoculture?

Jennifer Pitts on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. A seminal multi-volume account of the ‘capitalist world-economy’ reaches the long 19th century.

A New Global Depression?

Interview with the author of The Dollar Crisis, one of the few analyses to predict the 2008 financial meltdown. Richard Duncan tracks its causes to the credit explosion unleashed by the fiat-dollar system, in toxic symbiosis with the global wage deflation caused by manufacturing’s shift to the East.

Citizens as Customers

Post-Fordist capitalism has transformed consumers’ expectations, offering limitless diversification of commodities. Wolfgang Streeck explores the implications for a public sphere which cannot hope to match the cornucopia of the market. The consumption of politics by the politics of consumption?

The European Vortex

Global economic turmoil has exposed the structural flaws in the single currency. Amid deepening divergences between industrial north and debt-laden south, Michel Aglietta assesses the Eurozone’s chances of recovery, and the impact of its continued travails on the world economy.

Another Turn Of The Screw?

Beneath the roiling surface of the Euro-crisis, a further chapter of the EU integration project is underway. Susan Watkins on the institutional machinery Berlin is imposing across the Union, and the political stakes—and hypocrisies—laid bare by the struggle.

Markets and Peoples

Today’s Euro-turmoil as amplification of the clash between popular and financial interests. Turns of the dialectic of democracy and capitalism, and possible escape routes from the dictatorship of capital markets.

Spring Confronts Winter

Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?

The Dollar Era

Andrea Boltho on Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege. The dollar’s long reign as global reserve currency and prospects for its continued hegemony.

Crisis 2.0

Atlantic economies remain mired in unemployment and stagnation three years on from 2008. Diagnosing the underlying causes of the crisis as global over-capacity, deficient demand and anarchic credit creation, Robin Blackburn explores proposals for a genuine exit from it to the left.

The Spanish Model

Catapulted from backwater status into financialized modernity, Spain is now the latest frontier of the Eurozone crisis. Emergence of the Iberian bubble economy, distortions of its growth pattern—and eruption of protests against a compliant political class.

The Forgotten Space

The oceans as neglected but indispensable medium for globalized industry. Snapshots from the maritime landscape of exploitation.

War, Crash, Slump

Tom Mertes on Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance. Bestselling portrait of the interwar world’s central bankers as originators of the Great Depression—with edifying comparisons to their modern counterparts.

A Permanent Economic Emergency

As the Eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis deepens, Slavoj Žižek calls for an internationalist response that would transcend the defence of a failing status quo, to invent new transitional strategies.

Global Competition After the Financial Crisis

China’s largest firms remain small fry by comparison to Western MNCs. As the tectonic plates of the world economy shift, a sober assessment of its persistent asymmetries.

Structural Crises

A world-systems perspective on the post-2008 crash, seeing in present imbalances a conjunction of cyclical downturn and secular trends, and highlighting the nature of coming struggles for another, better order.

World Distempers

The author of Age of Extremes discusses the major developments since the end of the Cold War. Amid the turbulence of capital’s advance, what larger problems should historians seek to understand?

Shifting Sands

What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.

Capital’s Cartographer

A former pupil recalls Giovanni Arrighi’s world-spanning trajectory, landmark intellectual contributions and great personal generosity. Geographies of power, histories of inequality in the work of one of the leading analysts of our times.

Measuring World Disorders

John Grahl on Michel Aglietta and Laurent Berrebi, Désordres du capitalisme mondial. A prescient état des lieux of the global economy, identifying its imbalances and possible future trajectories.

America’s Head Servant?

Against predictions that China will soon replace the US as the world’s dominant economic power, Hung Ho-fung argues that the PRC’s export-oriented growth and vast dollar reserves have trapped it in a subordinate role—to which much of its elite remains committed.

Speculations on the Stationary State

Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.

The Rivals

Max Gasner on Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. The 21st century as re-run of the 19th, shaped by the ambitions of ascendant autocratic powers.

Bubblenomics

R Taggart Murphy on Graham Turner, The Credit Crunch. Origins of the financial crisis in the global squeeze on labour, and the example of Japan’s lost decade.

Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation

Contrary to mainstream diagnoses blaming the current financial crisis on a retreat of the state, Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings trace the active interventions that have shaped US finance and yoked working-class America to the discipline of debt.

Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows

In what ways does Brecht’s drama—and the world-transforming impulse behind his strategies of defamiliarization—speak to times and places other than his own? Ups and downs of his resonance in Brazil and beyond, shadowing the movements of history’s leading edge.

Biennials without Borders

Against claims for a de-territorialized, fully globalized art world, Chin-tao Wu measures the stubborn realities of continued Western dominance. Birthplace and residence of art-festival participants as indices of enduring hierarchy.

Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History

Do feminism and neoliberalism share a secret affinity? Nancy Fraser on the co-option of gender politics by the ‘new spirit’ of post-Fordist capitalism, and subordination of its radical critique to a World Bank agenda. Might a neo-Keynesian shift offer prospects for socialist-feminist renewal?

Value Theory and the Chinese Worker

In answer, Blackburn explores the paradoxes of fictitious capital, underwritten by super-exploitation of China’s producers. A public-utility credit system, democratic forms of nationalization and mechanisms to socialize investment as steps towards financial dual power.

Colletti on the Credit Crunch

What political opportunities arise from the current financial crisis? In a critical response to Robin Blackburn’s essay in NLR 50, Geoff Mann proposes the insights of Marx’s theory of value as a starting point for thinking beyond capitalist social relations—as Blackburn’s measures, he argues, do not.

The Winding Paths of Capital

The author of Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing, interviewed by David Harvey, on dispossession and development, capitalist crises, China’s future. The political education of a teenage factory-manager, via African liberation struggles and autonomia operaia; and influences—Braudel, Gramsci, Smith, Marx—in Arrighi’s work.

Asset-Stripping the State

Within the global wave of privatizations, those enacted in Latin America stand out for their breathtaking speed and scale. Medeiros contends that the principal motivation was not economic but political, driven by new capitalist coalitions emerging from the 1980s debt crisis.

The Economist’s Burden

David Woodruff on Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built. A vocal advocate of shock therapy casts a blinkered eye over its results in the former Eastern Bloc.

Crisis in the Heartland

Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.

Into a New Growth Regime

Should the story of contemporary capitalism be told as essentially an American tale? Counterposing a more Braudelian understanding of the global economy to Brenner’s approach, Michel Aglietta sees a new mode of regulation, and distribution of growth, emerging out of the Asian crisis of the nineties.

Changing Colours in China

The nature of China’s present socio-economic system has for some time been hotly debated. Reflecting on Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing, Joel Andreas traces the path of property relations, social services and income distribution in the PRC since the late seventies, reaching unambiguous conclusions.

More System, Please!

Commending Brenner’s overall narrative of post-war economic development, Kozo Yamamura holds it to be nevertheless too narrow—needing more attention to modern capital markets, to historical cycles of technological change, and to institutional differences between the leading industrial states.

Profits of Doom?

Can the economic history of the past three to four decades be accurately depicted as a long downturn? Contesting Robert Brenner’s account of them in his Economics of Global Turbulence, Nicholas Crafts argues that the ‘Great Moderation’ is a better description of a period in which the United States came to enjoy a strong lead in productivity growth.

The Right to the City

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

Plenty beyond Power

Tom Hazeldine on Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty. Selective account of a millennium of global trade, with force as market-maker from the Pax Mongolica to the Cold War.

Financial Regime Change?

As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition.

The Historian as Haruspex

Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing proposes a bold new political-economic patterning of China’s rise, America’s decline. Mark Elvin examines the assumptions behind narratives of divergent West and East, and the parameters that will define a reconfigured world order.

News from Nowheresville

Gopal Balakrishnan on Parag Khanna, The Second World. Globe-trotting account from beyond the OECD, surveying the stakes in a coming battle between ascendant China and a West caught in imperial doldrums.

Casino Colony

The transformation of the former Portuguese enclave of Macau into East Asia’s gambling capital by an alliance of local elites and Las Vegas entrepreneurs, under the approving gaze of Beijing. A frenzy of construction, rising inequalities and rampant corruption as outcomes of a neon-lit decolonization.

The Subprime Crisis

As reverberations from the stricken mortgage market reach the real economy, Robin Blackburn reveals the origins of the crunch in the shadowy realms of financialization. Precedents from the bubbles and crash of the 1920s, warnings from pioneers and venture capitalists, and proposals for how to turn the crisis to socially redistributive effect.

The Violence of Capital

Michael Hardt on Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Neoliberal transformations, from Chile to occupied Iraq, as instances of a ‘disaster capitalism’ enabled by socio-economic and ecological trauma.

The New East Asia

The emergence of a new regional order from the ashes of the Asian Financial Crisis. As the PRC’s economic expansion takes it further afield in search of markets and raw materials, how have China’s neighbours responded to the Middle Kingdom’s return to the global stage?

A New Global Financial Architecture?

As the world economy shows growing signs of vulnerability, what mechanisms exist for averting repeats of the Asian or Mexican crises? Banking and regulatory regimes as instruments of standardization, pulling national economies into Anglo-American orbits.

Resurrection of the Rentier

Robert Pollin on Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed. What have been the outcomes of neoliberalism in the advanced capitalist countries, and what possibilities exist for checking its momentum?

Fear and Money in Dubai

On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.