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Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World

Theorists of political justice have long taken the nation-state to be the relevant unit for their proposals. Nancy Fraser argues that the time for this is past. The necessary interconnection between struggles for economic redistribution and social recognition now requires that issues of political representation be re-tabled at a global rather than national level—where decisions affecting the fate of all are increasingly taken, or not taken.

The Limits of Multitude

What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.

Pax Europæa

Peter Gowan on Mark Leonard, Why Europe will Run the 21st Century. Panglossian manifesto for a Blairite Europeanism as model for the new Atlanticist world order.

Against Human Rights

Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?

Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century

To which thinkers should we turn in a bid to ground a new conceptualization of political agency—or to determine whether such a move has been nullified by the transformations of the last decades? Gopal Balakrishnan on Machiavelli’s parables of innovation and readings of him from Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss to Gramsci. The Florentine as strategist of beginning anew, in the context of historic defeat.

Palestinian Defiance

The Ramallah doctor and activist, general secretary of the Al Mubadara coalition, on struggles against the Israeli Occupation, from the popular movement of the first Intifada to the tactical errors of the second, via the disaster of Oslo. As Abu Mazen is levered into place, what alternatives can combat both IDF stranglehold and the flyblown Palestinian Authority?

Parting Words

The editor of Italy’s leading monthly of the Left explains, in a balance-sheet of the opening years of the century, why the journal is closing. As the Italian opposition gears up for resuming power next year, tactical manoeuvre replaces substantive debate, and ethical repentance disavows solidarity with political resistance. Electoralism and neo-Quakerism in the land of Garibaldi and Gramsci.

Arms and Rights

In an era of serial war, Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio as theorists of a perpetual peace. Jurisprudence and force in three parallel philosophical constructions of the present international order, and the unsettled afterthoughts—American, German, Italian—that accompanied them.

China’s Critical Intelligentsia

Arif Dirlik on Chaohua Wang, One China, Many Paths. A collective magnifying glass on the PRC’s complex social and political problems, as some of the country’s leading critical intellectuals debate its future.

Exorcizing the Manifesto

Jacob Stevens on Gareth Stedman Jones, Introduction to The Communist Manifesto. Intellectual antecedents of the trumpet blast of 1848. Must today’s critics lower their political horizons?

Afflicted Powers

The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and spectacular warfare after September 11, in the view of the Bay Area’s Situationist collective.

The River of Time

Perry Anderson responds to Fredric Jameson’s ‘Politics of Utopia’ in NLR 25. Lessons for the glacial political present from Bloch and Adorno, Fourier and Lao Tse—and conditions for the renewal of utopian energies.

A Practical Utopianism?

Michael Rustin on Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized. A Brazilian alternative to both free-market and social-democratic orthodoxies—experimentalism as transformative political practice.

Rendezvous at Mumbai

The fourth World Social Forum, in the neoliberal capital of the global South. Soaring elite consumption, widening inequality and anti-Muslim pogroms of Shining India, with the New Hindu Right set for fresh electoral victory.

The Parallax View

The philosophical basis for social action, as recast in Kojin Karatani’s striking Transcritique. On Kant and Marx. Slavoj Žižek investigates the irreducible antinomies of production and circulation—or economics and politics—as envisioned from the gap in between.

Artificial Twins?

Jacob Stevens on Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Smith and Condorcet compacted into icons for the social market.

Sparks in the Township

South Africa as vanguard of post-colonial neoliberalism, and laboratory of its social consequences. From the townships around Johannesburg, rebellion against the privatizations of the anc regime, and the enrichment of a new political class.

Monsoon Risings

How the Indian version of the Three Gorges Dam—the great series of barrages planned by state governments and international financial institutions in the Narmada Valley—was fought to a provisional halt by village resistance, in a popular campaign with lessons for every society in the Third World.

On the Attack

The founder of the single most successful movement against neoliberal globalization, and architect of the World Social Forum, discusses the French origins and international growth of ATTAC. Its connexions with Le Monde diplomatique and vision of the battles against financial markets and privatization to come.

A Socialist Cassandra

Susan Watkins on Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. The distinctive intelligence of a continental socialist in Britain.

New Revolts Against the System

The longue durée of resistance to the established order: after a hundred and twenty years of socialist and nationalist revolts, does the World Social Forum represent a qualitatively new alignment of forces and strategies for change?

Force and Consent

As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.

The French Fiasco

The collapse of the Centre Left in France, after five years of Jospin’s complacent government: the whys and wherefores of its electoral debacle this spring, and the panic-stricken prostration to Chirac that followed it.

Beyond Civil Society

A Brazilian view of the World Social Forum, in its regional and international context. How the landscape of the world’s Left has changed, and whether the ideologies of non-governmental organization and civil society are capable of resisting what they criticize.

Grass-Roots Globalism

Replying to Michael Hardt with an alternative look at Porto Alegre, Tom Mertes argues that while the variety of movements and forces in the WSF is not to be reduced to a single scale, the differences between them are less to do with organization than strategy.

Pacific Panopticon

The Filipino analyst and organizer of Focus on the Global South, veteran of the years of Allende and Marcos, discusses the prospects for the World Social Forum after September 11, arguing for the need to link protests against the IMF and WTO to campaigns against US military expansion.

The Age of Identity?

Gopal Balakrishnan on Lutz Niethammer, Kollektive Identität. How rooted are current conceptions of collective identity in an ominous inter-war history, and what substitutes are on offer?

Landless Battalions

A leader of Brazil’s Sem Terra explains the history and geography of the world’s largest movement of the rural poor. How to occupy land, mobilize support, resist the media and the state under a tropical brand of the Third Way.

Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung?

The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre has become symbolic of the forces beginning to shape a front of common resistance to the pattern of imperial globalization. Yet its character and composition remain little understood. Michael Hardt analyses the debates within it, and their political potential.

Internationalism: a Breviary

The metamorphoses of nationalism and internationalism, from the time of Kant to the ‘revolution in military affairs’. Social bases, ideological forms, geopolitical locations.

The New Anarchists

Is the ‘anti-globalization movement’ anything of the kind? Active resistance is true globalization, David Graeber maintains, and its repertoire of forms is currently coming from the arsenal of a reinvented anarchism.

The Oracle of Post-Democracy

Gopal Balakrishnan on Sheldon Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. The first theorist of modern democracy in the twilight of what has become of it in his land of reference.

A Farmers' International?

The demolisher of McDonald’s explains his personal background, the history of the Peasants’ Confederation in France, and the international objectives of Via Campesina. Struggles in the countryside of the Massif Central or Karnataka as spear-points in the anti-globalization movement.

Barring the Doors

Jacob Stevens on Jeremy Harding, The Uninvited; Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees; and Teresa Hayter, Open Borders. The blockading of Europe’s frontiers against the arrival of those in fear or need, and the reasons why ‘aliens’ should be welcomed.

Why Europe Needs a Constitution

Germany’s leading philosopher argues that further development of the European Union requires both a mobilizing political project—positively differentiating the Old World from the New—and a formal Constitution, submitted to a popular referendum.

Raising a Ruckus

The operations and outlook of the Ruckus Society, leading conspirator behind the outrages at Seattle and elsewhere: America’s dynamo of direct action, in the vision of a key organizer.

Into the 21st Century

States, markets, firms, classes, movements—how are they inter-related and where are they moving in the new century? Göran Therborn offers a panorama of global politics that amounts to a powerful and original alternative to all existing readings of the state of the world.

Scurrying Towards Bethlehem

Behind the second Intifada lies a century of conflict in Palestine. What are its roots, and what are its prospects? The Oslo Accords, the Israeli landscape and the Arab world.

Reclaiming the Commons

The anti-globalization movement is the talk of the financial press. Naomi Klein asks how far it is against globalization and whether it is a movement, arguing it is better described as a broadening series of different struggles against privatization—in every sense.

The Punch Card and the Hourglass

Interviewed by García Márquez and Roberto Pombo just after the EZLN’s entry into Mexico City, Marcos explains the strategy of Zapatista patience and the literary origins of a revolutionary militant.

Mass Investment Culture

Consumption has long been the umbilical bond tying labour to capital. Is this beginning to shift towards investment, as passive participation in pension funds, and active speculation in mutual funds, become a mass phenomenon in North America?

Why Does the Emperor Need the Yakuza?

Japan’s flashy gangsters look to be the antithesis of its austere emperors. Bertell Ollman contends that there is a structural connexion between them. Rule by an unelected bureaucracy requires an inviolate imperial symbol for compensating legitimacy, which must in turn be shielded from queries or criticisms by criminal thugs. An American Marxist challenges the central taboo of Japanese public life.

US Elections: Testing Formula Two

If the eighties were the decade of the Right in the West, the nineties saw a comparable sweep by the Centre-Left. Does the loss of the US Presidency by the Democrats presage another turn of the wheel in Atlantic politics? With Bush at the helm in the New World, what are the prospects for the Gores of the Old?

The Muddles of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the right-minded rhetoric of diversity of the moment. What is its political substance? Brian Barry reads Britain’s Parekh Report and considers the animating philosophy behind it. How far are they compatible with an egalitarian universalism, and what are the implications for traditionalist minorities? Are doctrines of karma just a harmless metaphysical whim?

Mellon in Magnitogorsk

Tony Wood on Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. USSR and USA as alternative models of mechanized happiness in the inter-war world—and their outcome at the end of the Cold War.

The Origins of Atlantic Liberalism

Peter Gowan on Richard Tuck, Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. The origins of ‘liberal’ interventionism by the NATO powers today in the doctrines of colonial retribution and expropriation of the seventeenth century.

The Politics of Piety

Gopal Balakrishnan on Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. How radical is the new discourse of concern with race and religion?

Mexico: Permuting Power

Mexico’s new Foreign Minister discusses his country’s prospects under Fox, and explains the thinking behind the ‘Buenos Aires Consensus’ programme for Latin America which will face its first major test there. What is in store for the country after eight decades of PRI rule?

G. A. Cohen’s Revolution in Morals

Jacob Stevens on G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? From Marx’s theory of history to lessons from Old Testament and New for today’s guidance.

Fire at the Castle Gate

The Chinese intellectual scene has been transformed by the emergence of a New Left. Its leading theorist explains how and why the neo-liberal consensus of the early nineties broke down, and considers what a radical agenda should look like as social and political problems mount.