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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

The Politics of Piety

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

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.

Gaberlunzie’s Return

The historian of Machiavelli and Gibbon—New Zealand originator of a ‘new British history’ framed beyond Anglocentrism—looks at Tom Nairn’s After Britain. Is the United Kingdom really fated to disintegration, or absorption into Europe?

Hardt and Negri’s Empire

Gopal Balakrishnan on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Globalization as a new Roman order, awaiting its early Christians.

Britain After Nairn

How far can the path from Thatcher to Blair be written as a dynamic of Ukanian constitutional involution, or devolution? Francis Mulhern questions whether classes can be so quickly bundled off-stage. Is it possible to speak of nations—English, Scottish, Irish or any other—as political communities, without social or ideological dispositions?

A Left Within the Place of Nothingness

Japan’s Left is the least known of any major state, outside its own borders. Asada Akira situates it in a wide-angled panorama of his country: Japanese political, philosophical and cultural life from inter-war days to the dissatisfied, postmodern present.

Treading Water?

McKibbin argues that New Labour's constitutional tensions are inherited from the Thatcherite project of centralizing power in order to promote a neoliberal political economy; and Labour's previous commitments to devolution. Tocqueville's view of constitutional inheritance and evolution is cited in opposition to Mair's model of a coherent Blairite strategy.

Defending Utopia

Terry Eagleton on Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia. What surer sign of accommodation to the status quo than pompous funerals of the utopian imagination? Masks and corollaries of political resignation.

On No Logo

Tom Mertes on Naomi Klein, No Logo. Emblems of ownership: from branding hides to clothes, cattle to people? A Canadian reporter’s stinging attack on the new corporate logic behind logo-mania.

Globalization and Political Strategy

The all-purpose G-word, as slogan and euphemism, needs taking apart. Fredric Jameson dismantles its different components—technological, political, cultural, economic and social—and reassembles them into a coherent target for collective resistance.