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The Long Downturn and Its Political Results

Responding to the wide-ranging debate sparked by their ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ (NLR 138), Riley and Brenner expand the temporal frame of their analysis of capitalist stagnation as an endogenous feature, incurable by bubbles and bailouts—and rethink the nature of the ‘political capitalism’ that results.

Sermons For Princes

Dylan Riley on Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. The FT’s chief economics commentator blames the imbalances of rentier capitalism, not global trade, for political disaffection with ruling elites.

Seven Theses on American Politics

Bidenism analysed as the outcome of a bipartisan lurch towards growthless Keynesianism, in a new stage of capitalist accumulation emerging from the long downturn. Classes—and class politics—redefined in a strikingly original intervention.

Capitalist Functionalism?

A critical rejoinder to David Harvey’s reflections on the Grundrisse in NLR 130. If capital automatically responds to a falling rate of profit by seeking out a larger mass of labour, how does that square with the facts of the business cycle?

Lockdown Limbo

Personal-sociological reflections on a pandemic year. From hospital consulting room to virtual seminar, rural Kentucky to affluent Berkeley, household isolation as division of labour, and appearances and realities of the wider social order.

Faultlines

American politics cast as a zero-sum battle between party coalitions for state-led divisions of the spoils—cheap money, bailouts, health insurance, tax—lending the electoral battle its peculiar intensity. Dominant and recessive logics of the party system in a stagnant economy.

Real Utopia or Abstract Empiricism?

Where to locate real utopias, as conceptualized by Wright, in the historical context of capitalist development? A rejoinder to Burawoy, emphasizing production over marketization, Marx over Polanyi, and analyses of the present over visions of the future, as the key to this theoretical conundrum.

What Is Trump?

The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.

Metaphysicking the West

Dylan Riley on Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe. ‘The West’ as normative construct—and narrative telos—in a moralizing account from Berlin of the 20th century’s wars and revolutions.

American Brumaire?

The electoral watersheds of 2016 signalled a rejection of the global-neoliberal formula of rule, but no viable establishment alternative exists. In its absence, Riley argues, Trump may offer a neo-Bonapartist substitute for a coherent hegemonic project.

Politics as Theatre?

Dylan Riley on David Runciman, The Confidence Trap. Parables for the present crisis drawn from liberal democracy’s most difficult hours.

Property Leading the People?

Dylan Riley on Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Genealogy and idiosyncratic extension of the Marxian concept.

Southern Questions

Dylan Riley on Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. Historical reframing of the New Deal for the age of Obama.

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.

Tony Judt: A Cooler Look

Few Anglophone intellectuals have received such posthumous acclaim as the Director of the Remarque Institute, leading contributor to the New York Review of Books, and late champion of social-democracy. Regularly compared to George Orwell, if not Isaiah Berlin, does any careful examination of his oeuvre sustain such panegyrics?

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.

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.

Enigmas of Fascism

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, Fascists and Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism. Alternative versions of the rise of a paramilitary Right in interwar Europe: were fascist movements ideologically coherent or inchoate, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?