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The World and the Left

In a landmark analysis, Göran Therborn contextualizes the myriad new lefts that have emerged across the globe since the turn of the millennium.

Struggles of the Roofless

Amid the debacle of Bolsonaro’s rule, Guilherme Boulos—coordinator of Brazil’s Sem Teto and PSOL presidential candidate—speaks to Mario Sergio Conti about the political crisis, barrio psychoanalysis, the balance sheet of the Lula–Dilma governments, the politics of impeachment and the militancy of practical experience.

Contrasted Revolutions

Saskia Schäfer on John Sidel, Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia. The different paths and outcomes of anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia.

Meanings of June Fourth

J. X. Zhang on Wang Chaohua, Conglai jiu meiyou jiushizhu. A participant’s clear-eyed reflections on China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, three decades on.

September Surprise

What is the wider meaning of the recent mass youth protests across the Indonesian archipelago—Java, Sumatra, Papua, Sulawesi, Bali—and what do they portend for the second term of Jokowi, once the Obama-style candidate of ‘hope and change’?

Hot Earth Rebels

Interview with a leading activist from Extinction Rebellion. How the UK’s new climate militants adapted civil-disobedience theories and ‘flat management’ structures to shut down central London in the name of environmental emergency.

Red Flags In The Forest

Kheya Bag on Alpa Shah, Nightmarch. A Naxalite guerrilla platoon as the vantage point for a multi-faceted account of Indian society, and the state violence that advances extractive growth.

The French Insurgency

Analysis of the group dynamics and programme of the Gilets Jaunes, read through the lens of the Prison Notebooks—and against the surprising precedent of the Chartist movement’s political economy.

An Improbable Movement?

The policies and pretensions of a Bourbonnais president as background to the political insurgency of provincial France. Origins and complexion of the gilets jaunes mobilization, with the Elysée resorting to the worst police violence since May 68.

Mutinous Territory

Rebecca Lossin on Mauvaise Troupe, The ZAD and NoTAV. Oral history and barefoot ethnography combine in a participants’ account of territorial struggles in Piedmont and Brittany.

Company Town?

An archaeology of the radical dreams buried under Seattle’s glass towers, the expanding footprints of Amazon and Microsoft. Reverberations of the October Revolution on the far shore of the North Pacific, as Wobblies, loggers and shipyard workers rally to the general strike of 1919.

Spain’s Feminist Strike

What led millions to participate in Spain’s nationwide women’s strike—a stoppage of care work as well as wage labour? Assessment of the forces at play—movement organizing, the media, unions, parties—and the potential of 8M to tilt the political balance of forces.

Which Feminisms?

The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?

Lessons for Eavesdroppers

Nancy Hawker on Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic. Language as an instrument for the reproduction of the securitized state.

New Broom in Burkina Faso?

After ruling for a quarter-century with support from Washington and Paris, Burkinabè leader Blaise Compaoré was ejected by mass protests in October 2014. Alexandra Reza places Compaoré’s regime and its ouster in a historical context of dictatorship and dependency that has been repeatedly challenged by popular mobilization.

Oppositions

After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.

Personafication

The shift of artistic and activist practice towards the performance of personae. Sven Lütticken tracks the fraying limits of subjecthood through post-war action painting, Marcel Mariën’s surrealist-Blanquist parti imaginaire, the 1960s Dutch neo-avant-garde, the Invisible Committee, Rojava and artistic experiments with the political party-form.

Armenia’s Fuel Protests

Political life in post-Soviet Armenia has been forged on the anvil of militarized national defence against its larger neighbour, Azerbaijan. Can a new generation of activists succeed in bringing social questions to the fore? Examination of recent struggles against transport and electricity price rises.

Ireland’s Water Wars

Ireland’s status as poster-child for Eurozone austerity has been shaken by mass protests against privatized water charges, as the discredited Labour–Fine Gael government heads into elections. Daniel Finn investigates the rise of the movement and its political prospects, with local activists pushing beyond a cautious trade-union leadership.

Maidan Mythologies

Volodymyr Ishchenko on Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis. The Maidan and civil war from the perspective of an EU think-tank.

Scholarism on the March

Interview with the eighteen-year-old leader of Hong Kong’s radical school students. Joshua Wong discusses his personal and political formation, the battle against Beijing’s patriotic education syllabus and the Umbrella Movement’s three-month occupation of the city’s streets in the fight for democratization.

Nepal’s Maoists in Power

Achin Vanaik on Aditya Adhikari, The Bullet and the Ballot Box and Prashant Jha, Battles of the New Republic. Nepal’s Maoist revolution checked by Delhi and its satraps.

Class and Politics in Turkey’s Gezi Protests

What social forces have been mobilized in the mass protests of recent years? Following Göran Therborn and André Singer’s contributions in NLR 85, Erdem Yörük and Murat Yüksel examine the class backgrounds and political ideologies of the Gezi Park protesters, finding that manual workers outnumbered ‘new middle classes’.

New Masses?

What social forces are likely to challenge the supremacy of capital in the coming decades? An assessment of potential bases of resistance—from traditional communities overrun by the global market to factory workers and an expanding yet amorphous middle class.

Rebellion in Brazil

A sociological portrait of the protests that gripped the country in June 2013. Crossovers of class, ideology and generation on the major cities’ streets, as portents of deeper shifts under way.

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 Anti-Olympics

Always an avatar for the international order of the day—Victorian imperialism, Cold War rivalry, Pax Americana—the Olympics have joined the wto and G20 as focus for alter-globo protest. Lessons for London from the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, where artists, activists and indigenous organizers took on the spectacle of the five-ring circus.

Undocumented in America

Has the mass immigrants’ rights campaign of 2006 been asphyxiated by the Democrats’ embrace? Two Los Angeles activists recount the movement’s progress since the Chicano struggles of the 60s, and current defence of America’s sans-papiers from state and vigilante attacks.

Alter-Globo in Hong Kong

Hong Kong labour activist Au Loong-Yu discusses the impact of Chinese sovereignty on the former British colony, and Pacific Rim protests against the WTO. What prospects for an alter-globalization in the East?

The Chequered Rainbow

As tensions mount on the eve of national elections in Bolivia, a study of the longest insurrectionary cycle of any Latin American country, stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The explosive fusion of ethnic and class aspirations in the newest round of risings, overthrowing two presidents in as many years.

Chinese Labour Struggles

A railway worker caught up in the events of Tiananmen Square, now using his radio show to broadcast the problems of Chinese factory hands live on air. Han Dongfang describes life in the Red Army, student-worker unity in 1989, surviving TB and torture in prison and the China Labour Bulletin’s legal strategy. Can the PRC’s official trade unions be captured from below?

ATTAC Against the Treaty

Report from one of the unofficial headquarters of the campaign from below against the EU ‘constitution’, and dissection of its text as free-market manifesto for the 25-state Union. How long before Europeans are next allowed a vote?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.