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Neo-Labourism in the Saddle

Still lagging its G7 peers in recovery from the 2008 crisis, and faced with the impasse of Brexit, Britain is haunted again by the spectre of decline. As Labour returns to office, tight-lipped about its plans, Tom Hazeldine analyses the class character of the vote and the regionally skewed economy that underlies it.

Stakeholder Capitalism, Again

Oliver Eagleton on Will Hutton, This Time No Mistakes. Lessons for the incoming Labour government on humanizing British capitalism, from a proselytizer of Blair’s Third Way.

Explaining the Irrationality of War

Drawing on eight years of comparative-historical research, Michael Mann overturns accepted wisdom on the bellicosity of democracies, the economic grounds for war and the rational calculations of states in a rivalrous world system.

After Populism?

Cihan Tuğal on Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment. Historicizing the Euro-Atlantic left of the 2010s and the post-crisis conditions that shaped it.

Unfinished Business?

Francis Mulhern on Philip Cunliffe et al., Taking Control. A radical-democratic manifesto for Britain after leaving the European Union.

Party and State in China

Unlocking the conceptual monolith of the ‘party-state’, Nathan Sperber sets the evolving relationship between the CCP and the vast governmental apparatus through which it rules in comparative historical context—revealing novel features of the Xi Jinping era.

Some Questions about Political Capitalism

Responding to Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ in NLR 138, Tim Barker probes the analysis of global manufacturing overcapacity and declining profit rates on which their diagnosis of a new regime of ‘political capitalism’ is based. Does Bidenomics entail just another round of politically engineered upwards redistribution?

Shifting Currents

Alberto Toscano on Pierre Dardot, Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre, Le choix de la guerre civile. Neoliberal rule as coercion, from Santiago to Paris.

The Meanings of Brexit

There has been remarkably little discussion of what Brexit means in theoretical terms for attempts to understand the limits of present-day national sovereignty and the character of the EU. In the first of two contributions on these questions, Cunliffe asks why UK politics has changed so little since ‘taking back control’.

Ukrainian Voices?

Ishchenko explores the paradoxes of a politics of national-identity recognition in the absence of national-economic redistribution. What does it mean to ‘decolonize Ukraine’ in neoliberal times?

Lessons of the Podemos Experiment

A decade after the 15-M movement, how to assess Podemos’s strategy and the ‘populist hypothesis’ on which it was based? After three years in government with the Spanish Socialists, a political and intellectual balance sheet from two participants.

Fortunes of the Green New Deal

Comparative assessment of the literature of GND-ology—policy proposal, political strategy and polemic—in light of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. What is the political import of this impoverished descendant of the GND imaginary, and how might eco-strategy need to reconfigure itself in the new conjuncture?

Thinking Like a Member-State

In the second of two pieces on the meanings of Brexit, Bickerton examines the outcomes of the UK’s 2016–20 upheaval through the concept of the ‘member-state’, its elites tied to transnational regimes, while a void gapes between politicians and voters. Even after quitting the EU, does Britain remain a ‘member’ in this sense?

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.

Gradualism’s Prophet

Alexander Zevin on Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist. Does the author of On Liberty offer a way forward for the left?

Roadmaps after Corbyn

Examination of the UK’s dominant political cultures, social liberalism and national conservatism, battling for hegemony within and between the major parties, and buffeted by economic storms. A sober reckoning with the lessons of Corbynism and hopes invested in an unreformable Labour Party.

Everyone a Legislator

What is the principal legacy today of Gramsci’s writing on politics? Often taken to be a theory of the party as a ‘modern prince’ derived from Machiavelli, can this still be so in an epoch when political parties are everywhere in decline? Michael Denning argues that what now matters in Gramsci’s work is his theory of organizing as a premonitory form of democratic legislation.

Naive Questions on Degrowth

In a probing contribution to NLR’s green strategy debate, Kenta Tsuda asks what growth is and whether humanity could do without it; how resource use might be measured; what political problems the implementation of degrowth would entail. In an era of stagnation and sputtering economies, can out-of-control growth explain the climate crisis?

Turkey at the Crossroads?

Reconfiguration of the AKP regime, amid domestic upheaval, economic turbulence, regional devastation and a growing gravitational pull from Eurasia. Contrasts and continuities of Erdoğan’s militarized foreign policy with the liberal-Islamic formula lauded by the West.

Climates of Capital

Against mere environmentalism, Nancy Fraser places global heating within a general interlocking social crisis. History and theory of capital’s contradictory relation to nature, and the necessity of combined struggle over energy, labour, politics and care, in the latest instalment of NLR’s eco-strategy debate.

The Fractured Right

Susan Watkins on Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy. The new right-wing forces in America and Europe assailed by a fierce old-right opponent.

Trench Warfare

Granular analysis of America’s 2020 election results in rustbelt counties, the small-town Midwest, Red exurbs and Texan borderlands. With record turnouts on both sides of an otherwise immobile voter divide, the economy—not the pandemic—provides a key to the equivocal verdict on Trump’s four years in office.

Appointment by the People?

Tom Mertes on Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? The oligarchic mechanism at the heart of the US presidential system and persistent failure of attempts to reform it.

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.

Ukania Perpetua?

Beset by simultaneous crises of class, state and nation, is the UK once again haunted by the spectre of decline? Perry Anderson presents an analysis spanning economy, polity, ideology, territory and diplomacy, testing how far the successive theses offered by NLR can be brought to bear on the present moment.

Politics and Pandemics

As the 2020 US election looms, how to assess the political fall-out of COVID-19 to date, across a world landscape of varying state capacities and social formations? Xi and Modi, Vizcarra and Bolsonaro, Merkel and Trump in comparative perspective.

Chosen Nations

Nick Burns on Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism. An Israeli conservative defends the differentials of national states against the universalizing ethic of US and EU imperialism.

Engels’s Second Theory

The author of Buying Time detects a state-political supplement to Marxian social theory in Engels’s analyses of 19th-century militarism. The interplay of modes of production and destruction, class struggle and international warfare, from the Crimea to the War on Terror.

Impeachment as a Social Form

How to account for the recurrent forms of populism, from Bonaparte to Trump? Components of a theory in Marx’s account of variant ‘lesser’ modes of exploitation—rent, tax, interest­—and their necessary forms of appearance.

Automation and the Future of Work—2

Concluding his two-part analysis of technological development and global labour-market dysfunction, Aaron Benanav rebuts the automation theorists’ call for Universal Basic Income with a counter-proposal. Can we invent the future by working backwards from the world we want to build?

Snipers in the Kitchen

Amid ongoing political turbulence in Latin America, Juan Carlos Monedero mobilizes the resources of state theory, from Gramsci to Poulantzas, to provide a comparative critical analysis of the cycle of left governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil.

Germany Redivided

Wide-ranging perspective on the German political landscape under Merkel, and left debates on how best to counteract the ascent of the AfD, from one of Die Linke’s Bundestag members.

Notes for a Feminist Manifesto

Opposed to ‘lean in’ liberal iterations, three activist-scholars premise a militant feminism for the many, inspired by La huelga feminista of 8 March. The politics of social reproduction and the imperative of wider solidarities: the women’s struggle retooled for the multiple crises of late capitalism.

Meditations on a Corpse

Cool post-mortem on the 1936 Popular Front government in France, written while it was still technically alive. Centrality of consciousness and importance of timing, in politics as in music—and Machiavelli as a better guide than Marx.

After the Take-Over

In the wake of Temer’s take-over, Brazil’s crisis viewed from the perspective of the favelas. Analysis of the gendered conditions in the peripheries—now under redoubled assault—and their potential for mobilization against the conservative wave.

Calmly on the Universal Bugbear

Tim Barker on John Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. Virtues and paradoxes of a level-headed antidote to the bien-pensant Atlantic hysteria of the hour.

Politics as Theatre?

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

The Heirs of Gramsci

Transformations of the Prison Notebooks’ fertile problematic of hegemony by a quartet of thinkers—Hall, Laclau, Guha, Arrighi—from Jamaica, Buenos Aires, Bengal, Milan. Coercion and persuasion, ideology and economic interest, national and inter-state systems as means for thinking Thatcherism’s ascendancy, populist strategies, peasant rebellion, post-colonial rule and the geo-political logics of American power.

Softening Up the State

What advice might Machiavelli offer critics of the contemporary market nation-state? In this striking reconstruction, lessons on corruption, inequality, immigration, mobilization—from Rome and Sparta, Florence and the Venetian Republic—yield proposals for open borders and universal basic income.

Property Leading the People?

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

Socialism as a Regulative Idea?

In The Structure of World History, Kōjin Karatani attempts a radical reconstruction of historical materialism, from early nomadism to post-capitalist society. Mauss, Hobbes and Marx mobilized as companion thinkers of exchange; Kant as ethico-political prophet. Rob Lucas queries the speculative history of one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals.

Understanding Podemos

The general secretary of Spain’s new anti-austerity party sets out the strategic thinking behind its bid to become a national force. Incipient crisis of the post-Franco regime, mired in corruption and economic collapse, and opportunities for a popular-political formation, mobilizing the social discontent of the indignados.

Spain On Edge

Responding to NLR’s questions, Pablo Iglesias discusses the regime’s counter-attack, the example of Syriza and the political geography of austerity in Spain. After May 2015’s regional elections, can Podemos forge a coalition strategy to navigate between marginalization and the lethal consequences of a PSOE embrace?

Culture After Google

Emilie Bickerton on Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform. Diagnosis of a cultural production laid low by digital consolidation, and political proposals for a push-back.

The Politics of Exit

Wolfgang Streeck on Peter Mair, Ruling the Void. Diagnosis of Western democracy’s hollowing in the final work of a political-science master.

Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode

Behind exchange there lurks production, but what is more hidden still? The disavowed conditions of capital’s possibility—in reproduction, politics and nature—as sites for expanded anti-capitalist struggle.

Grandeur and Misery of the Social State

Kafka’s day job, defending injured factory workers, as starting point for an illuminating study of the West’s social-protection mechanisms. Mixed legacies and uncertain future of a system built to mitigate the tensions of industrialization.

Populism and the New Oligarchy

Tracking the terms ‘populism’ and ‘the people’ from the 19th century, Marco D’Eramo offers a striking new interpretation of their current applications—the first levelled indiscriminately at any political force that steps outside the bounds of convention, the second banished from the scene.

Political Cultures of South Korea

The presidential victory of Park Geun-Hye, the dictator’s daughter, as bid for a refurbished conservative hegemony in the ROK. Origins of the elite in colonial collaboration and anti-Communist modernization, and its attempts to re-hegemonize the country’s historical trajectory.

The Last White Election?

Panoramic survey of America’s political landscape as revealed by November’s vote, with age, gender, ethnicity and geography the volatile determinants of Obama’s victory. Within an increasingly polarized ideological force field, how will the coming struggles unfold between Democratic President and Senate and a Republican House, itself consumed by turmoil?