Advanced search
Refine search
- NLR
- Sidecar
Migration: A View From Below
Against both the catastrophist and ‘win-win’ perspectives on immigration, this class-based examination shows that in-country and in-region movement far outstrips the traffic on the ‘migratory corridors’ joining poor countries to rich. Fieldwork from India and Indonesia reveals the social determinants shaping the conditions of departure.
The Future and the Left
Göran Therborn replies to Oliver Eagleton’s critique of ‘The World and the Left’ (NLR 137). Debates on the nature of dialectics and the triadic crisis of climate breakdown, imperial geopolitics and rising inequality. Could Bloch still be right about the grounds for rational hope?
Afropessimism’s Radical Abdication
In radical counter-position to the ameliorative civil-rights tradition, the Afropessimist perspective blends memoir and theory, lyricism and abstraction, into a nihilistic vision of ‘slaveness’ as founding condition of black American life. Loïc Wacquant probes the political logic of this ‘excluvisist brand of race primordialism’.
Therborn’s World-Casting
Critical engagement with Göran Therborn’s global analysis of 21st-century society and its prospects for the left. If the contradictions that anchored 20th-century socialism have been surpassed, what has taken their place? Perspective for an emancipatory politics working aslant the grain of history.
Topographies Of Capital
Engagement with the recent work of leading American socialist feminist Nancy Fraser, drawing out continuities between Cannibal Capitalism’s multi-dimensional account of the present conjuncture—encompassing crises of capitalist accumulation, gendered social reproduction, global warming and democratic politics—and Fraser’s earlier theses on recognition, redistribution and representation.
Society: New and Old
How far did Britain’s class structure alter in the sixties, with the onset of the ‘affluent society’? As counterpoint to prevalent myths and pieties, Hobsbawm supplies a mordant panorama of shifting habits and customs against a backdrop of polarized class and cultural divergence.
Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason
Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a ‘neofeudal’ age, as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street extract non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors, Evgeny Morozov returns to classic debates over the transition to capitalism to question the relation of the economic and the political.
Resolving the Trouble with ‘Race’
In a landmark essay, Loïc Wacquant proposes a new analytical framework aspiring to encompass the whole spectrum of ethnicity. Under what conditions does ‘ordinary’ ethnicity, as self-attributed social identity, on a plane of symbolic equality with others, become devalorized as an otherattributed categorization, stamped by stigma and inequality?
Caste, Race—And Class
A critical engagement with Isabel Wilkerson’s revival of the ‘caste school of race relations’ that flourished in the US social sciences in the 1940s. How might other international outcast groups—Dalits, Jews, Roma, Burakumin—compare to African-Americans? What logics explain their unique condition?
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.
Inequality and World Political Landscapes
Critical assessment of a landmark international survey of electoral demographics, mapping the social fractures blunting opposition to inegalitarian politics. The weight in these of income and education, class and identity, and the longer historical arc of national political orders. What is the outlook for neoliberal economics after the pandemic, not least in the country where they were first violently imposed?
Theory of Needs
Marxism is premised on the possibility of a political economy structured to meet human needs, rather than generate private profit. Could a New Deal capitalism in principle be capable of satisfying them? Is it even possible to disentangle ‘real’ needs from socially constructed ones? Translation of two texts from a 1942 seminar on the question of need.
The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media
In the 1990s, the Hegelian notion of a struggle for recognition was reclaimed by critical theorists to conceptualize the politics of subaltern identities. But in platform-mediated civil society, even the powerful seem to feel under-recognized. What becomes of the struggle for recognition in the reputation economy?
Into the Bramble Patch
With Biden pledging to restore the ‘rules-based order’, a redemptive history—describing the triumph of a peaceful new world order over its war-torn forerunner—has taken shape in the field of international legal theory. Tor Krever scrutinizes this narrative through the work of two recent propagators.
A Tale of Two Marxisms
The political-intellectual career of sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), traced by a friend and collaborator. Amid the demise of actually existing socialism, a passage from class analysis to utopian imaginings, science to critique. Can Polanyi offer insights on how these strands might be joined?
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.
Empire, Twenty Years On
If Empire was, for many, the signature text for the age of globalization, how do its theses fare now, in an era of rising nationalism and protracted crisis? In a landmark update, the authors examine how the twin spheres of power and (re)production have spun out of sync—symptoms of a system that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, works by breaking down.
The Bond of Shame
Is shame for one’s country, not love of it, the truer mark of belonging? Lineaments of a political emotion, at the intersection of biology and history, from Nestor’s invocation on the battlefield of Troy to Primo Levi’s remembrance of the Red Army. How might we imagine the boundaries of a shame-based community?
A New Form of Capitalism?
Does an expanding circuit of commodities whose value is indexed to their rarity and antiquity suggest that capitalism is secreting a novel ‘economy of enrichment’? Replying to Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in NLR 98, Nancy Fraser argues that Marx’s Holy Trinity of profit, interest and rent remains key to a taxonomy of contemporary commodification.
Enrichment, Profit, Critique
Responding to Fraser, Boltanski and Esquerre extend their comparative analysis of capitalist valorization types, adding to their original trio—standard form, asset form, collection form—another type, the trend form, and arguing that today’s ‘integral capitalism’ encompasses all four.
Counterstrike West
Conceptions of a revolution from the right in the era of European fascism, and an activist overcoming of conservative dejection at the fate of the West. Political and philosophical imaginings of an alternate capitalist modernity, capable of settling accounts with decadence and Bolshevism.
The Return of the Repressed
Is the long reign of neo-liberalism coming to an end, struck by the untoward blows of Brexit, Trump and spread of populist insurgencies across Europe, as victims of its pattern of globalization start to find a voice? If so, with no radical alternative yet in sight, is a strange interregnum looming, where ‘everything is possible and nothing consequential’?
The Polish Case
Within the new topology of conservative regimes emerging from the Great Recession, that of Poland’s Law and Justice government has a distinctive character. Leszek Koczanowicz describes the fracturing of the neoliberal-nationalist formula that had persisted since the 1990s, the second term turned as anti-Western social critique against the first.
Contradictions of Capital and Care
Nancy Fraser tracks the reconfiguration of the relations of social reproduction under successive regimes of accumulation—‘separate spheres’, male breadwinner, dual-income household. Are the exactions of financialized capitalism now serving to undermine its lifeworld?
The Economic Life of Things
Collection and asset—two ideal-typical logics through which value and price are established and objects ‘enriched’. From luxury goods to heritage villages and the mimetic effects of speculation; as industrial production is transferred to East Asia, the emergence of a new kind of capitalist economy.
Marx’s Lost Theory
In a landmark re-reading of Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, Mike Davis draws out the theoretical propositions on class and nation, world-market and inter-state rivalry, that underpin the seminal political writings. Repudiation of politics as discourse pur, and revaluation of Marx’s ‘middle-level concepts’ for the mediated expression of complex social interests.
Socialize the Data Centres!
The leading iconoclast of Internet euphoria recounts his path from schooling in Belarus through training in Bulgaria to NGO work in Central Europe and fame as author of The Net Delusion in the United States. A radicalized view of the transformations required in the information infrastructures of the present for any egalitarian future.