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Brecht In L.A.
From the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a rediscovered appraisal of Bertolt Brecht’s war-time exile in California. Tracing the swirl of interconnections between salonnières and stars, exiles and dissidents, artists of stage and screen. Beyond Hollywood frustrations, what of a Brechtian cinema?
American Decline?
Predictions of American decline have multiplied over the past half-century, in tandem with the country’s expanding world power. Marco D’Eramo balances the strengths of a novel mode of dominion—military, financial, digital, diplomatic—against growing domestic strains levied by political deadlock and economic globalization.
Capital and Cybernetics
Current debates on techno-capitalism often underplay the relative autonomy of the digital realm. Responding to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in NLR 133/4, Timothy Ström outlines the abstractionist and expansionist logic of a novel cybernetic-capitalist form, originating at the apex of the US imperial system.
Two Atlantic Lefts
The legacies of the Sanders and Corbyn waves include new cohorts of democratic-socialist elected representatives. As a provisional synecdoche for the electoral turn, Caitlín Doherty examines the records to date of the Democrat ‘Squad’ on Capitol Hill and their Labour equivalents at Westminster.
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?
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.
Escalating Plunder
In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation.
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.
End of the Neoliberal Era?
Prognosis for the US economy, after a decade of unprecedented monetary stimulus. Does the distempered character of the recovery—soaring profits, feverish asset prices, anaemic wage growth—signal a structural crisis in the existing regime of capitalist accumulation, and transition to a new institutional framework?
The Year 1960
Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.
America’s Slowdown
Robert Gordon’s panoramic Rise and Fall of American Growth foregrounds exogenous explanations for the fall-off in us economic dynamism since the seventies. Challenging his account, Michel Aglietta explores the role financial rents and shareholder agendas have played in sapping growth—and prospects for a new era of eco-tech innovations.
Home Alone
Costs of America’s imperial project registered in the emotional damage inflicted on its soldiers, and multiplier effects on those around them. Contrasting perspectives—reportage, blockbuster, trauma-group documentary—on men and war, as veterans’ suicides overtake us battlefield casualties.
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?