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A Proudhon For Postmoderns?

The politics of inequality in Thomas Piketty’s monumental Capital and Ideology. Enthusiasms and blind spots of ‘participatory socialism’, consensus and counter-movement, read as a 21st-century iteration of the tradition that descends from Proudhon and Polanyi, against the background hum of r > g.

Value in Motion

How to re-engineer the compound-growth spiral of the capital- accumulation process? A global blueprint for challenging the profit motive, pitting process against the atomism of the neoclassical tradition, in the search for a workable use-value alternative.

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.

Dollarization of the Eurozone?

Is an erosion of the monetary and financial autonomy of the EU underway? John Grahl tracks indices of informal dollarization through the credit markets that may be undermining the coherence of the Eurozone.

World Asymmetries

Aaron Benanav on Matthew Klein & Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars. Hobson revived for a provocative new analysis of global inequality, with solutions sought from Keynes.

Dreams and Nightmares of the World’s Middle Classes

A survey of new shifts within the world’s vast ‘in-between’ classes and their contrasting trajectories in North and South. How should their theorization—or ideologization?—by development economists and financial journalists be read?

Pandemonium in Brazil

Unravelling of the Bolsonaro presidency in the face of mounting opposition and a contagion threatening to wreak havoc on the favelas.

India’s Starvation Measures

The chaos caused by Modi’s ill-prepared lockdown, as migrant workers set out for their villages and death from starvation looms as a greater threat than the disease.

Sanctions and Sickness

Battling the pandemic in hard-hit Iran, hampered by Washington’s punitive sanctions regime.

The Philosopher’s Epidemic

While Agamben denounces the authoritarian nature of the COVID–19 shutdowns, a Swedish tycoon trembles at the mass wrath their economic consequences may provoke. Can they both be right?

A Planetary Pandemic

“This number of nlr opens with a set of texts on the covid-19 crisis. Coursing round the world, the virus plays the role of an etching acid that reveals the lineaments—political, economic, social, cultural—of the uneven landscape beneath. Less lethal than such zoonotic forerunners as . . .” read more

Lemongrass and Prayer

Bumbling ministers, regional rivalries and pious stigmatization of the victims compound inadequate hospital provision in Indonesia’s belated response to COVID–19, amid the uncounted dead.

The Monster Enters

Opening a set of reflections on COVID–19, the author of The Monster at Our Door puts the novel virus in its epidemiological context.

Wuhan Diary

Notes from the epicentre of the pandemic, taken from the film-maker’s remarkable multimedia postings under lockdown in Wuhan.

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.

Situationism à L’envers?

Building on the extended review by Cédric Durand in NLR 116/117, Perry Anderson seeks clues to the politics and method behind Adam Tooze’s Crashed in the author’s wider oeuvre. From the Peace of 1919 to the dollar swap-lines of 2008, the oft-heralded rise of a beneficent American hegemon.

Neo-Impressionist Hegemon?

Anders Stephanson on Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire. A reading of America’s global power through its territorial possessions, from ocean archipelagos to military bases.

In the Crisis Cockpit

Cédric Durand on Adam Tooze, Crashed. Epic account of the financial crisis and the decade of political aftershocks that followed.

Development’s Shadow

Jan Breman on Michael Levien, Dispossession without Development. India’s real-estate development through the eyes of its excluded.

Artwork as Critique

Zöe Sutherland on Marcus Verhagen, Flows and Counterflows. Comparative survey of how contemporary artists have engaged with the invisible dynamics of globalization through their work.

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?

Finance and Power

Geoffrey Ingham on Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. A former banker’s Marxist account of the imperialist dynamics of international finance and the preponderance of the Square Mile as the bureau de change of the world.

Geographies of Ignorance

De-exoticization of the faraway in the age of inter-continental travel, matched by growing blanks in the map of national space. Marco D’Eramo on the selective epistemologies of globalization.

Dynamics of Inequality

Behind the political upsets in the Atlantic world lie far-reaching shifts in the distribution of global wealth. Göran Therborn assesses the path-breaking research of Branko Milanovic on world income trends.

Road to Globalism

Anders Stephanson on John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power. Rise of American globalism, from Wilson to Truman.

The New Neoliberalism

If the ruling economic paradigm remains traceable to Mont Pèlerin, how to distinguish the present from the moment that brought Thatcher and Reagan to power? A periodization of neoliberalism, from anti-socialist insurgency, through centre-left stewardship, to the inchoate ideologies of the post-crash era.

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.

Europe’s Other Periphery

The fate of the East European economies in the transition from COMECON to EU. From post-communist slump to the politics of austerity, by way of industrial decline, wage collapses, external debt and buy-outs. The emergence of new dependencies, financial and industrial.

$1.90 a Day: What Does It Say?

The World Bank claims global poverty will soon fall below 10 per cent, but do its figures deserve their international legitimacy? Sanjay Reddy and Rahul Lahoti probe the assumptions and methodologies on which the Bank’s assertions are based, and suggest an alternative.

Dock Life

The history of global capitalism as inscribed in the changing face of the port city, from the teeming harbours of sail-era Amsterdam via the industrial hoards of the Cokeport to the great abstract desert of contemporary Rotterdam’s container terminals.

White Gold, Black Labour

Robin Blackburn on Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Can the history of a commodity supply a new perspective on the emergence of global capitalism?

Bankspeak

What can quantitative linguistic analysis reveal about global institutions? From Bretton Woods to the present, the language of World Bank reports has undergone telling modulations. Moretti and Pestre track the decline of concrete referents and active verbs, the triumph of acronyms over nation-states—and irresistible rise of ‘governance’.

How to Mishandle a Crisis

Adam Tooze on Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors. How Milton Friedman’s students, scholars of the Great Depression, helped stoke the financial crisis of 2008.

Empire Edgemanship

Anders Stephanson on Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume IV: Globalizations, 1945–2011. Strengths and frailties of the climax to a unique macro-sociological enterprise, as it reaches the theoretical sands of the contemporary world.

The Chimera of Global Convergence

Has the rise of the BRICs weakened the West’s grip on core sectors of the world economy? Sean Starrs weighs impressions of Western decline against the empirical evidence, finding plentiful signs of enduring US and European corporate power.

How Will Capitalism End?

Its challengers apparently vanquished, the main threat to capitalism may now come from disorders that lurk within the system itself. Wolfgang Streeck diagnoses its crisis symptoms, from persistent stagnation to global anarchy, and asks what lies in store as they multiply.

The Quinoa Hack

Staple of Andean diets long before the Spanish conquest, quinoa has lately become a global health-food commodity—with dubious results for Bolivia’s campesinos. Josh Berson maps out the limits of food justice pursued through consumerist techno-fixes.

Dynamics of Inequality

A leading French economist discusses the historical evolution of global wealth and income imbalances. After the levelling shocks of the 20th century, will the 21st bring a return to the longue durée dominance of inherited fortunes?

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.

A Bogus Concept?

Jan Breman on Guy Standing, The Precariat. Emergence of a global ‘dangerous class’?

Guestworkers: A Taxonomy

A typology of Gastarbeiter programmes and their function in capitalist labour regimes, from Wilhelmine Prussia to the Gulf monarchies. Side effects of attempts to import a disposable reserve army of labour, and the tensions they provoke between capital accumulation and state legitimacy.

China’s Rise Stalled?

Hung Ho-fung on Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing. A Wall Street insider’s sceptical look at prospects for an orderly recalibration of the world economy.

Finance for Anarchists

Robin Blackburn on David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Anthropological enquiry into the fluctuating forms of money and credit over the longue durée.

Empires at War

Adam Tooze on Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume III: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945. The world-spanning crises of the early 20th century seen through the lens of historical sociology.

A Liberal Geoculture?

Jennifer Pitts on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. A seminal multi-volume account of the ‘capitalist world-economy’ reaches the long 19th century.

Class in the 21st Century

From São Paulo to Beijing, a rising middle class has been hailed by liberal commentators as a bulwark for consumption and democracy in the decades ahead. Taking stock of these claims, Göran Therborn offers a magisterial overview of the global class landscape and the still prodigious numerical weight of manual workers within it.

Life and Death in Annawadi

Jan Breman on Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Close-quarters chronicle of life in a Mumbai slum-settlement.

A New Global Depression?

Interview with the author of The Dollar Crisis, one of the few analyses to predict the 2008 financial meltdown. Richard Duncan tracks its causes to the credit explosion unleashed by the fiat-dollar system, in toxic symbiosis with the global wage deflation caused by manufacturing’s shift to the East.

Citizens as Customers

Post-Fordist capitalism has transformed consumers’ expectations, offering limitless diversification of commodities. Wolfgang Streeck explores the implications for a public sphere which cannot hope to match the cornucopia of the market. The consumption of politics by the politics of consumption?

Another Turn Of The Screw?

Beneath the roiling surface of the Euro-crisis, a further chapter of the EU integration project is underway. Susan Watkins on the institutional machinery Berlin is imposing across the Union, and the political stakes—and hypocrisies—laid bare by the struggle.