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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.
Landscapes of Capital
A critical engagement with the work of Brett Christophers, whose books—The New Enclosure, Rentier Capitalism, Our Lives in Their Portfolios and The Price Is Wrong—unfold a novel critique of the ‘rentier stage’ of contemporary capitalism, in the tradition of radical historical geography developed by Lefebvre, Harvey and Davis.
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.
Times of Interest
In a striking contribution to the debate on secular stagnation, Nic Johnson examines the longue durée tendency of the rate of interest to fall. From the emergence of public debt in early-modern Europe to the faltering of investment and near-zero or negative real interest rates, running below the rate of inflation. A case for socializing the deployment of capital?
The End of Financial Hegemony?
The 2022 upsurge in inflation read as the birth pangs of a new macroeconomic regime, involving the relative demotion of finance and unravelling of over-accumulated fictitious capital. But finance is a master blackmailer, Durand warns, and may slow the devaluation of financial assets to a crawl.
Euphoria of the Rentier?
Are bloated finance and the information economy signs of something other—and possibly worse—than capitalism? If the latter’s defining characteristic is growth, might an era typified by stagnation signal its supersession? An attempt to bring into dialogue the work of Brett Christophers, McKenzie Wark and Aaron Benanav.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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’.
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.