CONTENTS
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Richard Duncan: 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.
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Donald Sassoon: Eric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012
Appreciation of the historian as unrepentant Communist. Donald Sassoon recalls Hobsbawm’s relations with the global movement he joined in Berlin during the Popular Front era, and his contributions as scholar and panoramic comparativist.
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Rob Lucas: The Critical Net Critic
Advances in information technology have generated both delirious boosterism and gloomy prognoses of computer-assisted decline. Rob Lucas engages with the sceptical current exemplified by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, tracing its conceptual underpinnings and identifying its lacunae—political, economic, historical.
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Daniel Finn: Order Reigns in The Hague
Daniel Finn reports on September’s Dutch election, where the Liberal and Labour parties rallied to prevent Holland following the Greek example. Origins and orientations of the Socialist Party that briefly threatened the Pax Bruxelliana, and strategic lessons for the left from its campaign.
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Rafael Correa: Ecuador's Path
The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?
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Robin Osborne: Cultures of Empire: Greece and Rome
How was Roman imperial rule over Greece legitimated in the minds of conquerors and subjects alike? The mutual reverberations of an Augustan cultural revolution that brought Hellenism to the empire’s core and diverted Greeks to the glories of the past.
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Julian Stallabrass: Radical Camouflage at Documenta 13
Dispatch from dOCUMENTA, the quinquennial art exhibition in Kassel, where a rhetoric of diversity and ‘anti-logocentrism’ serves as smokescreen for the contradictions and complicities of the art business.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Augusta Conchiglia on Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa, Kamerun! The first full account of France’s hidden colonial war in West Africa. .
- Clive Dilnot on Chris Killip, Seacoal. Scenes of industrial decay in 1980s Northumberland as images of a workless future.
- Bryan Palmer on Steven Hirsch & Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World. Panorama of libertarian left rebels, from Latin America to Ukraine, Cairo to Korea.
Articles:
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Rafael Correa,
‘Ecuador's Path’
The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?
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Donald Sassoon,
‘Eric Hobsbawm’
Appreciation of the historian as unrepentant Communist. Donald Sassoon recalls Hobsbawm’s relations with the global movement he joined in Berlin during the Popular Front era, and his contributions as scholar and panoramic comparativist.
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Julian Stallabrass,
‘At dOCUMENTA 13’
Dispatch from dOCUMENTA, the quinquennial art exhibition in Kassel, where a rhetoric of diversity and ‘anti-logocentrism’ serves as smokescreen for the contradictions and complicities of the art business.
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Augusta Conchiglia,
‘Ghosts of Cameroon’
Augusta Conchiglia on Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa, Kamerun! The first full account of France’s hidden colonial war in West Africa.
Editorials:
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2011,
Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?
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Arab Concatenation,
From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.
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Concert of Powers,
A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.
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NPT,
What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.
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Afghanistan,
Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.
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Wall Street Crisis,
Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.
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NLR at 50,
What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.
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Force and Consent
As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
Articles:
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Rob Lucas,
‘Critical Net Critic’
Advances in information technology have generated both delirious boosterism and gloomy prognoses of computer-assisted decline. Rob Lucas engages with the sceptical current exemplified by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, tracing its conceptual underpinnings and identifying its lacunae—political, economic, historical.
-
Robin Osborne,
‘Cultures of Empire: Greece and Rome’
How was Roman imperial rule over Greece legitimated in the minds of conquerors and subjects alike? The mutual reverberations of an Augustan cultural revolution that brought Hellenism to the empire’s core and diverted Greeks to the glories of the past.
-
Daniel Finn,
‘Dutch Elections
and Socialist Party’
Daniel Finn reports on September’s Dutch election, where the Liberal and Labour parties rallied to prevent Holland following the Greek example. Origins and orientations of the Socialist Party that briefly threatened the Pax Bruxelliana, and strategic lessons for the left from its campaign.
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Bryan Palmer,
‘Hurrah for Anarchy!’
Bryan Palmer on Steven Hirsch & Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World. Panorama of libertarian left rebels, from Latin America to Ukraine, Cairo to Korea.
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Clive Dilnot,
‘Seacoalers’
Clive Dilnot on Chris Killip, Seacoal. Scenes of industrial decay in 1980s Northumberland as images of a workless future.