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Robert Wade,
‘Financial Regime Change?’ As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition.

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Mailing date for NLR 53: 20th October 2008

CONTENTS

  1. Robert Wade: Financial Regime Change? As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition.
  2. David Harvey: The Right to the City Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
  3. Andrei Platonov: Father-Mother A screenplay from 1935, previously unpublished in English, by arguably the greatest Soviet writer. Amid far-reaching social transformation, notions of love, family and desire are also recast—with serious consequences for the simultaneously innocent and world-weary protagonists.
  4. Maristella Svampa: The End of Kirchnerism The turbulent beginning of the Fernández presidency marks the end of Kirchnerism in Argentina. Maristella Svampa surveys its record, noting ruptures and continuities—both rhetorical and substantial—with its predecessors in economic policy, social indicators and modes of rule.
  5. Peter Hallward: Order and Event Peter Hallward assesses Logiques des mondes, the latest major work by Alain Badiou, within the context of his wider concerns with truth and subjective being. Set theory and ontology brought to bear on abstract questions of appearance, relation, fidelity and historical change.
  6. Alain Badiou: Roads to Renegacy A philosophe engagé discusses the ‘wrong turn’ taken by so many erstwhile French Maoists, locating its sources within the landscape of 1970s militancy. The perils of politics as ambition, as fashion, as absolute—paving a mediatized path from 68 to Sarkozy.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Vijay Prashad on Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. Perceptive portrait of the Occupation’s single most elusive foe, and of the traditions of Shia militancy from which he descends.
  2. Tom Hazeldine on Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty. Selective account of a millennium of global trade, with force as market-maker from the Pax Mongolica to the Cold War.
  3. Alexander Cockburn on Rick Perlstein, Nixonland. Whatever happened to the Great Society? A Democratic breviary on the late 60s as supposed crucible of today’s partisan dissensus.
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Articles:

  1. Norman Dombey,
    ‘Prospects
    for the NPT’ Repeatedly invoked to choke off emergent nuclear powers in East Asia and the Middle East, the NPT’s actual content has remained largely undiscussed. Norman Dombey itemizes the Treaty’s provisions, and the asymmetrical burdens imposed on signatories, the better to gauge its successes and limitations.
  2. Peter Gowan,
    ‘Twilight of the Treaty?’ Responding to Dombey, Peter Gowan asks why such an unequal treaty has attracted so many adherents—and why its superpower beneficiary has sought to undermine it. Do impasses around the NPT signal failures for US dominance?
  3. Mike Davis,
    ‘The Democrats before 2008’ With anti-war sentiment growing—if still passive—in the US, how will Democrats use their recapture of Congress? Mike Davis analyses likely outcomes on the questions—Iraq, corruption, economic insecurity—that confront a Party leadership hooked on corporate dollars, and myopically gazing towards 2008.
  4. Robert Brenner,
    ‘US Politics’ Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush.
  5. David Harvey,
    ‘The Right
    to the City’ Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
  7. Alexander Cockburn,
    ‘The Great Divider’ Alexander Cockburn on Rick Perlstein, Nixonland. Whatever happened to the Great Society? A Democratic breviary on the late 60s as supposed crucible of today’s partisan dissensus.

Editorials:

  1. Tariq Ali,
    ‘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.
  2. Perry Anderson,
    ‘On the Conjuncture’ 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.
  3. Middle East, As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
  4. Europe, Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.
  5. Chechnya, Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
  6. Iraq, With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
  7. New Labour, Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.
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