Mike Davis:
‘Spring Confronts Winter’ 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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NLR 72 will be mailed out by 22 December 2011

 

CONTENTS

  1. Mike Davis: Spring Confronts Winter 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?
  2. Stathis Kouvelakis: The Greek Cauldron Why has Greece proved to be the weakest link in the Eurozone? Stathis Kouvelakis examines the contours of the post-dictatorship model, and the popular mobilizations that have arisen within its ruins.
  3. Robin Blackburn: Crisis 2.0 Atlantic economies remain mired in unemployment and stagnation three years on from 2008. Diagnosing the underlying causes of the crisis as global over-capacity, deficient demand and anarchic credit creation, Robin Blackburn explores proposals for a genuine exit from it to the left.
  4. Ai Xiaoming: The Citizen Camera A feminist filmmaker discusses the role of documentaries in China’s civil-rights protests. Activism and the digital image, from village struggles in Guangdong to the courtrooms of Fujian, via the plains of Henan and Sichuan’s earthquake zone.
  5. Kenta Tsuda: Academicians of Lagado? Vast claims have been made for the application of Darwinian concepts—purged of biological determinism—to the study of societies. Kenta Tsuda offers a penetrating and original critique of selection theory, finding a paradigm with limited explanatory value and shaky conceptual foundations.
  6. Perry Anderson: Lucio Magri Homage to an outstanding figure of the European Left, who fought to preserve the link between radical thought and mass politics as Italy’s Communist tradition dissolved around him.
  7. Pascale Casanova: Combative Literatures Against both narrowly national and homogenizing global approaches, Pascale Casanova argues for a dual optic on literature, considering national systems as competing entities within an agonistic world of letters.
  8. Susan Watkins: Peter Campbell Remembering the watercolourist, typographer and writer—resident art critic at the London Review of Books—who redesigned NLR.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Hung Ho-fung on Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism. Two Wall Street China hands assess the PRC’s transition from plan to market.
  2. Andrea Boltho on Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege. The dollar’s long reign as global reserve currency and prospects for its continued hegemony.
  3. Alexander Beecroft on Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. South Asia’s shift from holy to vernacular tongues measured against European parallels.
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Articles:

  1. Stathis Kouvelakis,
    ‘The Greek Cauldron’ Why has Greece proved to be the weakest link in the Eurozone? Stathis Kouvelakis examines the contours of the post-dictatorship model, and the popular mobilizations that have arisen within its ruins.
  3. Susan Watkins,
    ‘Peter Campbell’ Remembering the watercolourist, typographer and writer—resident art critic at the London Review of Books—who redesigned NLR.

Editorials:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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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