Hung Ho-fung
‘America’s Head Servant?’ Against predictions that China will soon replace the US as the world’s dominant economic power, Hung Ho-fung argues that the PRC’s export-oriented growth and vast dollar reserves have trapped it in a subordinate role—to which much of its elite remains committed.

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NLR 60 was mailed out to subscribers on 4th November 2009

CONTENTS

  1. Ho-fung Hung: America’s Head Servant? Against predictions that China will soon replace the US as the world’s dominant economic power, Hung Ho-fung argues that the PRC’s export-oriented growth and vast dollar reserves have trapped it in a subordinate role—to which much of its elite remains committed.
  2. Mary Callahan: Myanmar’s Perpetual Junta What explains the exceptional durability of the Tatmadaw? Mary Callahan looks to the regime’s origins in struggles against British colonial rule, and to the impact of Whitehall’s dual mapping of the country upon its complex ethnic patterns and social structures.
  3. Joachim Kalka: Money As We Knew It? As coins and banknotes are displaced by credit cards and virtual transactions, Joachim Kalka conjures twin visions of money’s sensuous effects—prompting mystical revulsion or cartoonish delight—from the disappearing world of cash.
  4. A. Sivanandan: An Island Tragedy A. Sivanandan recounts his country’s long road to ethnic cleansing, from the social engineering of colonial Ceylon to Colombo’s anti-Tamil campaigns. Marginalization, displacement and destruction of a people, in a communal onslaught fanned by Buddhist chauvinism.
  5. Erik Olin Wright: Understanding Class Conventionally seen as mutually opposed, could insights from the three principal paradigms of class analysis—Marxist, Weberian and stratification theories—be combined? Erik Olin Wright offers models for an integrated approach.
  6. Tom Reifer: Capital’s Cartographer A former pupil recalls Giovanni Arrighi’s world-spanning trajectory, landmark intellectual contributions and great personal generosity. Geographies of power, histories of inequality in the work of one of the leading analysts of our times.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. John Grahl on Michel Aglietta and Laurent Berrebi, Désordres du capitalisme mondial. A prescient état des lieux of the global economy, identifying its imbalances and possible future trajectories.
  2. Gregor McLennan on Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil. Exploration of the nature—and necessity?—of humankind’s moral orientation, tracing a thread from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and Adorno.
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Articles:

  2. Joachim Kalka,
    ‘Money As We Knew It?’ As coins and banknotes are displaced by credit cards and virtual transactions, Joachim Kalka conjures twin visions of money’s sensuous effects—prompting mystical revulsion or cartoonish delight—from the disappearing world of cash.
  3. Tom Reifer,
    ‘Capital’s Cartographer’ A former pupil recalls Giovanni Arrighi’s world-spanning trajectory, landmark intellectual contributions and great personal generosity. Geographies of power, histories of inequality in the work of one of the leading analysts of our times.
  5. Peter Gowan,
    ‘The Ways of the World’ In an interview recorded earlier this year, Peter Gowan recalls his political and intellectual trajectory, from the end of empires to Marxist militancy, from Eastern Bloc shipyards to the rise of the Dollar–Wall Street Regime.
  6. Jan Breman,
    ‘Myth of the Global Safety Net’ Report from the lower depths of the global employment hierarchy, as the economic crisis multiplies the effects of informalization and agrarian decline on the billion-strong reserve army of labour.

Editorials:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. World 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.
  5. US Hegemony 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.
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