Al Giordano: Mexico’s Presidential Swindle

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CONTENTS

  1. Al Giordano: Mexico's Presidential Swindle Predictably, Washington’s crusade for democracy has bypassed Mexico. How corrupt authorities handed Calderón the presidency, despite indicators of a clear lead for the PRD’s López Obrador—and the implications for a post-PRI order.
  2. Wang Hui: Depoliticized Politics, From East to West Reflections on China’s ‘revolutionary century’, and roots of its state-party rigidification in the failures of the Cultural Revolution. What deeper dynamics of capitalist restoration link the contemporary neutralization of politics, east and west?
  3. Mike Davis: Fear and Money in Dubai On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.
  4. Franco Moretti: The End of the Beginning Franco Moretti responds to criticisms of his quantative approach to literary history, from Christopher Prendergast and Roberto Schwarz. Origins, upshots—and potential limitations?—of the abstract models developed in Graphs, Maps, Trees.
  5. Retort: All Quiet on the Eastern Front A new broadside from Retort, the oppositionist Bay Area collective, written as Western and Arab governments gave the greenlight to Israel’s—botched—attempt to obliterate Lebanese resistance.
  6. Erik Olin Wright: Compass Points Can emancipatory social science provide a framework for rethinking paths forward from capitalism? Erik Olin Wright on the navigational tools that might orient a route towards a non-statist socialism; and on the necessary preconditions for transformative theory.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Peter Gowan on Christopher Layne, Peace of Illusions. A maverick mole inside realist international-relations theory, overturning orthodox accounts of US global strategy.
  2. Gregory Elliott on Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left. Pathbreaking revisionist history of French liberalism’s ‘anti-totalitarian’ awakening.
  3. Peter Thomas on Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens. The first full biography for 80 years, with new details of the thinker’s life seen through Green spectacles.
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Articles:

  1. Mike Davis,
    ‘Fear and Money
    in Dubai’ On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.
  2. Retort,
    ‘All Quiet on the
    Eastern Front’ A new broadside from Retort, the oppositionist Bay Area collective, written as Western and Arab governments gave the greenlight to Israel’s—botched—attempt to obliterate Lebanese resistance.
  3. Peter Thomas,
    ‘Being Max Weber’ Peter Thomas on Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens. The first full biography for 80 years, with new details of the thinker’s life seen through Green spectacles.
  4. Malcolm Bull,
    ‘States of Failure’ The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?
  5. Taggart Murphy,
    ‘East Asia’s Dollars’ Discussions of the sustainability of the US current-account deficit—trending upward from $800bn—rarely plumb the long-term motives of its creditors. Taggart Murphy analyses the historical roots of Tokyo’s post-1868 geofinancial support for the ruling superpower, London or Washington, and the implications of China’s rise for Japanese strategy.
  6. Kasian Tejapira,
    ‘Toppling Thaksin’ How Thailand’s billionaire Prime Minister was overthrown by mass mobilizations in April 2006, and role of the Palace–Barracks–Temple triumvirate in his defeat. Kasian Tejapira on the twin conjuncture of 1997—combining a ‘good governance’ Constitution with the Asian financial crisis—that put the country’s corrupt electocracy into the hands of its telecom magnate.

Editorials:

  1. Tariq Ali,
    ‘War for the
    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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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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