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Richard Walker:
‘The Golden State Adrift’ Long at the forefront of US capitalism, the Golden State is now at the leading edge of its crisis. Richard Walker measures the dimensions of California’s slide—housing bubble, fiscal woes, rising inequality—as well as the underlying demographic and economic shifts.

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NLR 66 was mailed between December 13 and 20, with delays due to adverse weather conditions. We apologize for any inconvenience to subscribers.

CONTENTS

  1. Richard Walker: The Golden State Adrift Long at the forefront of US capitalism, the Golden State is now at the leading edge of its crisis. Richard Walker measures the dimensions of California’s slide—housing bubble, fiscal woes, rising inequality—as well as the underlying demographic and economic shifts.
  2. Gopal Balakrishnan: The Coming Contradiction Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic and its engagement with questions of historicity, narrative and time. Categories and concepts from Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Ricoeur, used to interrogate the impasses of the present—and to envision what lies beyond.
  3. Ho-fung Hung: Uncertainty in the Enclave Portrait of Hong Kong’s contested political scene. With democratizing reforms blocked by an entrenched alliance of CCP and local magnates, an increasingly radical populace seeks to break the deadlock. Might the PRC’s hyper-capitalist region be its weakest link?
  4. Michael Denning: Wageless Life Origins of the figures of unemployment and the informal sector, and their inadequacy to contemporary forms of wagelessness. Michael Denning draws lessons from Marx, Fanon and the streets of Ahmedabad.
  5. Asef Bayat: Tehran: Paradox City Walled citadel of the Shahs, hub of petro-modernity, post-Islamist metropolis: Asef Bayat on the history of struggles to define Iran’s capital, and the successive contests between elite projects and popular resistance that have shaped its spatial pattern.
  6. Sven Lütticken: Playtimes Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.
  7. Tariq Ali: On Mao's Contradictions Tariq Ali on Rebecca E Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World. Level-headed exploration of the Great Helmsman’s life and legacies.
  8. Alberto Toscano: The Spectre of Analogy Alberto Toscano on Luciano Canfora, L’uso politico dei paradigmi storici. Dissection of the uses of historical analogy, from Thucydides to Furet.
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Articles:

  3. Michael Denning,
    ‘Wageless Life’ Origins of the figures of unemployment and the informal sector, and their inadequacy to contemporary forms of wagelessness. Michael Denning draws lessons from Marx, Fanon and the streets of Ahmedabad.
  5. Tom Mertes,
    ‘War, Crash, Slump’ Tom Mertes on Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance. Bestselling portrait of the interwar world’s central bankers as originators of the Great Depression—with edifying comparisons to their modern counterparts.

Editorials:

  1. Cameron‘s Coalition, Anatomy of the UK’s new crossbreed government, and the uneven electoral geography that produced it. Amid the ruins of New Labour’s economic model and spreading Euro-turbulence, what prospects for resistance to austerity’s impending axe?
  2. New Labour,
    As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  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. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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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