CONTENTS
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Perry Anderson: The House of Zion
The fate of the Palestinians and the fortunes of Israel, after fifty years of occupation, and American and European collusion with it. Realities behind the official tropes decorating a ‘two-state solution’, and hesitations of nascent debate over a single state in the territory once ruled as a mandate by Britain.
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Iván Szelényi: Capitalisms After Communism
A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?
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Walter Benjamin: By the Fireside
The solitary reader devours the novel, and the lives of its protagonists, as fire consumes the logs in a hearth; big business casts its shadow over a fading world: a life’s meaning is grasped by reflection on its end. In a hitherto untranslated 1933 review of Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale, Benjamin reflects on the nature of storytelling and the novel.
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Verónica Schild: Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America
Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.
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Carlos Spoerhase: Seminar versus MOOC
Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning.
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Sven Lütticken: Personafication
The shift of artistic and activist practice towards the performance of personae. Sven Lütticken tracks the fraying limits of subjecthood through post-war action painting, Marcel Mariën’s surrealist-Blanquist parti imaginaire, the 1960s Dutch neo-avant-garde, the Invisible Committee, Rojava and artistic experiments with the political party-form.
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Marco D'Eramo: Dock Life
The history of global capitalism as inscribed in the changing face of the port city, from the teeming harbours of sail-era Amsterdam via the industrial hoards of the Cokeport to the great abstract desert of contemporary Rotterdam’s container terminals.
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Francis Mulhern: Afterlives of the Commune
Francis Mulhern on Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury. Political imaginary and afterlives of the Paris Commune.
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Jeffery Webber: Green Development?
Jeffery Webber on Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera. Social and environmental history of enclosure and resistance in southern Chile.
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John Newsinger: The Famished Raj
John Newsinger on Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal. Pathbreaking study of a forgotten colonial catastrophe that claimed millions of lives.
Articles:
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Walter Benjamin,
‘By the Fireside’
The solitary reader devours the novel, and the lives of its protagonists, as fire consumes the logs in a hearth; big business casts its shadow over a fading world: a life’s meaning is grasped by reflection on its end. In a hitherto untranslated 1933 review of Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale, Benjamin reflects on the nature of storytelling and the novel.
-
Carlos Spoerhase,
‘Seminar versus MOOC’
Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning.
-
Marco D'Eramo,
‘Dock Life’
The history of global capitalism as inscribed in the changing face of the port city, from the teeming harbours of sail-era Amsterdam via the industrial hoards of the Cokeport to the great abstract desert of contemporary Rotterdam’s container terminals.
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John Newsinger,
‘The Famished Raj’
John Newsinger on Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal. Pathbreaking study of a forgotten colonial catastrophe that claimed millions of lives.
Editorials:
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Europe,
Debt, deflation and stagnation have now become the familiar economic stigmata of the EU. But what of its political distortions? A survey of the three principal—and steadily worsening—imbalances in the outcome of European integration: the oligarchic cast of its governors, the lop-sided rise of Germany, and the declining autonomy of the Union as a whole in the North Atlantic universe.
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Annexations,
After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.
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2011,
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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Articles:
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Iván Szelényi,
‘Capitalisms After Communism’
A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?
-
Verónica Schild,
‘Latina Feminism’
Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.
-
Sven Lütticken,
‘Personafication’
The shift of artistic and activist practice towards the performance of personae. Sven Lütticken tracks the fraying limits of subjecthood through post-war action painting, Marcel Mariën’s surrealist-Blanquist parti imaginaire, the 1960s Dutch neo-avant-garde, the Invisible Committee, Rojava and artistic experiments with the political party-form.
-
Francis Mulhern,
‘Afterlives of the Commune’
Francis Mulhern on Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury. Political imaginary and afterlives of the Paris Commune.
-
Jeffery Webber,
‘Green Development?’
Jeffery Webber on Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera. Social and environmental history of enclosure and resistance in southern Chile.