CONTENTS
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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.
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Robin Blackburn: Finance and the Fourth Dimension
The concept of alternative futures, banished from postmodernity’s eternal present, flourishes on the financial summits of the global economy. Robin Blackburn argues against a neo-Luddite dismissal of the new financial engineering techniques by the Left, while coolly assessing the economic and social costs of their current configurations.
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Leo Chanjen Chen: Cinema, Dream, Existence
With City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster, Hou Hsiao-Hsien established the landmarks of Taiwan’s New Cinema—distinguished by aesthetic distance and break with political taboo. Chen traces the origins of Hou’s achievement to a mixture of an apprenticeship in commercial film, a unique synthesis of islander and high-modern culture, and impartial sympathy for those caught up in history’s storm.
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Alain Supiot: Law and Labour
Behind the struggles over employment laws in France and Germany, Alain Supiot describes a deeper battle over legal systems. Are national legislative models—now benchmarked for investment efficiency by the international institutions—becoming rival products in a world market of norms?
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Susan Willis: Guantánamo’s Symbolic Economy
How to explain the importance to the US Administration of the primitive torture facilities at Guantánamo Bay? Incarceration and intelligence farming, as imagined by LeGuin or Philip K. Dick, and strategies—active and passive—for resisting reduction to ‘bare life’.
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Perry Anderson: The World Made Flesh
Perry Anderson on Hervé Juvin, L’avènement du corps. Premonitions of a new regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it.
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Tony Wood: Celluloid and Plasma
Tony Wood on Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. How has the digital era changed the cinematic viewing experience—and the spectator? Freeze-frame fetishism and narrative disruption from Lumière to Kiarostami, via Hitchcock and Rossellini.
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Richard Gott: Venezuela’s Murdoch
Richard Gott on Pablo Bachelet, Gustavo Cisneros: un empresario global. Portrait of the Latino media baron—Venezuelan salesman for the American way, purveyor of soft drinks and soap operas, key conspirator in the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez.
Articles:
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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.
-
Leo Chen,
‘Cinema, Dream,
Existence’
With City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster, Hou Hsiao-Hsien established the landmarks of Taiwan’s New Cinema—distinguished by aesthetic distance and break with political taboo. Chen traces the origins of Hou’s achievement to a mixture of an apprenticeship in commercial film, a unique synthesis of islander and high-modern culture, and impartial sympathy for those caught up in history’s storm.
-
Alain Supiot,
‘Law and
Labour’
Behind the struggles over employment laws in France and Germany, Alain Supiot describes a deeper battle over legal systems. Are national legislative models—now benchmarked for investment efficiency by the international institutions—becoming rival products in a world market of norms?
-
Perry Anderson,
‘Carnal Capital?’
Perry Anderson on Hervé Juvin, L’avènement du corps. Premonitions of a new regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it.
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Richard Gott,
‘Venezuela’s
Murdoch’
Richard Gott on Pablo Bachelet, Gustavo Cisneros: un empresario global. Portrait of the Latino media baron—Venezuelan salesman for the American way, purveyor of soft drinks and soap operas, key conspirator in the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez.
Editorials:
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Tariq Ali,
‘Mid-Point in 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Articles:
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Yoav Peled,
‘Zionist Realities’
A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
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Virginia Tilley,
‘A Secular
Solution’
Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
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Francis Mulhern,
‘Conrad’s Disavowals’
The fascination of Joseph Conrad’s novels with the transformative pressures of capitalist modernity threatens a revelation so intolerable, Mulhern suggests, that it can only be contained within dense narrative strategies of deferral and disavowal.
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Susan Watkins,
Toryism
under Blair’
Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.
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Kees van
der Pijl,
‘A Lockean
Europe?’
Liberalization and its discontents seen in the longue durée—the struggle of late-coming statist contenders against an Anglophone heartland, now subsuming Europe in its Lockean embrace. Kees van der Pijl tracks the removal of macro-economic questions from democratic decision-making as central precondition for the EU’s neoliberal turn.
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Patrick
Cockburn,
‘The Abyss
in Iraq’
A panorama of Iraq two and a half years after the Anglo-American invasion. Britain’s leading reporter on the country talks about the life conditions of the population; the springs of the resistance; the relations between Sunni and Shia communities; the position of the Kurds; the performance of the us military; and the historical precedents and possible outcomes of the second Western seizure of Iraq.
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Mike Davis,
‘Planet of Slums’
Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.
