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Laleh Khalili interviewed by George Souvlis

George Souvlis: By way of introduction, could you explain what personal experiences strongly influenced you, politically and academically?

Laleh Khalili: I grew up in Iran in the 1970s and early 1980s and being the daughter of Iranian leftist revolutionaries –and later political prisoners and later still exiles– indelibly marked the way I look at the work. On the one hand, growing up in an intellectual leftist household meant introduction to a rich seam of literature and history – not only those of Europeans, but also of Russians and Latin Americans. It meant that names like Che Guevara and George Habash, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Genet, and Costa Gavras, Garcia Marquez and Cortazar and Neruda, Kazantzakis and Gorky and so many others were familiar and their politics considered familiar.

On the other hand, my parents’ experiences of incarceration and exile and the resultant dislocation, decimation and devastation made me acutely alive to the workings of this form of violence and inevitably wove world-historic events into the fabric of my personal life.

Without these two sets of influences –both intellectual and experiential– I don’t think I would have ever produced the kinds of academic works I eventually produced.

by Richard Seymour

‘Wanting’ has an obvious double meaning. To want something in the ordinary sense is to wish for it. But want is also lack. The two meanings are not necessarily separable. To want for nothing is not necessarily to have everything, but to be without nothing that one could wish for. Therefore if someone says, “I want a sex change,” they are both describing a wish and naming a lack. Paradoxically, naming is also a way of forgetting. As soon as we give a name to whatever it is that we are wanting, we can forget the questions that circled, shark-like, around that lack. As if the relief that we get from naming our desire is partly just that the questions finally fucking stop.

Dilar Dirik interviewed by George Souvlis

George Souvlis: By way of introduction, could you explain what personal experiences strongly influenced you, politically and academically?

Dilar Dirik: As a Kurd, you can never run from your identity, because your identity is essentially political and the level of your political consciousness acts as a self-defense as the only way to secure your survival and existence. That is why insistence on the free expression of your self-determined identity is portrayed as political controversy, nationalism, or terrorism by the capitalist-statist system.

by Kyle Geraghty

In the aftermath of the shock Brexit result, discussions on its causes and consequences have been frankly bizarre. So far, the have focused on bygone folk stories about sovereignty, migration, and globalisation, disconnected from any wider understanding of capitalism or history. There also seems to be no clear solution to the monumental fuck-up that has resulted from the absence of any clear plan for leaving the European Union which works, alongside our political system which is incapable of handling a depressingly English form of parliamentary populism. In this piece I want to try to untangle some of the causes and consequences of Brexit, and reflect on two key points; who actually voted for it and why; and what Europe actually is, and what its relationship to capitalism is.

Paul Mason interviewed by Malise Rosbech

Capitalism is on its last legs. According to the British journalist, writer and activist, Paul Mason, capitalism develops in cycles of 50 years. For Mason, the 2008 financial crisis was the abrupt end to capitalism’s fourth wave and we are now in the fifth and final wave. Like Marx, Mason claims that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions - postcapitalism has already begun. But it is neither the left or the proletariat which is the engine of socio-economic transformation; rather, it is information technology and the networked individual. I met Mason at small cafe in South London to hear more about his book PostCapitalism.

Malise Rosbech: In your book, one of your major claims is that we live in a historical anomaly. Could you explain more about why that is and how you got to that conclusion?

Paul Mason: When I was covering the 2008 crisis, it became obvious to me that it was a major disruption. But the theories that emerged over and above the kind of denial theory, which is basically that it’s not a problem, tended to assume that the main problem was a debt overhang, so that we were just going to have long term indebtedness  - that we just needed to pay down the debt mountain. This didn’t satisfy me. To me depressions don’t just happen because you get big build-up of debt in the system. Rather, it’s when you have big build-up of debt in the system and the real economy is not functioning alongside that.

Kevin Gray interviewed by George Souvlis.

George Souvlis: Would you like to present yourself by focusing on the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?

Kevin Gray: My undergraduate degree was in Chinese Studies, although I quickly became aware of the limitations of Area Studies in terms of its methodological nationalism and its related tendency to try and explain all social, political and economic phenomena with reference to historical and cultural legacies internal to the country in question. While the thought of Mao Zedong, for example certainly contains within it influences of traditional Chinese literature and philosophy, this hardly seemed adequate to understand the broader phenomena of the Chinese revolution and modern state-building in the country and its broader international context. Yet, there seemed to me at least to be a recurrent tendency to try and explain such processes with relevance to particularist historical-cultural factors. Following graduation, I also spent four years living in South Korea, in Kimpo County to the west of Seoul to be precise, just a few short kilometres from the border with North Korea. Perhaps more than any intellectual influence, this experience of living in what was both an industrial and highly militarised environment led me to become acutely aware of the intersections between developmental and geopolitical trends in the region. According to the popular narrative, South Korea had at that time just graduated from developing to developed country status only to be hit by the Asian economic financial crisis. At the same time, the engagement strategy with the North pursued by the Kim Dae--Jung and then Roh Mu-Hyun coincided with a vigorous popular movement against the role of US militarism in the country, which led me to develop an interest in the role of social resistance to both neoliberalism and US imperialism. As a result of these intellectual and personal experiences, I opted to study International Relations at postgraduate level in order to develop my analysis of such trends. After a brief flirtation with World Systems Theory, I found that with Gramscian approaches to International Relations I was able to develop a framework that could incorporate quite complex interconnecting processes of the politics of capitalist industrialisation, geopolitics, and social resistance. These are still very much the issues that drive my research, both in relation to East Asia and more broadly.

by Amar Diwakar

The great normalisation has commenced. The universal belief amongst the establishment that Trump would be catastrophic for the Republic has given way to sycophantic supplications that the grandiosity of the highest office in the land will eventually mollify much of his incendiary proposals. Whether it is Hillary Clinton declaring that Americans “owe Trump a chance” in her post-mortem concession speech, or Nancy Pelosi promising to engage with him on policy issues related to infrastructure, childcare, and early childhood education.

by Jamie Allinson

Of what is Islamic State the name? Since September 2014, the self-styled caliphate and its adherents have captured and then lost thousands of square kilometres of territory in Syria and Iraq, killing – and in many cases enslaving and torturing – thousands of people in the process; faced aerial bombing campaigns by both the US and Russia; established affiliate groups in at least eight countries; and carried out (or won the allegiance of the perpetrators of) at least seventy attacks outside of Syria and Iraq. In the summer of 2016 alone, ISIS, or people claiming affiliation to them, launched seventeen separate attacks. ISIS is qualitatively different to any previous terrorist organisation. The forces of Islamophobic reaction, not least the new US president, have lost no time in occupying the hard-right space opened up by mainstream policymakers in response.

ISIS’ attacks, and the now-clichéd slick production of their ghastly propaganda videos, induce a feeling of political vertigo – of living in collapsing times. That the creation of this effect is precisely the intention of ISIS does not make it any less appropriate.

Amongst those who reject the securocratic response to ISIS, a sequence of displacement usually follows. No one seems able to argue the old saw that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter: on behalf of whose freedom are ISIS fighting? Instead one finds the impulse to decolonise mourning: insistent reminders that for every Orlando there is a Beirut, for every Paris a Quetta, as if once grief is equitably distributed a solution will be reached. Or else a kind of security politics from below: the arguments that ISIS is not being bombed properly; the (false) claims that Western powers have somehow created ISIS by arming the Syrian opposition, or those (true but inadequate) that the organisation is a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not all these responses are equally wrong: the gut reaction that something is falling apart is probably right. Where to begin with a materialist analysis of this horrifying mess?

by Andrew Johnson

The 2 March election for the Northern Ireland Assembly is, barring a huge upset, likely to see a rough continuity in the strength of the political forces. The real question is whether the DUP and Sinn Féin – who will almost certainly retain their dominance on both sides of the sectarian divide – will be able to revive their joint government, or whether a period of instability and direct rule from Westminster will follow.

by Benjamin Kunkel

The acute capitalist crisis of 2008 has in the years since developed into a chronic complaint, to be managed but not overcome. In wealthy countries, ultra-low interest rates prop up consumer spending and, for investors, inflate the value of stocks, bonds, and other paper or digital assets. Swollen private portfolios induce luxury spending, and the size of the resulting wealth effect, as Alan Greenspan liked to call it, does a lot to determine what volume of crumbs spills from the banquet table in the form of worker’s wages. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their income than others, asset-price Keynesianism, as it has been called, is an inefficient way to inject demand into an economy. But the method has its allure: what could suit the rich better than rapidly rising prices for what they have to sell – namely, financial assets – while prices of the ordinary goods and services that they buy fall short of even the 2 per cent annual increase sought by central bankers as a minimum rate of inflation? To purchase the results of toil with the weightless gyrations of fictitious capital is a good bargain.

by Sam Kriss

Like everyone else, I went to America for Trump’s inauguration. The whole vast European media establishment has its quadrennial migratory stampede, rushing over to the marshy grazing-grounds between the Susquehanna and the Potomac, to watch the great empire pretend to be very proud of itself as it ceremoniously shits its pants. Colour: bright orange; a firm 6 on the Meyers Scale. But the ceremony alone is never enough. Something about America sets people digging underneath. You plunge speeding into the murky hinterland, planting the photogenically indigent in front of your GoPro to hear the land itself speak through their mouths, and say what it really thinks of Donald Trump. You find mysteries in the Masonic sigil of DC’s street plan. You find secrets chained up in the basement of Comet Ping-Pong Pizza. You try to unearth the outlines of the Indian burial ground, the one that’ll explain why walls of blood are always surging through the shining city on the hill. America keeps on doing unutterably awful things, so you go there, and try to find out why. But first you have to go there. When I flew in to JFK airport, the line for customs was packed with anxious British journalists, tapping their feet, scratching for a cigarette, desperate to get out there, past all this endless bureaucracy, and start their work of finding out what the age of Trump would really be about. And meanwhile, the answer surrounded them.

Alex Nunns interviewed by Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour: Reading your book on Corbyn [The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power, O/R Books, 2016], one is immediately struck by the fact that you have opted for an incredibly detailed, textured history and analysis. There’s a sense in which a relatively minute but powerful historical moment, when you unpack it, seems to illuminate almost every dimension of British politics. It’s almost as if you’re painstakingly assembling the telling details, the moments, the testimonies, which otherwise might be lost. So the first question is what does this tell us about the kind of book you set out to write? 

Alex Nunns: I set out with two objectives. The first was simple: to explain how Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party. I didn’t know the full answer when I started, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. The mainstream media, of course, was resolutely determined not to understand what had happened, because to do so would have undermined their insistence that it was some kind of political nervous breakdown. I was disappointed—but not at all surprised—at the complete absence of intellectual curiosity on display. Here was a once in a generation, maybe even once in a century political upset. Journalists at the Guardian and the BBC, for example, might personally have opposed Corbyn, they might have thought his leadership was bound to fail, but at the very least they should have considered it interesting, worthy of explanation. Instead they acted in a way that laid bare how the media is an actor in the political drama, not a dispassionate observer of it—the priority from the beginning was to delegitimise Corbyn rather than to report on him. It was fascinating to watch it happen, to read comment pieces and watch news reports and think, ‘You’re behaving exactly as any crude Marxist analysis would predict, like an automaton, and you don’t even seem self-aware enough to realise.’ Actually the first chapter that I wrote was about the media, even though it appears quite late on in the book.

by Sophie Lewis

As I sit down to write this, I am haunted by images circulating in the wake of another brutal murder. In one of them the person in question, still living, has the gloved hands of a Turkish riot cop on her arm. Hande Kader, may she rest in power, was a sex-working trans woman of colour whose life we have, once again, collectively allowed haters and the state to take away. To say ‘rest in power’ is obviously the very least we can do. Now Kader becomes another of our foremothers.

A friend is starting out in sex-work and is isolated and scared. Another likely can’t afford the electrolysis she isn’t sure she wants (along with the other components of the medical ‘pathway’) but she’s just purchased some hormones illegally, exactly as she warned her clueless GP she would, having had her NHS wait-time for gender reassignment extended further into the future than she could bear.

Soon, we will invoke Hande Kader on Transgender Day of Remembrance. How many corpses can one memorialise in one lifetime?

by Richard Seymour

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On both sides of the Atlantic, there is one group of people who terrify and enrage the punditocracy. The legend that is the ‘white working class’, a trope long in gestation throughout the noughties, has finally struck back with a vengeance. Conservatives in government, Brexit, and now President Trump.

The ‘white working class’ used to provoke mainly a form of sentimental nostalgia and patronising endearment. It was a tea towel memory, a commodity, not something that had real influence. But the terror arising from this wave of global reaction is producing an interesting anti-democratic backlash amongst liberal-minded opinion-formers. The lefty vicar, Giles Fraser, has argued that Trump’s win is a good case for a hereditary monarch. A royal head of state, he argued, would provide a structure of meaning that guaranteed national cohesion and attenuated the bitterness of democratic contestation. But this backlash against the ignorant voter has been developing for some while among sections of the intelligentsia.

Warren Montag interviewed by George Souvlis.

George Souvlis: Would you like to present yourself by focusing on the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?

Warren Montag: My political and intellectual formation was governed, fittingly I suppose, by a logic of the encounter: that is, I was extraordinarily lucky. If I had not been in the right place at the right time and in proximity to the right people, I would not have thought or written as I have. In the mid to late seventies in Los Angeles (to which I returned after receiving my B.A. from UC Berkeley), I met both Geoff Goshgarian and Mike Davis and we soon formed a kind of collective with a few others (in particular I remember Samira Haj, now a historian at CUNY, I believe). We also organized a study group in which we read the three volumes of Capital, as well as Mandel’s Late Capitalism and other works.

John Chalcraft interviewed by George Souvlis.

George Souvlis: By way of introduction, could you explain what personal experiences strongly influenced you, politically and academically?

John Chalcraft: I grew up the son of a social worker and a vicar in a provincial milieu. I remember defending a motion supporting the miners’ strike with a friend at a school debate in the 1980s and being genuinely surprised by the anger our stance aroused in our conservative context. Cycling alone in North Africa in my late teens had a major impact on my perceptions of a part of the Third World that I still viewed at that time in unexamined Orientalist terms. Discovering the writings of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger in my early twenties was a very provocative intellectual and political experience. Their arguments were at odds with the dominant understandings I had inherited. I was also frustrated in regard to the lack of non-Western history on offer in my undergraduate days. This frustration and provocation set up much of the questioning and intellectual drive that took me into critical scholarship and a PhD in the history of the Middle East.

by Lizzie O’Shea

On inauguration day, Washington DC was a dystopian urban desert. Black grill fences lined downtown streets in multiple directions, concrete barricades squatted around every corner, and helicopters droned endlessly overhead. There were few cars, the whole place overrun with an array of Trump supporters, including many men in suits, army personnel, and the very occasional protestor. The city was awash with all kinds of grey. The only colour was ominous red caps emblazoned with ‘Make America Great Again’ and several confusing, expensive-looking signs about Jesus. 

Silvia Federici interviewed by George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić

George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić: What were the formative experiences for you politically and personally?

Silvia Federici: The first most formative experience in my life was WWII. I grew up in the immediate postwar period when the memory of a war that had lasted for years, added to the years of fascism in Italy, were still very fresh. At an early age I was aware that I was born into a world deeply divided and murderous, that the state far from protecting us could be an enemy, that life is extremely precarious and, as Joan Baez’ song later said, “there but for fortune go you and I.” Growing up in postwar and presumably post-fascist Italy it was difficult not be politicized. Even as a little girl I could not help not to be antifascist hearing all the stories my parents told us, and my father’s tirades against the fascist regime. I also grew up in a communist town, where on May Day workers sported red carnations on the jackets and we wake up at the sound of Bella Ciao, and where the struggle between communists and fascists continued with the fascists periodically trying to blow up the monument to the partisan and the communist retaliating against the headquarter of the MSI – Movimento Sociale Italiano – which everybody knew was a continuation of the now banned fascist party. By the time I was 18 I saw myself as a radical, that at the time the prototype struggle was still that of factory workers or the anti-fascist struggle.

Werner Bonefeld interviewed by George Souvlis

George Souvlis: Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual and political formation?

Werner Bonefeld: One of my most important formative experiences was factory work. Studying was easy in comparison. I studied at the Universities of Marburg, Berlin, and Edinburgh. At Marburg the Marxism on offer was very dogmatic. It did not encourage people to think for themselves. I left after two years to continue my studies at the Free University of Berlin. In Berlin a few things came together, as it were. My favorite Professor was Agnoli, who was one of the most distinguished Marxists of his generation. He allowed his students to think. He welcomed it. He was a great orator. Part of the degree programme was to do work-placement. I first worked as a removal man and then as a research assistant at the West-German teachers’ union, for which I got paid. Never before had I earned money by reading and writing (my research was into alternative schooling as opposed to public provision). I quickly understood the meaning of Marx’s insight that to be a productive labourer in not a piece of luck but a great misfortune. One might add, nor is it an ontological privilege, as a whole tradition of historical materialism saw it. I studied in Berlin at a time of great restlessness, from the peace movement to the squatter movement in the early 1980s.

My Dear Brewer:

Have just read the majority report of the Committee on Immigration. It is utterly unsocialistic, reactionary and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation. . . .

by The Editors

Not since 1943 has there been a better time to be a fascist. The ‘liberal order’, the demise of which has been the subject of ruling-class hot takes for some years now, does indeed appear to be in a shabby state. Trump’s election – on which more within this issue – follows on from the vote for Brexit as a body blow to the politics of the ‘extreme centre’ in the very lands in which it was born. Victory for the far-right Freedom party in Austria’s presidential election was very narrowly averted: should Marine Le Pen win the forthcoming French presidential contest, against which no sensible punter would now bet, the resulting scrap of hard-won relief will evaporate. Then the UN security council will be led by the fascist- through hard-right of US, French and British politics, plus the distinct market-Stalinisms of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. In the second rank will be the hard-right Narendra Modi of India, and the Brazilian inheritors of a soft coup for austerity. This is not a world in which it is growing easier for workers to organise economic self-defence, or develop political organisations to achieve class demands.

by The Editors

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by John Merrick

Walking down the wooden steps last Monday night, the dead-eyed glare of Young Labourites hit you hard. Three days into conference and the bum-fluff and teenage skin is showing through; their father’s suits, 20 years of growth and ale before they fit, are beginning to crease and stain. What kind of twilight zone for the young and awkward had I stepped into?

Jeffery Webber, interviewed by George Souvlis

George Souvlis: 10 year ago Evo Morales was elected president of. In your article dealing with the Bolivian regime titled, "Fantasies Aside”, you argue that there’s a reconstituted neoliberalism in Bolivia under Morales. Is it a neoliberal regime, and if so, why and how does it differ from previous neoliberal regimes in the country? To what extent do indigenous people participate substantially in the policy making of the regime? Is any indigenous liberation taking place?

Jeffery Webber: I think the tenor of debate in scholarly accounts of Latin American political economy, around neoliberalism, post-neoliberalism, and neo-developmentalism, have tended easily to degenerate into semantic turf wars that often obstruct careful assessment of continuities and ruptures in countries such as Bolivia more than reveal new insights. So I’ll try to avoid that dynamic here, and just say, to start with, that I first made the argument that the Morales regime’s political-economic strategy since 2006 could best be characterized as “reconstituted neoliberalism” in my 2011 book, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. The later magazine piece you mention was a response to subsequent criticisms of that book coming from a certain crude, left-populist, celebratory position of the Morales regime and defensive apologia of any and every action it ever undertook.