CONTENTS
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Jean Baudrillard: The Pyres of Autumn
The torching of the French banlieues as both sequel to the No vote of May 2005 and symptom of a wider Western malaise. Rejection of official pieties of integration, and flames of revolt against an automated Europe.
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Justin Podur: Kofi Annan’s Haiti
Justin Podur on Michael Deibert, Notes from the Last Testament. Untenable defence of Aristide’s overthrow, as Haiti’s poor come under siege from militias tacitly sanctioned by UN forces.
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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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Sabry Hafez: An Arabian Master
The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.
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Forrest Hylton: The Landslide in Bolivia
The Left owes its December victory in Bolivia to the popular movements that have stymied water and gas privatizations since 2000. Forrest Hylton surveys the landscape ahead, and the militant formation of Morales’s running mate Álvaro García Linera.
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Alvaro Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power
Bolivia’s new vice-president analyses the dual crisis of his country’s state. Exhaustion of the neoliberal primary-export model, and bankruptcy of a ‘colonial’ republican order founded on mestizo superiority.
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Julian Stallabrass: Spectacle and Terror
After Gopal Balakrishnan’s engagement with Afflicted Powers in NLR 36, Julian Stallabrass turns to the Retort collective’s conception of spectacle and its Islamist antagonists. Does a Debordian optic occlude the oppositional potential of modern technologies?
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Peter Hallward: Staging Equality
The ‘theatrocracy’—sovereignty of the audience—condemned in Plato’s Laws is reinstalled as a radical principle of egalitarian politics in Jacques Rancière’s work. Peter Hallward examines the implications and limitations of his approach. Is today’s post-political order vulnerable to theatrocratic attack?
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Tom Nairn: The New Furies
Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.
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Georgi Derluguian: Machiavellis for Postmoderns
Georgi Derluguian on Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics. Techniques of political legerdemain in the former Soviet states, and the swerving trajectories of its intelligentsia practitioners
Articles:
-
Jean Baudrillard,
‘Pyres of
Autumn’
The torching of the French banlieues as both sequel to the No vote of May 2005 and symptom of a wider Western malaise. Rejection of official pieties of integration, and flames of revolt against an automated Europe.
-
Forrest Hylton,
‘Landslide in
Boliviar’
The Left owes its December victory in Bolivia to the popular movements that have stymied water and gas privatizations since 2000. Forrest Hylton surveys the landscape ahead, and the militant formation of Morales’s running mate Álvaro García Linera.
-
Julian
Stallabrass,
‘Spectacle and
Terror’
After Gopal Balakrishnan’s engagement with Afflicted Powers in NLR 36, Julian Stallabrass turns to the Retort collective’s conception of spectacle and its Islamist antagonists. Does a Debordian optic occlude the oppositional potential of modern technologies?
-
Tom Nairn,
‘The New Furies’
Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.
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Jack Goody,
‘Inheritance
and Incest’
Jack Goody on Maurice Godelier, Métamorphoses de la parenté. Kinship as the central concern of anthropology, and its place in French and British traditions of the discipline. The universality—or otherwise—of incest taboos; their interpretation by Lévi-Strauss; and the role of beliefs versus interests in generating them.
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Robin Blackburn,
‘Imperial
Margarine’
Robin Blackburn on Niall Ferguson, Colossus and Empire. Rehabilitations of colonial rule for today’s proconsuls in Baghdad and Kabul.
Editorials:
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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:
-
Sabry Hafez, ‘An Arabian
Master’
The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.
-
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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Leo Panitch &
Sam Gindin,
‘Superintending
Global Capital’
The end of US hegemony has been announced more often even than that of neoliberalism. Yet American power persists, with little resistance so far from rival centres of accumulation. Rationales and indices of the continuing role of the United States as overlord of world capital.
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Malcolm Bull,
‘Limits of
Multitude’
What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.
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Andrew Glyn,
‘Global
Asymmetries’
Wide-ranging account of the growing disequilibria within an increasingly integrated global capitalism. Andrew Glyn takes the measure of China's still gigantic catch-up potential, in comparison to previous Asian NIEs, and assesses the impact of its rise across different sectors of the world economy.
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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.
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Giovanni Arrighi,
‘Hegemony
Unravelling’,
parts I
In the first part of a major engagement with David Harvey’s New Imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi sets out the interlocking dynamics, spatial and temporal, of capitalist development and imperialism. Should US difficulties in Iraq and the ballooning current-account deficit be read as symptoms of a deeper-lying crisis, a shift from hegemony to dominance presaging the rise of a new East Asian challenger?
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& II
In the conclusion to his major two-part essay on the new US imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi situates the contradictions of the current American ‘spatial fix’ for the problems of overaccumulation in the context of a longue durée of systemic cycles. Have Washington’s attempts to secure its world role through the invasion of Iraq instead hastened the rise of China?
