CONTENTS
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Robert Pollin: De-Growth vs a Green New Deal
Can degrowth supply a political economy that meets environmental and egalitarian aims? In a powerful contribution to the debate initiated by Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel (NLR 109), Robert Pollin argues that a green-growth model offers a more viable alternative.
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Achin Vanaik: India's Two Hegemonies
How to grasp what’s new in the rule of right-wing strongmen like India’s Narendra Modi? Systematic comparison of the predominance of today’s BJP with that of the Congress Party under Nehru and his descendants. Contrasts of leadership style and party organization—continuities of cow-belt base, regional chauvinism and border enforcement.
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John Willett: Art and Revolution
Commissioned by Eric Hobsbawm for Einaudi’s Storia del marxismo, a synoptic survey of avant-garde movements in the era of 20th-century revolutions. Disputing the received view of a series of chaotic, short-lived experiments, John Willett traces the emergence of an internally coherent cultural renaissance, stretching from Moscow and Vitebsk to Mexico City.
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Catherine Bertho Lavenir: Border Making
From boundary stone and river bank to school-room map and airport security zone: a typology of the border that relates material markers to the institutions which transmit—and enforce—their meanings.
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Peter Dews: The Idea of Hope
Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.
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Cal Winslow: Company Town?
An archaeology of the radical dreams buried under Seattle’s glass towers, the expanding footprints of Amazon and Microsoft. Reverberations of the October Revolution on the far shore of the North Pacific, as Wobblies, loggers and shipyard workers rally to the general strike of 1919.
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Eva Díaz: Art and the New Space Age
From Buckminster Fuller to Robert Rauschenberg, visual culture was enthralled by space travel in the age of Gagarin and the Apollo moon landings. As tech billionaires lease Cape Canaveral launch pads for private-enterprise extra-terrestrial ventures, more critical takes from a range of new artists.
Articles:
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Achin Vanaik,
‘India's Two Hegemonies’
How to grasp what’s new in the rule of right-wing strongmen like India’s Narendra Modi? Systematic comparison of the predominance of today’s BJP with that of the Congress Party under Nehru and his descendants. Contrasts of leadership style and party organization—continuities of cow-belt base, regional chauvinism and border enforcement.
-
John Willett,
‘Art and Revolution’
Commissioned by Eric Hobsbawm for Einaudi’s Storia del marxismo, a synoptic survey of avant-garde movements in the era of 20th-century revolutions. Disputing the received view of a series of chaotic, short-lived experiments, John Willett traces the emergence of an internally coherent cultural renaissance, stretching from Moscow and Vitebsk to Mexico City.
Editorials:
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Which Feminisms?,
The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?
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Erdoğan’s Cesspit,
As the AKP’s crackdown on political dissent continues and Erdoğan’s autocratic ambitions become ever more apparent, his Western apologists lament the fall from grace of a man—moderate and liberal-minded—who never existed.
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Portugal,
How and why has Portugal differed from Spain since the downfall of their respective dictatorships in the mid 70s? The course of political and economic development since the Revolution of 1974 was contained, and its current discrepant outcome: a conventional social-democratic government obliged to break with Euro-austerity under the pressure of a pact with the radical left.
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The French Spring,
How did Emmanuel Macron become President of France virtually overnight? What are the likely consequences of his rule? The long epoch of collusive alternation between Centre-Left and Centre-Right, and its abrupt ending; the realities of Le Pen’s Front National, and the riposte of Mélenchon’s La France insoumise. Has neo-liberalism finally arrived in force in Paris, and if so what are the implications for Europe?
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Casting Off,
How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.
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Oppositions,
After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.
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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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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.
Articles:
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Eva Díaz,
‘New Space Age’
From Buckminster Fuller to Robert Rauschenberg, visual culture was enthralled by space travel in the age of Gagarin and the Apollo moon landings. As tech billionaires lease Cape Canaveral launch pads for private-enterprise extra-terrestrial ventures, more critical takes from a range of new artists.
-
Peter Dews,
‘The Idea of Hope’
Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.
-
Cal Winslow,
‘Company Town?’
An archaeology of the radical dreams buried under Seattle’s glass towers, the expanding footprints of Amazon and Microsoft. Reverberations of the October Revolution on the far shore of the North Pacific, as Wobblies, loggers and shipyard workers rally to the general strike of 1919.
-
Catherine Bertho Lavenir,
‘Border Making’
From boundary stone and river bank to school-room map and airport security zone: a typology of the border that relates material markers to the institutions which transmit—and enforce—their meanings.