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Dylan Riley,
‘What Is Trump?’ The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.

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NLR 114 will be mailed out to subscribers from 21 December.

CONTENTS

  1. Dylan Riley: What Is Trump? The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.
  2. Perry Anderson: The Missing Text The debates of the English New Left in the summer of 1961 as backdrop to the memorable essay by Raymond Williams, printed below—and possible explanation for its first appearance in an obscure, formerly CIA-funded literary journal. Perry Anderson asks how knowledge of it would revise Edward Thompson’s critical assessment of The Long Revolution in NLR.
  3. Raymond Williams: The Future of Marxism Published at last in NLR, a remarkable, long-buried intervention by one of the leading thinkers of the early New Left. Characteristically original and independent-minded considerations of the relation of Marxism to the actually existing Communist regimes and the correspondences of socialist theory and practice across the ‘three worlds’, written just after The Long Revolution.
  4. Alexander Clapp: The Twin Faces of Athens Myths and realities of Greek statehood writ large in its distended capital. From post-Ottoman neo-Hellenism to Cold War urbanization and the culture-sapping rule of the Troika, the delimitation of a new-fangled city of Pericles from the catch-all conurbation for Balkan migrations.
  5. Carlos Spoerhase: Rankings: A Pre-History A forerunner to contemporary listification in eighteenth-century tabulations of painters, playwrights, poets and composers. Rise and fall of Enlightenment metrics of aesthetic evaluation, squeezed between the dyadic arrangements of classical comparatio and Romantic conceits of off-the-scale artistic genius.
  6. Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, Cinzia Arruzza: Notes for a Feminist Manifesto Opposed to ‘lean in’ liberal iterations, three activist-scholars premise a militant feminism for the many, inspired by La huelga feminista of 8 March. The politics of social reproduction and the imperative of wider solidarities: the women’s struggle retooled for the multiple crises of late capitalism.
  7. Catherine Samary: A Utopian in the Balkans Catherine Samary on Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Bloch’s utopian horizon as measure for the achievements and inversions of the SFRY.
  8. Tony Wood: Mesoamerican Pathways Tony Wood on John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland. Historic struggles of central Mexico’s campesinos postulated as relay-switch for capitalism’s expansion in Latin America and beyond.
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Articles:

Editorials:

  1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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?
  10. 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.
  11. 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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