The standard argument for backing hawkish centre-left parties remains the ‘lesser evil’. Lorna Finlayson interrogates that line of reasoning and the assumptions on which it rests: crude consequentialism, narrow minded electoralism and covering up the realities of Starmer’s Labour.| New Left Review
Netanyahu is building on the obliteration of Gaza to launch an external offensive across multiple fronts, aiming at cantonization in Lebanon and Syria, and regime change, if not state break-up, in Iran. What explains the West's political investment in an Israeli-centric Middle East, on conspicuous display during June’s Twelve-Day War?| New Left Review: current issue
In an expansive response to Perry Anderson’s critique of international law in NLR 143, Martti Koskenniemi counterposes to headline rulings on crimes against humanity the opaque, pervasive network of techniques that constitutes the legal infrastructure of global capitalism, shaping our unequal world-social relations and how we imagine them.| New Left Review: current issue
Though brandishing ‘Stop the Steal!’ placards, along with US and Israeli flags, nationalist mobilizations in South Korea draw on a different lineage to that of Trump, Bolsonaro or Farage. The latest NLR study of rising new rights locates the RoK’s conservative bloc in its history of collaboration with Japanese and American imperialism, now re-gearing against the PRC.| New Left Review: current issue
Picking up on Emilie Bickerton’s identification in NLR 109 of a new genre of films centred on the working class, Julia Hertäg offers a comparative-historical view of German Arbeiterfilme. Themes and forms tracked from the radical efflorescence of Weimar through the sixties rebellion against the Bonn Republic to the anomic social landscape of the post-unification FRG.| New Left Review: current issue
Following his analytic survey of socialist economic theory and practice in the last number of NLR, Aaron Benanav sets out a design for institutions that could structure an economic democracy beyond capital accumulation and waged labour. A novel dual-currency system, elected investment boards, worker self-management and trans-sectoral coordination, responsive to the broadest social goals.| New Left Review: current issue
Carolyn Lesjak on Fredric Jameson, Inventions of a Present. The cultural theorist’s literary criticism assembled for the first time, yielding new insights on method.| New Left Review: current issue
Jonathan Rée on Christoph Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. Critique of the ideological function of Anglo-American philosophy’s hegemonic style.| New Left Review: current issue
Julian Stallabrass on Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention. Case studies limning a contemporary artworld in which viewing is reconfigured by digital distractions.| New Left Review: current issue
An interview with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.| Sidecar
After the dilapidation of urban modernism, what kinds of city and what forms of architecture await us? The author of The Seeds of Time considers their flowers in the dizzying work of Rem Koolhaas, the mega-developments of the Pearl River Delta and the conceptualization of ‘Junkspace’. Breaking back into history with a battering-ram of the postmodern?| New Left Review
Against the rightward trend of the Old World, countries in Latin America continue to favour governments of the left. The resounding mandate for Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico’s presidential election confirms Morena’s hegemony within the new party system. Where exactly on the political map should its project be placed?| New Left Review
On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.| New Left Review
An interview to RMS with an intersting historical perspective and his| Giacomo Tesio
In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation.| New Left Review
