New Left Review's Blog

Tom Mertes on Richard Beck, Homeland. Origins and afterlives of America’s long War on Terror.

Katie Ebner-Landy on Rahel Jaeggi, Progress and Regression. A critical theorist reformulates the concept of progress as social-reflexive problem-solving.

Jack Copley on Timothy Mitchell, The Alibi of Capital. Capital re-conceptualized as terraforming expropriation of the future.

Following his widely praised Ages of American Capitalism, Jonathan Levy’s The Real Economy proposes a theoretical counterpart, grounding a concept of capital in a fusion of Smith, Keynes, Freud, Deleuze and Guatarri. Javier Moreno Zacarés responds with a thoroughgoing critical engagement, ranging from the ‘transition debate’ to the AI bubble.

Mongolia’s diverse ecology was the site of revolutionary transformations in the twentieth century, when the principal source of wealth—the livestock herd—was sequentially the basis of feudal class, collective resource and a privatized asset. The socialist making of a nation-state and its capitalist unmaking—a materialist account.

Reflections on having lived the passage from one age to another, as prospects give way to retrospects, pages to screens and time to space. With the close of one century, the onset of the next provides an occasion to take stock of what has been lost—and what gained—in the transition.

An interview about the new parameters of climate politics, with the breakdown of global consensus. As the EU re-opens coal-fired plants and the US shuts down wind farms, China gouges the earth to churn out cheap green-energy products—and is met by anti-extractivist protestors.

A diagnosis of the scrambled political culture of today’s Atlantic elites, with Trump read as symptom as much as cause. Can the concept of hyperpolitics help to decipher the strategic incoherence and foreshortened horizons of the West’s fractious ruling-class blocs?

Thomas Meaney on Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises. The Cold War’s end recast as upshot of a contest to enforce capital’s discipline, East and West.

Sebastian Veg on Ming-Sho Ho, Be Water; Ching Kwan Lee, Forever Hong Kong; Edmund Cheng and Samson Yuen, The Making of Leaderful Mobilization. Studies of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests.