New Left Review's Blog

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.

In 2017, a fire killed 72 residents of Grenfell Tower in West London, exposing a bleak background of neglect. How can art grapple with such an event? Contrasting modes of aesthetic response explored in the works of Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen and Forensic Architecture.

A sociological critique of calls for the wholesale elimination of police, courts and prisons, arguing instead for a radical ‘penal minimalism’—a better-funded system, with fewer suspects funnelled into it, and imprisonment a punishment of last resort.

Interviewed by Tom Stevenson, one of Britain’s leading historians discusses the development of his understanding of the war as a terminal clash between imperial-colonial systems, built on close analysis of its interrelated military, political and economic dimensions.

The global reverberations of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, understood as world event—an epochal turning point which serves to reveal the changing nature of the times. Philosophical reflections on the rise of a new-era McCarthyism in Germany and the US.

Investigating the persistence—or retreat—of capital’s great prog­rammatic offensive, along its many fronts: ideological struggle, policy prescription, macro-regulation of economic life, class direction. A multi-dimensional analysis of an uneven condition.

Asymmetries of the US-Israeli assault on Iran, as an uneasy balance holds between Tehran’s tourniquet on the Strait of Hormuz—and the world economy—and the enormous firepower of the aggressors, at the end of the first round.

Emilie Bickerton on Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects. A ‘negative’ history that sheds new light on the master filmmaker.

Nausicaa Renner on Paul Heideman, Rogue Elephant. Hollowed-out parties and capitalist sectoralization said to underlie the Trumpian capture of the GOP.