New Left Review's Blog

Emilie Bickerton introduces a selection from the intensive discussions that erupted after Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, was screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1962—a cool judgement by l’Unità’s film critic, Ugo Casiraghi; an impassioned defence by Sartre; and location in Soviet cinematographical debates by Vittorio Strada.

In the second instalment of the late historian’s correspondence with Perry Anderson, disagreements and convergences on religion and secularization; on Hobbes, Vico, Lampedusa; on Ginzburg’s concept of ‘the bond of shame’—and, repeatedly, on Marc Bloch.

With Europe’s elites more willing to embark on a zombie rearmament than grapple with the divisions in their own hollowed states, a spirited case for a renewal of democracy in the economic sphere—drawing on cooperativism, syndicalism and Kōjin Karatani’s theory of isonomia.

If capital’s operations have moved beyond the reach of democracy, what possibilities are there for a reassertion of the collective will? Material and political problems of a programme for small-scale social-democratic revival—a critical engagement with Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control.

Technologically and ideologically, militant Zionism is on the march, wreaking destruction across the Middle East. A critical researcher into its military-intelligence methods discusses the function of the IDF as Israel’s all-purpose nation-building apparatus and the role of Occupied Territories’ digital-surveillance systems in feeding its high-tech take-off.

In ‘The New National Question’ (NLR 160), Benjamin Kunkel asked whether a post-globalization order might offer opportunities for the left. In his reply, Jacob Collins probes the ambiguous meanings and complex typology of the national, drawing on critical theorists from Tom Nairn and Régis Debray to Benedict Anderson and Wang Chaohua.