Articles

Susan WatkinsBaselines

Trump’s second term has begun with a whirlwind of iconoclastic pronouncements and an opening to Moscow that has sent European rulers into ideological crisis. An American-policy aide-mémoire offers baseline metrics for the ruptures—and continuities—ahead.

Perry AndersonIdées-forces

What weight should be given to the role of ideas in moments of radical change, as opposed to that of material interests and forces? From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, rise of Marxism and hegemony of neoliberalism, lessons for a system-changing left.

Tariq AliConquered Lands

A political panorama of the Middle East, surveying the fortunes of rulers and ruled in Riyadh, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, Tehran, Gaza and Tel Aviv, under the stifling blanket of a heavily militarized Israeli-American hegemony.

Teemu RuskolaThe Making of the Chinese Working Class

Drawing inspiration from Edward Thompson’s classic study, a comparative analysis of the forces that have shaped and re-shaped China’s labouring masses, as wave upon wave of ‘new enclosures’ complete the proletarianization of the peasantry.

Malcolm BullWhy Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?

If, since Duchamp, anything can be art, regardless of skill or vision, why isn’t more of it produced? Drawing on Frank Knight’s work on financial risk to probe the institutional theory of art, Malcolm Bull finds curious links with the worlds of cryptocurrency and NFTs.

NLR EditorsSymposium: Introduction

A discussion of Robin Blackburn’s quintet on slavery in the Atlantic world: origins, rise, overthrow, legacy.

John CleggRoads To Freedom

Opening a symposium on Robin Blackburn’s The Reckoning, a probing examination of political agents and structuring conditions behind the late overthrow of slavery in the American South, Cuba and Brazil.

Enrico Dal LagoAtlantic Histories

How should Blackburn’s slavery quintet be situated in relation to shifting historiographical paradigms of the Atlantic World, from the voyages of discovery to the age of Anglo-American predominance?

Nancy FraserSlavery and Social Theory

What questions for critical social theory are posed by the capitalist slave regimes of the Americas? An inquiry into the political, economic and social-reproductive dimensions of enslaved and ‘doubly free’ labour.

Robin BlackburnContradictions of Capital and Slavery: A Reply

Responding to his interlocutors in NLR’s symposium, Blackburn foregrounds the contradictions of capital and political rule in the Atlantic slave systems that opened space for class struggle.