New Left Review, Issue 115

In the latest issue:

Susan Watkins: America vs China

Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?

Peter Nolan: The CPC and the Ancien Régime

Roots of the PRC’s legitimating ideology in the longue durée of Chinese history, as source of the Party’s confidence that it need not imitate Western models in the coming century. Peter Nolan sets out the view from Zhongnanhai on the desirable relation between market and state—a potential alternative to the current world order?

Christopher Connery: Ronald Coase in Beijing

On the eve of the financial crisis, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing posited the advent of a world-equalizing market state in China. Christopher Connery now takes a sardonic look at the country’s ‘institutional economics’ through the eyes of an idiosyncratic English Hayekian.

Robert Brenner and Victor Shih: China’s Credit Conundrum

Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown.

Didier Fassin and Anne-Claire Defossez: An Improbable Movement?

The policies and pretensions of a Bourbonnais president as background to the political insurgency of provincial France. Origins and complexion of the gilets jaunes mobilization, with the Elysée resorting to the worst police violence since May 68.

Mark Burton and Peter Somerville: Degrowth: A Defence

Counterblast to Robert Pollin’s programme in NLR 112 for a green-growth new deal, arguing that a radical reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions requires a smaller global economy. Proposals for a drastic overhaul of production, construction, transportation and agricultural practices.

Lola Seaton: Green Questions

A survey of the ‘green strategy’ debate in recent numbers of NLR unravels the threads of twin disagreements about GDP growth, which appears, by turns, a political-economic necessity and an ecological death-sentence. Steady-state, half-earthing, degrowth, green new deal? All have questions to answer.

Frederik Van Dam: Fictions of Culture

Frederik Van Dam on Francis Mulhern, Figures of Catastrophe. Elegant elucidation of an unsuspected literary genre centred on culture as a ground for social conflict.

Alexandra Reza: Imagined Transmigrations

Alexandra Reza on Stephen Smith, La ruée vers Europe. Projected convergence of African demographic growth and economic stagnation as conditions for a migratory ‘scramble for Europe’.

Rebecca Lossin: Mutinous Territory

Rebecca Lossin on Mauvaise Troupe, The ZAD and NoTAV. Oral history and barefoot ethnography combine in a participants’ account of territorial struggles in Piedmont and Brittany.

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Adam Smith in Beijing

by Giovanni Arrighi

In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the West and the territories it had conquered. In this magisterial new work, G...

Figures of Catastrophe

by Francis Mulhern

The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel. Reading across and against the grai...

The Zad and NoTAV

by Mauvaise Troupe

Preface by Kristin Ross

Translated by Kristin Ross

At a time of ever more accelerated and expanded development of natural and agricultural territory, in the aim of making targeted areas more profitable and controllable, there are inhabitants who op...