New Left Review, July/August 2017
The latest issue is now available.
In the latest issue:
How and why has Portugal differed from Spain since the downfall of their respective dictatorships in the mid 70s? The course of political and economic development since the Revolution of 1974 was contained, and its current discrepant outcome: a conventional social-democratic government obliged to break with Euro-austerity under the pressure of a pact with the radical left.
Catarina Martins: The Portuguese Experiment
The coordinator of Portugal’s Left Bloc traces her trajectory from theatre to the political stage. The prominence of women in the party’s leadership, the social achievements wrested so far from the grip of the Portuguese establishment, and the prospects for extending those gains or seeing them reversed by Brussels and Berlin.
Nancy Fraser: A New Form of Capitalism?
Does an expanding circuit of commodities whose value is indexed to their rarity and antiquity suggest that capitalism is secreting a novel ‘economy of enrichment’? Replying to Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in NLR 98, Nancy Fraser argues that Marx’s Holy Trinity of profit, interest and rent remains key to a taxonomy of contemporary commodification.
Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre: Enrichment, Profit, Critique
Responding to Fraser, Boltanski and Esquerre extend their comparative analysis of capitalist valorization types, adding to their original trio—standard form, asset form, collection form—another type, the trend form, and arguing that today’s ‘integral capitalism’ encompasses all four.
Marco D'Eramo: The Not So Eternal City
Angry and witty in equal measure, a blistering native account of Rome’s fate at the hands of avaricious developers, insensate priests, neo-liberal ex-communists and stupefied tourists: corruption, dilapidation, fossilization, Disneyfication and—now, above all—cementification of Europe’s oldest capital.
Sven Lütticken: The Juridical Economy
Art as the uncanny double of law in the work of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, and its confrontations today with the law in avant-garde practice, as the juridical category of the person either expands beyond even the corporation, dismissed as ‘artificial’ by Hegel, to new fictive forms, or contracts to captive sub-human shapes.
Wang Chaohua: China's First Revolution
Wang Chaohua on Qin Hui, Zou chu dizhi. Sources and consequences of the Revolution of 1911 for China’s history, in the telling of one of its most original political thinkers. Could changes of state ever be separated from transformations of culture?
Nikil Saval: Two-Island Estrangement
Nikil Saval on Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger. The early years in Jamaica and Britain of NLR’s first editor and the founder of Cultural Studies, at home in neither island, an influence across the world.
Tor Krever: Spectral Expertise
Tor Krever on David Kennedy, A World of Struggle. The unseen, ubiquitous role of experts in determinations of the global economy and international law, and in political decisions at large. Foucault really a better guide than Hobbes?
