Why is South Africa seemingly still mired in the income and spatial segregation patterns of the apartheid era? Standard explanations focus on the ANC, either as too neoliberal or too statist. Kevin Cox looks instead at the making of classes—and expropriation of African farmers—in conditions of globalization’s labour shock.
An inter-generational exchange between one of the Cold War’s originating thinkers and a young Marxist scholar studying his work. Problems of American foreign policy, definitions of the national interest, the Soviet Union and the containment doctrine and the independent development of political discourse among the subjects under consideration.
Derogatory references to wiki-novels abound in contemporary literary criticism, as authors parade their characters’ pseudo-erudition. But might these be signs of an iPhone era ‘regime of perception’? Dazzling reconsideration of the relation between the novel and the encyclopaedia, from Sterne and Melville to Rachel Kushner and Sally Rooney.
A tribute to the founder of the Parisian Regulation School of heterodox economics, with its striking combination of elite statistical training, rich conceptualizations and long-range economic history. Michel Aglietta’s singular trajectory traced from radicalization in Algeria and 1960s Marxism to studies of China and green modelling.
If the past is always that of a certain present, what are the conditions for avoiding the subordination of public history to self-interested origin stories, or the consignment of past infamies to oblivion? Who belongs in public memory, and who not? Reflections on the political use and abuse of popular historiography.
The experience of the Frieze Art Fair in London, as sibling events sprout in New York, LA, Seoul, Abu Dhabi, under the ownership of an entertainment mogul. Commercial logics on display in a glaring, idea-less space, where artists function as generators of speculative capital.
Nic Johnson on Melinda Cooper, Counterrevolution. Neoliberalism as programme to head off the radical potential of the Keynesian state.
Grey Anderson on Edward Luce, Zbig. Biography of Brzezinski, updating the American strategist and Russia hawk for present needs.
María Haro Sly on Carlos Pagni, El Nudo. The Buenos Aires periphery as a political subject, from the early workers’ movement to Javier Milei.