New Left Review

Gift subscriptions to NLR come with full access to the archive from 1960 to the present—1000s of articles, including classics from Adorno, Althusser, Benedict Anderson, Harvey, Jameson; Robert Brenner, Judith Butler, Mike Davis, Nancy Fraser and many more. newleftreview.org/p/x

Here's my essay in the new issue of The Ideas Letter, 'Terms of Art', on contemporary America film criticism and the work of A S Hamrah, with some emphasis on inaccuracy and misrepresentations; cameos from Kael, Faber @tnyfrontrow and other eminent figures theideasletter.org/essay/he-lost-…

A superb essay by Nancy Fraser, particularly on ‘Philosemitic McCarthyism’ From the introduction:

This again might at first blush look like self-assurance: we can teach anything. But in reality, it’s the opposite. Anyone, on this logic, can teach any subject. Expertise is irrelevant ... By forfeiting judgement, we make ourselves redundant. @LJFinlayson newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

“Hapless and sanctimonious, Starmer has the worst approval ratings of any prime minister since records began in the seventies. Labour is adrift in a country where the economy is stagnating under Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s grim-faced orthodoxy.” newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

A great book sooner or later finds its ideal reader. Here @lola_seaton nudges Ben Lerner's Transcription into disclosing its secrets newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

“The idea that being appalled by a genocide is symptomatic of a ‘warped’ mind—whereas casually referring to tens of thousands of dead children as an obstacle to proselytise on behalf of the state that killed them is not—is about as warped as it gets.” newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

for @NewLeftReview I wrote about reading (and re-reading) Ben Lerner's trippy, riddling new novel, which sent me west... newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

This review, which stares into Lerner’s novel to the point of achieving a kind of critical pareidolia, was a better read than Transcription itself

a smash hit from the most searching and rigorous reviewer of new fiction on these shores @lola_seaton over at @NewLeftReview SIDECAR on the novel people have been reading + thinking and politely arguing about: Ben Lerner's Transcription newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

In NLR 158: Gaza as World Event. Nancy Fraser reads the global reverberations of Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a crisis point in the prevailing Western moral order. Reflections on neo-McCarthyism in Germany and the US. newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/a…

Tom Hazeldine: ‘These were the worst midterm results for a governing party in living memory. They have tightened the net around Labour’s flailing Prime Minister…’ newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

"Rage at rich people with dubious pasts is no substitute for an analysis of the dynamics of the system and the opportunities that its laws of motion open and foreclose." newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Lola Seaton (@lola_seaton) considers Ben Lerner’s new novel: ‘Whether we call the flowering of new senses fiction or criticism, to connect the terms is to see that they meet in the utopian…’ newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Is NLR the only outlet whose website has justified paragraphs?

Dylan Riley at his best: "rage at rich people with dubious pasts is no substitute for an analysis of the dynamics of the system and the opportunities that its laws of motion open and foreclose." newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Corey Robin: “Dylan Riley in the New Left Review today stating crisply and cleanly, in three paragraphs, one of the major problems with Sven Beckert's book on capitalism, and the underlying worldview it expresses (though Riley doesn't say a word about Beckert): "One of the most important distinctions for understanding the dynamics of the current world and its historical emergence is that between capitalists and capitalism. Capitalists are economic actors oriented toward profit. As long-distance merchants, financiers of princes, and tax farmers they have existed in a wide variety of societies for thousands of years. Capitalism, in contrast, is a system of all-round market dependence that emerged much more recently and in a much more geographically restricted area (in the Low Countries and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). It should never be forgotten that capitalists generally loathe capitalism, especially its competitive constraint. They would prefer to make profits through rent-seeking and political extraction without risking their wealth on uncertain investments. Indeed, the most obvious threat to capitalism today comes not from the working class, but paradoxically from capitalists who with increasing success have figured how to profit by plunder rather than productive investment. These points are far from original, but they are not sufficiently recognized for two interconnected reasons. The first is the suspicion of comparison. For many scholars, even posing the question of why, for example, England and the Netherlands made the transition to market-dependent agriculture is a sign of incorrigible eurocentrism and a retrograde failure to grasp that capitalism was a globe-spanning system ab initio. That naturally leads to enormous pressure to describe all types of profit-making activity, especially merchant colonial activities, as an emergent form of capitalism. The second reason is a more specific pressure to describe various labour-repressive agriculture systems, especially slavery, as capitalist. To support this claim it is endlessly demonstrated that the agrarian elites of these systems kept careful books, were oriented to profitability and entangled in sophisticated systems of finance. Both tendencies, the anti-comparative one and the recasting of capitalism as any economic system organized around profitability, derive from a position of political weakness. Capitalism seems immune to an immanent critique which takes as its starting point the system in its pure state and unfolds its inherently contradictory character as both social and anarchic; instead, capitalism is to be condemned in terms of its violent past and present, its entanglements with colonialism, racism and oppression, as in ‘racial capitalism’. Accordingly, the object of critique subtly shifts from the system – capitalism – to the actors: capitalists. But rage at rich people with dubious pasts is no substitute for an analysis of the dynamics of the system and the opportunities that its laws of motion open and foreclose." newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Lorna Finlayson on merit (@LJFinlayson): ‘Suppose you are a philosopher, trying to decide which of your colleagues should be made redundant. ‘ newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…