Tariq Ali (
@TariqAli_News
) on the uprising in Palestine:
'Israel is a nuclear state, armed to the teeth by the US. Its existence is not under threat. It’s the Palestinians, their lands, their lives, that are.'
'The legitimacy of the power structure has collapsed; it is now nothing more than a coercive bloc. Having demolished all other mediations, the autocrat is separated from the people only by a police line.'
Frédéric Lordon on the French uprising:
Lorna Finlayson (
@LJFinlayson
) on academics and the plight of higher education:
'The uncomfortable truth is that academics have been complicit, and often instrumental, in bringing about the present predicament.'
Mike Davis writes for Sidecar on the global conjuncture.
'Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour.'
'Mainstream Zionism sought a mono-ethnic Jewish state from the start. Its leaders knew their goal required expulsion of Arabs, and had no qualms about "transfer"—ethnic cleansing.'
Perry Anderson, 'The House of Zion':
'Genocide, ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba are not acts of God. They can be prevented. Our governments have so far refused to raise objections. Let us remind them of the costs of their complicity.'
Sai Englert in Sidecar:
‘On any realistic assessment, international law is neither truthfully international nor genuinely law.’
In the latest NLR, Perry Anderson writes on the history, theory and practice of a powerful hegemonic instrument:
Perry Anderson on the history, theory and practice of international law:
'As an ideological force at the service of the hegemon and its allies, it is a formidable instrument of power.'
For Sidecar, Ilan Pappé on six reasons why Zionism is collapsing:
'A slow process of disintegration can gather momentum and then, in a short period of time, bring down structures that once appeared solid and steadfast.'
'Inevitably, journalists have described the succession drama as "Shakespearean". If there’s a ghost haunting this feast of cliches, it is probably a starving Gazan.'
Tim Barker (
@_TimBarker
) on the intra-elite conflict in Washington:
'That Biden could only be moved to pity by a war crime that personally affected the man who introduced tapas to Washington speaks volumes about the moral bankruptcy of his administration.'
Richard Beck (
@Richard__Beck
) on Bidenism Abroad:
Today in Sidecar, Mike Davis on the Capitol Hill riots and the realignment of the Republican Party.
'What was essentially a big biker gang, dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians, stormed the ultimate country club.'
A previously untranslated essay by Mario Tronti (1931-2023):
‘It is only with the weapon of political irony that these days one can combat the tragic seriousness of history.’
"The ‘magic’ of our monarchs is the sweet odour of decay arising from a mountainous dunghill of unfinished bourgeois business. The exaggerated popularity they enjoy is one manifestation of a nation which turned its back on progress generations ago."
Alberto Toscano remembers Antonio Negri:
‘At the core of Negri’s life and work was the idea that philosophy is inseparable from a practice of collective liberation…’
Perry Anderson on the history, theory and pratice of international law as a hegemonic instrument:
'What they forbade others, the liberal powers reserved the freedom to do themselves.'
Richard Seymour (
@leninology
) on Starmer's majority without a mandate:
'Few governments have been this fragile coming into office. There will be no honeymoon.'
Tariq Ali (
@TariqAli_News
) on Gaza's fightback:
'Palestinians know that the fascist elements of the Israeli state would have no compunction about sanctioning the mass murder of Arabs. And they know this must be resisted by any means necessary.'
Anton Jäger (
@AntonJaegermm
) on Todd Field's 'Tár':
'The film's reception exposed a Weltanschauung increasingly helpless in the face of artistic ambiguity: the "intolerance of ambivalence" that Freud once saw as the hallmark of the neurotic personality.'
How far did Britain’s class structure alter in the sixties, with the onset of the ‘affluent society’?
In this text from 1963, published for the first time in English, Eric Hobsbawm supplies a mordant panorama of the nation’s shifting habits and customs:
'Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds.'
Launched in 2020, Sidecar publishes free weekly articles on world politics, capitalism, ideas and culture.
If you value our work, please consider becoming a monthly supporter or making a one-off donation.
'They are putting the rest of us on notice: If we can do this to Ken Loach, a man who has spent his life championing the victims of oppression, racism and discrimination, imagine what we shall do to you.'
Ilan Pappé on the Israeli protests:
'Liberal Zionism is founded on a series of oxymorons: enlightened occupation, benevolent ethnic cleansing, progressive apartheid. Thanks to Netanyahu’s government, these contradictions can no longer be contained.'
Alyssa Battistoni (
@alybatt
) on Bruno Latour:
'Latour’s relationship to the left had long been fraught, if not entirely unsatisfactory to either: Latour enjoyed antagonizing the left; in turn, many leftists loved to hate Latour.'
'A return to the anti-colonial tradition of Said, Césaire, Fanon and Biko is necessary to counter Palestinian "neo-nationalism"'.
Alberto Toscano on visions of decolonization:
Jonathan Rosenbaum writes on Jean-Marie Straub.
'Godard and Straub-Huillet remained comrades-in-arms for well over half a century, effectively serving as the two most imposing pillars of cinematic modernism in Western Europe.’
Dominique Routhier (
@docteur_en_rien
) on Bruno Latour:
'Latour’s ecologism resembles macronisme, in holding that ideas, through their persuasive power alone, can surmount political divisions and win support from across the social spectrum.'
'The death drive works, Freud says, "in silence". Yet the prompt of psychoanalysis is to ask that we try to speak anyway, however impossible the address.'
Alex Colston (
@re_colston
) writes for Sidecar on the psychosocial fallout of the pandemic.
For Sidecar, Richard Seymour (
@leninology
) on the UK riots:
'Lacking the utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion, today’s far right has become obsessed with bordering. It has retreated to a defensive nation-statism.'
'How did the Spanish left move from a position of strength – aspiring to "overthrow the regime of 78" – to one of weakness, if outright defeat, over the past ten years?'
Brais Fernández (
@BraisRomanino
) on the dynamics behind Spain's elections:
Cédric Durand (
@cedric_durand
) responds to
@adam_tooze
.
‘A smooth transition beyond carbon is no longer an option. There is no Pareto-efficient way of eradicating fossil fuel use in a timeframe compatible with the prevention of climate disorders.
For Sidecar, Rob Lucas (
@roblucas
) on the history and politics of machine learning:
'Capitalist production always involved an alienation of knowledge; and the mechanization of intelligence was always embedded in the division of labour.'
The new issue of NLR is now online!
Featuring previously unpublished New Left texts by Hobsbawm, Miliband, Wollen and Williams.
Plus Lola Seaton on political capitalism, Nathan Sperber on China, and Perry Anderson on Giorgio Fanti:
For Sidecar, Tariq Ali (
@TariqAli_News
) dismantles the tropes of the anti-Russian warmongers.
'The commentariat’s cry – "no sphere of influence for Russia!" – neglects to add that this is because the US presumes to command a global sphere.'
Thomas Meaney on the seventieth anniversary of Điện Biên Phủ:
'The communist state daringly – and brilliantly – implemented land reform at the height of its conflict with the French, in order to fully mobilize the peasant class.'
Oliver Nachtwey (
@onachtwey
) on the 'left-conservatism' of Sahra Wagenknecht:
'Wagenknechtism is simply a new form of Bonapartism, seeking to represent the passive and reactionary sections of the lower and middle classes.'
For Sidecar,
@yanisvaroufakis
writes on resisting the smear campaign against Ken Loach.
'It is a delicious irony that those who have tried the hardest to rid our souls of racism are hurt the most when accused of these prejudices.'
For Sidecar, Ussama Makdisi (
@UssamaMakdisi
) on 'the Palestine exception':
'Unlike every other case of Western settler-colonization, the oppression of Palestinians has outlasted the mainstreaming of concepts like "human rights" and "racial equality".'
'The weakening of the economy and hardening of authoritarianism are not easily reversible trends. They are the logical outcome of China's uneven development and capital accumulation over the last four decades.'
Ho-fung Hung (
@hofunghung
) in Sidecar:
‘The profit motive that lies at the root of exponential growth has to be spiked at every turn.’
Amid global discontent and economic collapse,
@profdavidharvey
rereads Marxian value theory to locate an escape route.
In the last decade, the classroom has replaced the boardroom as the terrain of feminist analysis. The risks of this manoeuvre are evident in Amia Srinivasan’s book, which generalises outwards from the university.
@caitdoherty
on 'The Right to Sex'.
For Sidecar, Owen Hatherley's special feature on the changing faces of London transport.
'Crossrail is a gentrification superhighway, and a line which finally makes getting into town more bearable for working-class people.'
'In Britain, all those who want to fight on must shift their focus to the refugees who will soon be knocking on NATO’s door. At the very least, refuge is what the West owes them: a minor reparation for an unnecessary war.'
Tariq Ali in Sidecar:
'In Sweden and Finland, we can see what "joining the West" really means: binding oneself to a US-led power bloc while doing away with any nominally socialist institutions – a process that has already been underway for decades.'
@lilyslynch
for Sidecar:
For Sidecar, Anton Jäger (
@AntonJaegermm
) responds to Richard Seymour on the UK riots:
'Beneath British pogromism lies a universe of misery which it is the left’s historic task to negate.'
Writing in NLR, Michael Hart & Antonio Negri return to the theses of Empire, twenty years on:
'Just as today’s Empire was formed in response to the insurgencies of the multitudes from below, so too, potentially, it could fall to them.'
Naomi Hossain (
@nomhossain
) contextualizes the unrest in Bangladesh:
'The Awami League has had unprecedented success in fusing with the state apparatus – the bureaucracy, security forces, judiciary – while also co-opting civil society and big business.'
'The climate left does not lack for utopian imaginaries, which can make for enjoyable exercises. But such utopianism can too easily avoid the material realities of the world as it exists.'
@Matthuber78
on degrowth and half-earth socialism:
Camila Vergara (
@Camila_Vergara
) on today’s vote in Chile:
‘Chileans choose between a far-right Pinochet apologist and a social democrat – not between ‘two extremists’ offering different variants of populism.’
McKenzie Wark (
@mckenziewark
) on Sylvère Lotringer of
@SemiotextePress
.
‘How prescient it was that Lotringer worked his whole life against the embers of fascism of which commodification is not the liberal extinguisher but the accelerant.’
For Sidecar, Alberto Toscano on the latest work by Adam Curtis.
‘The effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present leaves an aesthetic of explanation – the capture of emotion without the current of history.’
Perry Anderson on 1914 and 1848:
'A deeper structural feature of capitalism, long preceding the emergence of trusts, converted economic competition between firms into military conflicts between states. That was uneven development.'
‘This year will be remembered as the moment when global capitalism was reorganized beyond neoliberalism, a tectonic shift that will irrevocably alter the terrain of political struggle.’
Cédric Durand on the dynamics of the Biden era.
NLR 130 is now online!
Featuring
@GuilhermeBoulos
on Brazil's struggle of the roofless;
@mayadadol
on the cinema of Lav Diaz;
@profdavidharvey
on capital's fundamental contradiction, plus much more.
NLR 139 is now online!
Featuring Perry Anderson on Mike Davis and Tom Nairn; André Singer on Brazil; Cecilia Rikap on digital monopolies; and Matthew Karp (
@karpmj
) on US politics, plus much more:
'Modernism is an unfinished project, not a dead one. We have the ruins from which our new Jerusalem may be rebuilt.'
Esther Leslie (
@afoggyplace
) on the life and work of Owen Hatherley (
@owenhatherley
):
Caitlin Doherty (
@caitdoherty
) on the limits of contemporary feminism:
‘Feminism has no absolute right to existence. It must describe something about the world accurately for it to make sense as a political-philosophical position.’
'The recent protest wave has highlighted Israel’s fundamental paradox: it cannot be both democratic and Jewish. It will either be a racist Jewish state, or a democratic one for all its citizens. There is no middle ground.'
Ilan Pappé in Sidecar:
Rob Lucas (
@roblucas
) on the geology of capitalist social forms.
‘The mine was at that point the primary means for the development of geological knowledge – and, it turned out, even its labour process could supply a model of deep, structured time.’
Terry Eagleton on the new work by Raymond Geuss:
‘If Geuss were less suspicious of what he calls "world views", he might acknowledge that one at least of them offers a more dialectical assessment of liberalism than he is willing to countenance.’
'Putin’s belief that he could build a Russian capitalism structurally interconnected with that of the West, but operationally independent of it—a predator among predators, yet a predator capable of defying them—was always an ingenuous delusion.'
Introducing Sidecar, the new NLR blog!
Our opening lineup features
@TariqAli_News
on Starmer's purge;
@sophiepinkhmmm
on Stalin's final ceremony;
@majapearce
on Ivoirian elections; Wolfgang Streeck on NATO; and
@PinningtonN
on Annie Ernaux.
Read now!
'The demand for one state is now the best Palestinian option available. That it should be dismissed with such vehemence by Zionist and Scurrier spokesmen alike is evidence enough of that.'
Perry Anderson in NLR 96.
'Castillo's removal will not change the dynamics that create Peruvian political instability: parties that operate as kleptocratic machines, divided branches of government, and the conflict between fujimorismo and its opponents'.
@paulodrinot
in Sidecar:
NLR 147 is now online!
Featuring Rashid Khalidi & Tariq Ali on Palestine, Tony Wood on Mexico, Radhika Desai on India, Cédric Durand on Brett Christophers and Owen Hatherley on Andy Beckett, plus much more:
'At leadership level, a significant part of the Labour left made a conscious decision not to challenge the false narrative about antisemitism that was gradually constructed from 2015 onwards.'
Daniel Finn (
@DanFinn95
) on the campaign against Corbyn:
NLR 128 is now live!
Featuring Susan Watkins on the new Keynesianism; Georgi Derluguian on Nagorno Karabagh;
@AntonJaegermm
on Anglo-Belgian inequalities; and
@davies_will
on the politics of recognition in the age of platform capitalism.
Leo Robson (
@leorobsonwriter
) on Fredric Jameson:
'Jameson is primarily an appreciator, defined by flexibility, freedom from inherited hierarchies and snobberies, and the capacity for surprise.'
For Sidecar, Alberto Toscano on visions of decolonizing Palestine:
'"Oslo" names a form of false consciousness that afflicts Palestine’s political elites, who have been defanged, coopted, NGOised and corrupted by the the Accords.'
In this Sidecar special,
@DanFinn95
surveys the fabricated 'antisemitism crisis' and the strategic failure of the Labour left.
'The political field is littered with the corpses of those who were only too anxious to retreat under fire.'
'The classics of Western thought are today studied more extensively in China than in the West, for it is in these very texts – Plato, Aristotle – that China looks for ways of interpreting Western politics.'
Marco D'Eramo in Sidecar:
'Today the peasants, not the workers, are the only class that is internationalist in practice, precisely because they are chauvinist in ideology.'
Marco D'Eramo on the farmers' protests and 'l'Europe profonde':
'The fact is that over twenty years, the US has failed to build anything that might redeem its mission. The brilliantly lit Green Zone was always surrounded by a darkness that the Zoners could not fathom.'
@TariqAli_News
on NATO's failure:
‘Gramsci’s critique of political science begins from a simple but profound idea: that everyone is a legislator.’
In NLR 129, Michael Denning rereads Gramsci as a theorist of political organizing.
'Only a Europe at peace with Russia, one that respects Russian security needs, could hope to free itself from the American embrace, so effectively renewed during the Ukrainian crisis.'
Wolfgang Streeck on the geopolitical fallout of Putin's war:
'Hundreds of Finns, including the former chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have paid to have personalized messages inscribed on Ukrainian artillery shells fired at Russian forces.'
Lily Lynch (
@lilyslynch
) on Finland's wartime mania:
Alexander Zevin (
@zevin_a
) on US liberal and left responses to war in Ukraine.
‘A refusal to contemplate any alteration to a post-Cold War order forged in hubris by the victors is not toughness. It is war mongering.’
As Biden breaks with neoliberalism, political economists have tried to situate the present moment in the long-term rhythms of capitalist development. What can we learn from their analyses?
Read Cédric Durand (
@cedric_durand
) in Sidecar:
Latest issue of NLR now online, featuring Cihan Tuğal (
@CihanTugal
) on Turkey, Nancy Fraser on capital and climate, and Oliver Eagleton on Corbyn's defeat (
@EagletonOliver
):
For NLR, Owen Hatherley on Andy Beckett and the Labour left:
‘Corbyn will likely share Scargill’s fate as a figure of hate for the British ruling class for the rest of his life. He should take it as a point of pride.’
'Huber is right that capital’s pursuit of profit is a fetter on our collective liberation. What he misses is that eco-modernism similarly fetters a world of flourishing for all.'
@KaiHeron
writes for Sidecar on Marxist alternatives to degrowth:
NLR 122 is now online!
Featuring global perspectives on covid-19 from Mike Davis,
@ai_xiaoming
and others;
@owenhatherley
's landmark history of London; Michael Denning on Trump's impeachment; Terry Eagleton on linguistic theory; plus much more.