New Left Review> Issue 91 out now!
The January/February issue of New Left Review is now on sale, featuring the following essays:
Wang Chaohua: The Party and its Success Story
How should the balance-sheet of Chinese Communism be assessed? In a rejoinder to Perry Anderson’s comparison of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Wang Chaohua delivers a critical verdict on the record of Mao’s utopianism and Deng’s pragmatism, and the bleak legacy of the crushing of popular aspirations in 1989.
Franco Moretti: Lukács’s Theory of the Novel
Centenary reflections on one of the landmarks of twentieth-century thought about literature. Lukács in tension between Novalis and Weber during the Great War, and the implications for literary enquiry today of a conjugation that could never historically be repeated.
Evgeny Morozov: Socialize the Data Centres!
The leading iconoclast of Internet euphoria recounts his path from schooling in Belarus through training in Bulgaria to NGO work in Central Europe and fame as author of The Net Delusion in the United States. A radicalized view of the transformations required in the information infrastructures of the present for any egalitarian future.
Gopal Balakrishnan: The Abolitionist—II
In the second part of a sweeping reconstruction of the development of Marx’s thought, the ways in which bourgeois society came to be replaced by capitalism as the cardinal object of investigation after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, and the political lessons of his passage across that watershed for rebellions in the new century.
Mauricio Velásquez: The Battle of Bogotá
In a high-stakes election, South America’s most ruthless recent embodiment of reaction, Álvaro Uribe, lost his bid to install a minion in the presidential palace and pursue the extermination of guerrilla forces in Colombia. Mauricio Velásquez analyses the electoral victory of Uribe’s one-time confederate Santos, and the prospects for civil peace in its wake.
NLR 91 also features the following book reviews:
Anders Stephanson on Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume IV: Globalizations, 1945–2011.
Strengths and frailties of the climax to a unique macro-sociological enterprise, as it reaches the theoretical sands of the contemporary world.
Barry Schwabsky on Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand.
How different are Shenzhen trade-painters copying Western artists from the conceptualists using them?
Jeffery R. Webber on Julio Ferrer, Osvaldo Bayer Íntimo.
Heroic itinerary of Argentina’s most intransigent journalist and historian, recorder of popular revolts and scourge of military tyrants.