Blog

Isabell Lorey on the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and beyond.

Emmanuel Macron's campaign to be re-elected French President has come under increasing strain in recent weeks following the so-called “the McKinsey Affair,” named after the giant American consulting firm that was paid enormous sums by the French government for reports that were often completely useless. Frédéric Lordon asks what the controversy says about the state in contemporary capitalism, and what the affair's effects on the forthcoming French elections will be.

Even in times of defeat, the class struggle continues. Everything is not possible at all times, but there are always forks in the road and opportunities – all too often missed – for the forces of popular emancipation. Reflecting on the lessons of the student movement of 1986 and the shattered 'Greek Spring',  Stathis Kouvelakis sketches a way forward for the left in 2022. 

In the second part of their series on the global conjuncture, Nikhil Pal Singh and Joshua Clover survey our present economic and ecological impasse, and search through the ruins for the green shoots of solidarity and for the "openings that are necessarily present when things fall apart."

According to Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Éric Zemmour is a far-right politician who, by playing on his status as a Jew, gives the far right, which is traditionally anti-Semitic, a veneer of respectability.

The industry often presents the relation between job precarity and environmental degradation as a zero-sum game: if something is to be gained in terms of good jobs, something must be lost on the the side of health and environment.  Here, Lorenzo Feltrin argues that employment precarisation and environmental degradation are far from incompatible, they both result from the capitalist imperative to economise while producing evermore commodities.

Scorched Earth insists on the inseparability of social disintegration and environmental collapse under global capitalism. Civil society and ecosystems are eroding simultaneously.

The history of Ukraine is inextricably linked with antisemitism, from the pogroms of the Russian Civil War to the Ukrainian nationalist complicity in the Holocaust. Such historical connections have once more come to the fore during Russia's invasion of the country, now lead by a Jewish president. Here, historical sociologist Brendan McGeever writes on this complicated past, and what the present Jewish attachment to the idea of Ukraine means for both Jewish identity and the ongoing history of racism in the region and beyond.

Maya Adereth and Neil Warner of Phenomenal World interview Michael Mann on the study of history and the reemergence of great power politics

We publish here the text of one of the last interviews with Georges Lukács, given to Hungarian television. The interview was prepared and conducted by András Kovács. Lukács talks about his youth and the influence Lenin had on his own development as a revolutionary activist. His aim is to convey the sense of Lenin’s grasp on the richness and complexity of historical reality. The interview was recorded in October 1969. We are publishing here the first part, which is mainly about Lukács’s relationship with Lenin’s thought and action.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, and the string of extraordinary and increasingly everyday global events that have come along with it, many have diagnosed the end of neoliberalism and the birth pangs of something new rising in its stead. In the first of a two part series, Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh map the present conjuncture and search for answers in the rubble of global capitalism.

A recent interview with Enzo Traverso in the Cornell Chronicle about his new book Revolution: An Intellectual History.