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In this edition

A set of texts from around the world addressing the political, economic, social and cultural fall-out of the coronavirus pandemic. Building on his investigation of earlier zoonotic outbreaks in The Monster at Our Door, Mike Davis sets out the epidemiological context for COVID-19 in ‘The Monster Enters’.

Along with reports from São Paulo, Mumbai and Surabaya, we publish the account of an Iranian public-health scholar on how US-led sanctions are hampering her hard-hit country’s battle against the virus, and an extract from the ground-breaking Wuhan Diary posted under lockdown by the film-maker and gender-studies scholar Ai Xiaoming. Taggart Murphy reflects on the contrasting geocultural reactions to the virus, East and West, and Marco D’Eramo measures philosophers’ denunciations of the lockdowns against capitalists’ fears of their socio-economic consequences.

Also in NLR 122

Owen Hatherley’s landmark text on the London of the Left; Michael Denning’s bravura re-reading of Marx’s political writings elucidates the historical content of impeachment as a social form; Shaohua Zhan sets out five scenarios for the 21st-century Land Question in China; plus book reviews by Christopher Bickerton, Terry Eagleton, Lola Seaton and John Merrick.

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

by Michael Denning

Over the last half of the twentieth century, culture moved to the foreground of political and intellectual life. Suddenly everyone discovered that culture had been mass produced like Ford’s cars; t...

The Pig and the Skyscraper

by Marco d’Eramo

Foreword by Mike Davis

Translated by Graeme Thomson

“You expect the city of Al Capone and what you find are pleasant boulevards coursing up and down between the neo-classical buildings of the 1893 Universal Exhibition ... The city center unfolds bef...

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

by Owen Hatherley

Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of regenerating the inner cities left to rot under successive Conservative governments. Over the next decade, British cities became the laborat...