susan watkins

Editorial

SHIFTING SANDS

C
orrelations between anniversaries and historical con-
junctures are likely to be ironic. When nlr was launched in
London fifty years ago, in January 1960, it was one of myriad
small harbingers of left renewal. Anti-colonial forces were
registering victories in Africa, Asia and the Arab world; the Communist
movement was emerging from the stranglehold of Stalinist orthodoxy;
in North America, Western Europe and Japan a new generation chafed
at the conformism of Cold War culture. By the mid-60s the Review had
staked out a programme of mapping these three world zones in a series
of comparative studies of national social formations—not least its own.
Strongly oriented towards Continental theory and practice, the journal
played its part in the intensive debates within Marxism that accompanied
the heady days of 68. It helped to pioneer work on women’s liberation,
ecology, media, film theory, the state.

By the 1990s, the journal survived within an international landscape that

would have seemed a sci-fi dystopia in 1960: the Kremlin’s economic
policy run by Friedmanites, the General Secretary of the ccp lauding
the stock exchange; Yugoslavia, the most pluralist and successful of the
workers’ states, decimated by imf austerity policies and subjected to a
three-month nato bombing campaign, cheered on by liberal opinion
in the West; social democratic parties competing to privatize national
assets and abolish labour gains. Neo-liberalism reigned supreme,
enshrining a model of unfettered capital flows and financial markets,
deregulated labour and internationally integrated production chains. On
its fortieth anniversary, at the high noon of globalization and American
supremacy, nlr was relaunched by its editorial committee in a spirit of

new left review 61 jan feb 2010 5

 6 nlr 61

uncompromising realism: ‘the refusal of any accommodation with the

ruling system, as of any understatement of its power’.1

Ten years on again, the continuation of the neo-liberal era itself has
been thrown into question by the eruption of an epic financial crisis at
the heart of the system. During the grandes journées of September 2008
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant us institutions at the centre of
the mortgage-backed securities market, were taken into government
stewardship after their shares had plunged by 90 per cent. Lehman
Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch was forced into a shotgun mar-
riage with Bank of America, hbos with Lloydstsb; a tottering Citigroup,
whose stock value had fallen from $244bn to $6bn, was shored up by
government funds, Washington Mutual pulled from receivership by
JPMorganChase. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and
Société Générale were saved by massive Treasury transfusions into their
bankrupt insurer, aig. In the months that followed, world output, trade,
equity, credit and investment ground to a halt, while unemployment
soared towards double digits across the Northern hemisphere.

Running into trillions of dollars in direct and indirect support, the bailouts
of the financial institutions will weigh on domestic economies—above all
in the us and uk—for years to come. But did the massive state inter-
ventions also signal the end of the neo-liberal model? Ideologically, the
wealth-creating prowess of big finance has been one of its central legiti-
mating claims. There was a feeling, not just on the left, that the crisis
could not but leave the paradigm itself discredited; it might even have
dealt a body-blow to American hegemony. The humbling of the Wall
Street giants—us Treasury Secretary Paulson offering to go down on his
knees before Congress on their behalf—seemed to suggest that the world
stood on the brink of a new era. Since then the financial system has been
stabilized, although none of its underlying problems have been resolved.
But despite the torrent of literature on the crisis, its historical meaning
remains obscure. What ended, and what did not, in September 2008?

Any answer will need to begin by setting the crash in comparative perspec-
tive. Crises that shake the entire capitalist world have been surprisingly
1
Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, nlr 1, Jan–Feb 2000.
 watkins: Editorial 7

rare, for all the creative-destructive nature of the system; but 2008 could
arguably be set against the railroad bust of 1873, the 1929 New York
stock-exchange collapse or, as a lower limit-case, the ‘great panic’ of 1907.
Their outcomes differed widely. In 1873, German receipt from Paris of
the 1871 Franco-Prussian war indemnity—£90 million, paid in gold—
set off frenzied building booms in Berlin and Vienna that sucked back
German funds from over-extended American railroad trusts, which in
turn helped bring down us banks. Financial contagion spread, and the
recessions that ensued initiated a widespread deflationary downturn—‘a
depression of prices, a depression of interest, a depression of profits’—
that persisted, punctuated by occasional rallies and further recessions,
until 1896.2 By contrast, the ‘Rich Man’s Panic’ of 1907, upshot of spec-
ulative banking failures in Italy and copper and railroad busts in New
York, had little lasting impact on manufacturing and trade; after a short,
sharp recession, recovery set in the following year. Different again, the
1929 crash signalled a plunge in trade and output that would usher in
the Great Depression.

A precondition for any deeper understanding of the 2008 crisis will be

a thorough-going comparative analysis; but an investigation along those
lines lies beyond the scope of the present survey. What follows will simply
take these earlier crises as markers for a preliminary scanning of the post-
2008 landscape, to ask what remains of neo-liberalism, as programme
and ideology, and what may be consigned to the past.

Neo?

‘Neo-liberal’ is a dismal epithet, of course, imprecise and over-used.

But some term is needed to describe the macro-economic paradigm
that has predominated from the end of the 1970s until—at least—
2008. Hayek once said that, while he regarded himself as a classical
liberal, the term neo-liberalism was not inappropriate, since liberalism
had been so completely abandoned in the West after the 19th century
that the return—still incomplete—to its principles merited the prefix.3
Three features have distinguished the late 20th-century variety from

2
From Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, cited in Eric Hobsbawm, The
Age of Empire, 1875–1914, London 1987, p. 36. See also Charles Kindleberger and
Robert Aliber, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 5th edition,
Basingstoke 2005, pp. 17, 44, 118–9.
3
Politically, of course, most neo-liberals, less historically minded than he, have
always disliked the term.
 8 nlr 61

earlier free-market avatars. First, its Americanness: from Carter on, the
neo-liberal programme has been developed and propagated by us-led
institutions, and propounded as international policy by the us state.
American multinationals and financial giants have been among its prin-
cipal beneficiaries and it has been experienced in many parts of the world
as the Americanization of economies, cultures and societies. Second, its
enemies: the social-democratic post-war settlement, organized labour,
state socialism. Whereas Victorian-era laissez-faire tried to hold the line
against a coming world of protectionism, the genius of neo-liberalism
has lain in the destruction and expropriation of existing structures and
goods: privatization of utilities, de-unionization of labour, means-testing
of universal benefits, removal of tariffs and capital controls. Its positive
constructions have been less charismatic: the wto, shadow banking,
workfare, nafta.

A third distinguishing feature of neo-liberalism has been its success.

Nineteenth-century liberalism was hemmed in on all sides by pre-
capitalist property relations, imperial tariffs and a growing socialist
movement. Since the end of the Cold War, by contrast, neo-liberalism’s
hegemony has been almost universal, virtually every governing party
adhering to it; the term globalization had to be coined to denominate the
same set of policies at an international level. True that it has never been
an ideology in the broadest sense—a shared Weltanschauung, capable
of interpreting the totality of human experience—but rather something
narrower and more specialized: a belief in the superiority of one set
of macro-economic policies over others, legitimated by their relative
success, delegitimated by their costliness or failures. Neo-liberalism
mobilized the enthusiasm of those who could count their gains from it;
but as an electoral programme it always needed an admixture of some
warmer ideological brew: nationalism (Reagan, Thatcher), Third Way
social-liberalism (Clinton, Blair), religion (bjp, akp), etc. It has been con-
tested from below in Latin America, and unevenly applied in Germany,
Japan, Korea and China; but since the 1990s the liberalized American
economy, with the Treasury–Wall Street nexus at its heart, has been the
paradigm for the world.

Rescue

The official account has it that an unimaginably devastating crisis for

this system was averted by the decisive intervention of the us Treasury
 watkins: Editorial 9

and Federal Reserve, whose prompt actions—public funds poured into

the stricken banks, fiscal and monetary relief rushed to the stalling
economies—‘saved the world’.4 One much-noted difference between
today and the pre-ww2 crises lies in the degree of American co-ordination
of the world economy. Unlike their predecessors, Paulson, Geithner and
Bernanke could command a vast and densely integrated global finan-
cial system. Through the size of the us market, and Treasury hegemony
over other key finance ministries, they could orchestrate international
responses in a way that Andrew Mellon or Montagu Norman could not
have envisaged. The Treasury bailout of Deutsche Bank and Société
Générale via aig was one aspect of this; the concerted doses of monetary
loosening and counter-cyclical spending across the advanced capitalist
world—an average 2 per cent of gdp for the G20 economies—another.

The neo-Keynesian emergency packages stand in stark contrast to the

liberal purity of Mellon, who as Hoover’s Treasury Secretary argued for
letting the system purge itself.5 But the 2008 ‘rescue’, aimed at shor-
ing up the existing order, differs just as much from the Rooseveltian
programme of ‘relief and reform’, embodied in the 1933 Glass–Steagall
Act. It has been more like a Treasury-funded version of the banker-led
bailouts organized by J. P. Morgan during the ‘great panic’ of 1907, or
by the New York Federal Reserve during the ltcm crisis in 1998. As a
result, the great winners of the 2008 crisis have been the banks. With
the exception of Lehman Brothers, the Treasury–Wall Street nexus has
looked after its own. After a period of frenzied mergers, the surviving
banks are famously bigger than ever before and still more essential to
the system. They have been funnelled trillions of dollars in forms that
have largely avoided public scrutiny—one reason why they could repay
the condition-laden tarp funds so soon. They have used the Treasury’s
largesse in profitable trading on their own accounts, benefiting from
the low Federal funds rate while charging usurious levels on loans and
credit cards, at the expense of almost everyone else. Geithner’s March
2009 financial rescue plan, offering to defer mark-downs on their toxic
mortgage-bubble assets in exchange for cosmetic stress tests, signalled

4
The phrase was coined by Paul Krugman to describe Gordon Brown’s parallel efforts
on behalf of the City of London: ‘Gordon Does Good’, nyt, 12 October 2008.
5
For Hoover’s famous summary of Mellon’s ‘leave-it-alone liquidationism’
see Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, p. 178. Kindleberger argues that
Schadenfreude in Washington at pushy New York bankers’ come-uppance helped
determine the hands-off Federal response to the railroad bust of 1873.
 10 nlr 61

the turning-point. The banks had got away with it, politically; since then
their shares have soared.

Despite these concerted interventions, plunges in output, trade, equity

and house prices in the first two quarters after September 2008 were
steeper than those of 1929. The eu as a whole saw an annualized drop
in output of 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2009; the fall was 12
per cent in Japan. Global panic—spread not least by the Federal Reserve
chairman (‘there may not be an economy on Monday’)—was only one
factor in the contagion. German and Japanese banks were implicated in
the us subprime market, Chinese funds in the broader housing sector.
Countries that had most faithfully copied the American housing bubble
faced their own blow-outs, as foreclosures increased and foreign capi-
tal fled. Austrian banks exposed in Hungary, or German in the Baltics,
clamped down on lending at home. Commodity-producing countries in
Africa and Latin America, as manufacturing exporters in Asia, braced
themselves for falling American demand.6

Prospects

By the summer of 2009, epic fiscal and monetary loosening had started
to brake the global contraction. imf prognoses should no doubt be taken
with a pinch of salt, after their sunny forecasts in April 2007; but they
suggest that American gdp will steady from –2.7 per cent in 2009 to 1.7
per cent in 2010; the Eurozone from –4.2 to 0.3 per cent, with France and
Germany doing slightly better, and Japan stabilizing from –5.4 to 1.7 per
cent.7 This is in stark contrast to the 1930s, when output fell continuously
for four years in North America, much of Europe and Latin America,
dropping by 29 per cent, peak-to-trough, in the us.8 But as the crisis
enters its second year, the world outlook is notably uneven. Hardest hit
among advanced capitalist countries are the core Atlantic economies—the

6
imf World Economic Outlook, October 2009; Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth
Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton 2009,
pp. 248–73.
7
Figures and prognoses from the imf World Economic Outlook, October 2009,
and Regional Economic Outlooks for Europe, Western Hemisphere, Africa, Asia and
the Middle East, October 2009. According to these estimates, emergency counter-
cyclical spending has lifted growth by an average 1.5 per cent of gdp in the advanced
capitalist economies.
8
Reinhart and Rogoff, This Time is Different, pp. 234–6; Eric Hobsbawm, Age of
Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London 1994, pp. 85–108.
 watkins: Editorial 11

us and uk, with disproportionately large financial sectors, but also Spain,
Greece and Ireland—where credit booms, real-estate bubbles, household
debt and over-leveraged financial institutions have all imploded. Worst
off is Russia, in the aftermath of a massive foreign-borrowing binge by
its corporations during the years of high oil and gas prices: gdp plunged
by nearly 10 per cent in the first half of 2009, domestic demand fell
by half and industrial production levels plummeted by 40 per cent.
Official unemployment is hovering around 10 per cent in the us and the
Eurozone, 18 per cent in Spain; jobs in construction, manufacturing and
services have all been hit. Employment regimes are one of the few points
of divergence in G20 responses to the crisis: in East Asia, France and
Germany firms have retained workers; in the Atlantic economies, jobless
rates have leapt up by an average 5 per cent. In the us, Latino and under-
25s unemployment levels are running at 13 and 18 per cent respectively.
This is punishingly high, though not yet approaching the 1930s figures
of over 20 per cent long-term unemployment in much of Europe and
the us; but it is qualitatively worse than the post-1907 shock, or that of
‘normal’ recessions.

For the Atlantic economies the imf outlook over the next four years is
for sluggish recovery at best, with a serious risk of further downturns.
Fiscal retrenchment and further credit-tightening loom, with debt and
mortgage defaults set to be compounded when interest rates finally rise.
Most vulnerable are the dependent peripheries of these zones, with little
leeway for deficit spending or job protection. Mexican gdp growth plum-
meted from 3.3 per cent in 2007 to –7.3 per cent in 2009; the remittance
economies of Central America were decimated by the collapse of us con-
struction. Eastern Europe has been left exposed to high levels of debt
and scarce social provision; currencies struggle to keep up with the euro.
The ex-Soviet Republics have been hit by the fall-off in remittances from
Russia. It is above all in these regions that countries have been coming
under the tutelage of the imf: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala; Latvia,
Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, Romania; Belarus and Ukraine.

Across the East and South, the picture is very different. On the back
of massive counter-cyclical spending, China and India have rebounded
with barely a dip, to predicted 9 per cent and 6.5 per cent growth rates
for 2010 respectively. Outsize fiscal and monetary stimulus—some 5
per cent of gdp each, 3 points above the G20 average—is estimated to
have added 2 percentage points to their short-term growth figures, and
 12 nlr 61

prc infrastructural investment is lifting exports from Indonesia and

Australia. (With lower counter-cyclical expenditure, Korea and Taiwan
are expecting 4 per cent growth in 2010, after a steep drop at the start of
2009.) The Chinese rebound in industrial production has come largely
in electronic goods, worst hit by the post-crash trade crunch; but while
volume has picked up, the value of prc exports in late 2009 was still 30
per cent down. How sustainable these growth levels will prove without
us–eu recovery remains to be seen; high-end, capital-intensive sectors
will be hardest hit by a continuing export downturn. In the meantime,
property values have been escalating in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and
China, where house prices had already risen by 40 per cent in 2008.

In Latin America, Brazil—buffered, like India, by a large domestic

market—is undergoing a mini-boom with the speculative spike in com-
modity prices: in 2009 soy, a principal export, leapt by 20 per cent.
Commodity-based currencies—the Brazilian real, South African rand,
Australian dollar—have risen by over 25 per cent. South Africa and
Botswana were hit by capital outflows at the start of 2009, and Nigeria
is suffering from the collapse of an oil-based credit bubble; but many
African countries—Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania, Senegal—
suffered more from the high food and oil prices of 2007–08 than from
the financial crisis. Across the south, poorer countries, less integrated
into the world market, have been relatively unscathed in terms of out-
put, the low-end textiles and garment sector least affected by the early
2009 trade crunch. But crude growth figures here are no measure of the
impact of cuts in what is already bare-subsistence income.

These are still early days. But at the start of 2010, the ‘recovery’ seems
patently unstable: a jobless North Atlantic, with a crippled credit system
at its heart; a bubbling East, yet to recalibrate to the shrinking market for
its goods; a mountain of debt still to be settled; speculative funds at loose
in the system, driving commodity-price spikes. Finance is still booby-
trapped, while turbulence has shifted east and south.

Regulated liberalism?

Behind the ‘rescue’ lies a remarkable degree of establishment consensus

on the causes of the crisis and solutions to apply. The touchstone for
this view is that the American economy itself was fundamentally sound
before the crash: the problems were limited to the financial sector, albeit
 watkins: Editorial 13

worsened by global imbalances of East Asian savings and American

debt. For the us, the solution now is to keep the economy going, regulate
the banks and institute an aggressive trade policy. Once these have been
set in place and fiscal austerity restored—admittedly, a tough call—there
is every hope that a more sober and sustainable version of the same
globalized and liberalized world economy will emerge. The main dif-
ferences are over proportions: insufficient or over-lax counter-cyclical
spending; regulatory oversight too timorous or too interfering. At a more
analytical level, efficient-market theories and representative-agent mod-
els have been criticized for neglecting to take human nature, imperfect
information or perverse incentives into account. But again, regulation
is the answer.9 With the exception of a few lone voices calling for a free-
market clear-out,10 establishment convergence around what might be
called regulatory liberalism seems all but complete. Proponents of other
‘varieties of capitalism’ have been muted—perhaps because they are now
regulatory liberals, too. This is the outlook that tacitly informs the multi-
tude of blow-by-blow accounts of the crisis, which mainly concentrate on
the more glamorous end—Wall Street giants, Mayfair and Connecticut
hedge funds.11 Alternative analyses will no doubt appear in due course.
But the present unanimity is in striking contrast to earlier crises, where
diagnoses and prescriptions were contested from above and below: after
1873, the bimetallism of Prairie populists, trade and agricultural tariffs,
or imperialist expansion to find commercial opportunities overseas; after
1929, Keynes vs Schumpeter and virtues of the Soviet five-year plan.

Ideologically, regulatory liberalism would seem to represent an inflection

of the neo-liberal paradigm rather than any rupture with it. The term
‘regulation’ has the advantage of suggesting fairness and neutrality, but
it is in fact a hard-line liberal economic concept, as one of its principal
contemporary theorists, Giandomenico Majone, makes clear. Pioneered
as a way to manage privately owned us railroads in the 1880s, regulation
has always been counterposed to nationalization and public ownership.

9
Krugman, ‘How did economists get it so wrong?’, nyt, 6 September 2009;
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives
the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton 2009. See also
Joseph Stiglitz, ‘The Current Economic Crisis and Lessons for Economic Theory’,
Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 35, no. 3, 2009; and Jeff Madrick, ‘They Didn’t
Regulate Enough and Still Don’t’, nyrb, 5 November 2009.
10
James Buchan, ‘Is Britain Bust?’, Prospect, August 2009.
11
For example, Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream,
Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, London 2009.
 14 nlr 61

Undertaken by the state, therefore on behalf of the people, the latter

may be subject to multiple claims and expectations—economic devel-
opment, full employment, social equity, etc. In a regulatory regime, by
contrast, the state delegates responsibility to a third party, unencumbered
by electoral accountability. The logic of regulation is thus ‘an increas-
ingly complete severance of expert authority from the popular will’.12 In
practice, of course, the banks themselves are determining the new regu-
latory requirements. Proponents of such modest reforms as a restored
Glass–Steagall Act, utility, ‘narrow’ or limited-purpose banking confess
themselves marginalized: even to get a hearing in face of ‘the lobbying
clout of the big banks’—‘one congressman, five finance lobbyists’—‘is
an uphill battle’.13 The resulting sense of continuity-through-adaptation,
ideological and pragmatic, was summed up in a Financial Times sermon
on the twentieth anniversary of capitalism’s Cold War triumph. The
great virtue of liberal democracy, Martin Wolf reminded readers, was its
capacity to learn and adapt, spurning utopian programmes in favour of
Popperian bricolage:

In the case of this crisis, the failure lies not so much with the market sys-
tem as a whole, but with defects in the world’s financial and monetary
systems . . . Happily, governments and central banks have learnt the lessons
of the 1930s and decided, rightly, to prevent collapses of either the financial
system or the economy. That is precisely the right kind of ‘piecemeal social
engineering’.14

Underlying problems

The confidence seems misplaced. In the 1870s as in the 1920s, prob-

lems of capital accumulation in the real economy lay behind the equity
and housing bubbles, and helped prolong the recessions into global
downturns. The crash of 1873 came after two decades of sustained
world-economic expansion that saw German and American develop-
ment catch up with Britain’s, putting an end to the uk’s advantage as

12
Giandomenico Majone, Regulating Europe, London 1996. For a full discussion see
Perry Anderson, The New Old World, London 2010, pp. 105–16. The quotation, from
Anderson, is on p. 107.
13
John Plender, ‘How to tame the animal spirits’, ft, 30 September 2009; see also
John Kay, ‘Narrow Banking: The Reform of Banking Regulation’, csfi pamphlet,
London 2009; Niall Ferguson and Laurence Kotlikoff, ‘How to take the moral haz-
ard out of banking’, ft, 2 December 2009.
14
Martin Wolf, ‘Victory in the Cold War was a start as well as an ending’, ft, 11
November 2009.
 watkins: Editorial 15

sole industrialized power and initiating a phase of intensifying compe-

tition. With labour markets relatively tight, if fluctuating, and workers
combative, rivalry between firms largely took the form of price deflation;
although investment and productivity grew between 1873 and 1896,
profits and prices fell. Despite severe repression—Pinkertons in the us,
Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany—these were years of advance for labour,
with the growth of mass working-class organizations, broadening literacy
and partial suffrage; wages rose, in part through the masculinization of
the work force and ‘family wage’, while food prices stayed low.15 In 1929
the situation was more uneven: during World War One and after, the
booming American economy powered ahead with Fordist auto produc-
tion, consumer durables and electrification, while Continental output
collapsed after a brief post-war revival; but the us was already beginning
to over-reach itself when European production levels started to rise from
the mid-20s.16 American farm prices were flat and wages levelling off by
the end of the decade; the housing boom had collapsed in 1926 and the
subsequent stock-market bubble, which sucked American funds back
from Europe and Latin America, plunging those regions into trouble
even before the crash, was fuelled by borrowed money. The role of the
American colossus as import destination for a great part of the world’s
primary commodities—Brazilian coffee, Japanese silk, South Asian rice,
Argentine wheat—ensured that the ensuing chain of bank and business
failures, stock liquidations, price deflations and further bankruptcies
would take on global proportions.17

What are the comparable conditions today of capital accumulation,

labour supply and world trade? Problems of productive over-capacity were
already apparent at the beginning of the 1970s, as the us saw Germany
and Japan forge ahead in one key industry after another: textiles, steel,
automobiles, machine tools, consumer electronics.18 Since then, large
new production centres in Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and
finally China have poured competing goods onto the world market. At the

15
Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, pp. 34–62; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing,
London 2007, pp. 101–40, 193–210.
16
Hoover himself blamed the war-time expansion of production outside Europe—
not least in Japan and Canada—for the Depression: capacity ‘proved excessive at
1925 prices’, as European production began to recover. See Kindleberger, Manias,
Panics and Crashes, p. 120.
17
Reinhart and Rogoff, This Time is Different, pp. 234–6; Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes,
pp. 85–108.
18
Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London 2006, pp. 112–3.
 16 nlr 61

same time, a historic weakening in the position of labour and the share
of wages in the world economy has served to depress relative demand.
The feminization of the labour force since the 1970s, part and parcel of
service-sector expansion, has also brought a lowering of wages across
the board. The rustbelt-to-sunbelt shift in manufacturing, away from tra-
ditional working-class communities, has broken generational continuity
in labour organization. Across the South, hundreds of millions have
been thrown into the search for wage labour through the decimation of
subsistence farming by the vastly higher productivity of Euro-American
agribusiness, a process speeded by imf programmes. The integration of
India and China into the global capitalist economy has brought another
1.5 billion chronically low-paid workers into the labour market, doubling
its size and, on one estimate, reducing the capital/labour ratio to 55–60
per cent of its previous level.19 The mass entry of propertyless workers
from kitchen, countryside and collective has compounded problems of
over-capacity with those of relative under-consumption—‘a systemic
shortage of effective demand’.20

In these conditions, it would seem that revival of profits in one econ-

omy could only come at the expense of others: either by lowering costs,
expanding markets or altering the terms of trade. At the very start of the
neo-liberal era, the failure of American manufacturing to generate suf-
ficient returns in face of growing competition from Germany and Japan
was a principal cause of the 1970s us default on the Bretton Woods
dollar–gold peg: Fort Knox was being emptied as much by American
corporations’ investments in lower-wage economies abroad as by soar-
ing military and social spending.21 Exchange-rate shocks as by-products
of us interest-rate switches have triggered much of the turbulence of
the neo-liberal period. In 1979 the Volcker–Carter hike, implemented
to tame inflation and discipline labour at home, bankrupted indebted
Third World and Comecon countries, bringing industrial-development
programmes to a halt. Crisis solutions imposed by the imf and World
Bank in the 1980s ruthlessly furthered programmes for abolition
of external capital controls and internal liberalization, offering big

19
Richard Freeman, ‘The Challenge of the Growing Globalization of Labour Markets
to Economic and Social Policy’, in Eva Paus, ed., Global Capitalism Unbound: Winners
and Losers from Offshore Outsourcing, New York 2007.
20
Giovanni Arrighi, ‘Winding Paths of Capital’, nlr 56, March–April 2009, p. 82.
21
Richard Duncan, The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures, Singapore
2003, p. 10.
 watkins: Editorial 17

financial operators a privatization bonanza just as the entry of pension

and mutual-fund managers into the field as investment players led to a
huge expansion of the us financial sector. In 1985, the Baker–Reagan
Plaza Accord lowered the dollar to benefit American exporters, throwing
booming Japanese and German firms into recession. Japanese capital
surged instead into a record-breaking real-estate bubble. After its burst
in 1992 Japanese funds, thwarted by poor returns at home and low inter-
est rates in the us, flooded into Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore,
Taiwan, then China. The East Asian Tigers boomed, producing the new
electronic goods of the 1990s. International investors followed suit and
local banks became kiosks for foreign credit.

From the early 90s, the take-off in the East developed in a complex sym-
biosis with the continuing downturn in the core zones, mediated through
trade, capital goods and investment flows. Throughout the 1990s and
early 2000s growth in Japan and Germany was barely positive, while the
us ‘new economy’ boom of the mid-90s proved short-lived. Clinton’s
strategy, designed by Goldman Sachs, was premised on the wealth-effect
of financial-sector profits compensating for poor capital-investment
returns and stagnant wages—systemic capital misallocation turned to
a virtue. But when the dollar was raised again from 1995, the competi-
tiveness of us firms was weakened. Poor corporate returns led to the
collapse of dot.com shares in 2000. Thereafter successive debt-based
bubbles were premised on the cheap credit provided by foreign inves-
tors, above all Japan and China.22 Struggling to keep the us economy
afloat, Greenspan slashed interest rates from 6.5 to 1 per cent from 2001
and, over the next four years, fanned house prices up 50 per cent. When
they threatened to dip in 2003, as American forces poured into Iraq, he
urged on the securitized subprime market. But us growth rates contin-
ued to decline: 3.6 in 2004, 3.1 in 2005, 2.7 in 2006, 2.1 in 2007, 0.4
in 2008. Job creation never recovered from the 2000 recession. When
Bernanke began raising interest rates in 2006, to steady the dollar and
subdue the bubble, the great unravelling began.23

22
For data, see Anton Brender and Florence Pisani, ‘Globalized Finance and its
Collapse’, Brussels 2009.
23
See Robert Brenner, ‘What’s Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America’, April
2009, to which this account is greatly indebted. See also R. Taggart Murphy, ‘In the
Eye of the Storm: Updating The Economics of Global Turbulence’, Asia-Pacific Journal:
Japan Focus, 7 December 2009.
 18 nlr 61

Against this stands the astonishing transformation of the Chinese econ-

omy, qualitative as well as quantitative: it is now the largest automobile
market in the world. Over the next twenty years the Chinese Economic
Council is planning to build another 200 cities of a million inhabitants
each—around the size of Dallas—with dramatic implications for poten-
tial growth in infrastructural investment, services and consumption.
How resilient the Chinese economy will prove in face of the cumulative
pressures now converging on it—falling us markets, rising commod-
ity prices, excess liquidity from its $600bn stimulus package and $1trn
post-2008 credit expansion—remains to be seen. Given its current fren-
zied rate of production, it is hard to see how the prc can avoid going
through some sort of recessionary crisis in the short term, however tem-
porary that may prove.

Frictions

The prospects for any immediate stabilization and rebalancing of the

world economy plainly depend on some ongoing agreement between
Washington and Beijing, as well as Berlin and Tokyo. At the time of
writing, Obama and Bernanke appear to be implementing a turn to neo-
Reaganomics: a second Plaza Accord to lower the dollar, inflate away the
debt, regain competitive advantage in world trade and stare down the
sovereign menace of a major creditor, accompanied by record-breaking
deficits and military expansion abroad. Several factors militate against
this strategy. First, every further international credit shock or sover-
eign default risks pushing the dollar back up, as funds surge into its
safe haven. Second, although leaders in the Eurozone and Japan have
meekly assented to Washington’s demands, for the time being Beijing
is determinedly matching us exchange-rate protectionism with its
own; Chinese officials have called for the eu and prc to ‘play together’
against American monetary policy. American advisors have begun
recalling Nixon’s 10 per cent import surcharge, which swiftly persuaded
Japan and Germany to accept a low dollar in the early 70s. Some are
now proposing that the dollar be supplemented by other trading curren-
cies, the euro, yen or yuan, in order to free up us economic policy.24 But
if, as Marcello De Cecco has suggested, the world economy is mutat-
ing from a ‘collusive’ to a ‘competitive oligopoly’, the scope for national

24
See C. Fred Bergsten, ‘The Dollar and the Deficits: How Washington Can Prevent
the Next Crisis’, Foreign Affairs, Nov–Dec 2009.
 watkins: Editorial 19

mercantilist strategies remains conditioned by the interdependence of

the major economies. This, too, is a new situation, without parallel in
the pre-ww2 world.25

Yet it would be a mistake to equate any retraction in us provision of

economic goods with a commensurate diminution of American hegem-
ony. Support for Washington’s direction of the international political
system—determining friends and enemies, making war and peace—
and for American macro-economic priorities are not the same thing.
But in practice they overlap: the same state leaderships are responsi-
ble for lifting capital controls or cutting public spending as for granting
basing rights or supporting un Security Council resolutions. Rewards
in one sphere reinforce obedience in the other. The us economy has
been shrinking as a proportion of the world total for decades—from
nearly 50 per cent in 1945 to 22 per cent in 2008; but by most meas-
ures its military, political and cultural reach is greater now than during
the 20th century. Nor has the Obama Administration retreated from the
strategy of imperial power projection that Washington has advanced,
via the First Gulf War, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, ever since
1990. On the contrary: it has not only extended the Bush doctrine of
pre-emptive warfare as a us prerogative but succeeded in naturalizing
it. The 2002 National Security Strategy report ruffled many feathers. By
2009, Obama’s aides could offhandedly announce the redesignation of
the Afghan theatre as AfPak without an eyebrow being raised. For that
matter, despite its scathing denunciations of the doctrine of ‘humanitar-
ian intervention’ as cover for a power-seeking hegemon, or description
of American attitudes towards international law as he ze yong, bu he ze
qi—‘use when deemed fit, disregard otherwise’—Beijing’s geo-political
strategy remains, ‘build the Chinese pole within a multipolar world’, not
‘catch up with and surpass the beautiful empire’. Chinese oil compa-
nies in Iraq and mining interests in Afghanistan are dependent upon us
armed forces. An immensely powerful world hegemon still exists. The
transitional era is not an interregnum.

A principal reason for the continuing strength of American hegem-

ony lies in the victories of the neo-liberal project, which always
involved both an ideology and a programme. The first took a series of

25
Marcello De Cecco, ‘From Monopoly to Oligopoly: Lessons from the pre-1914
Experience’, in Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner, eds, The Future of the Dollar,
Ithaca 2009, p. 122.
 20 nlr 61

forms—monetarism, Thatcherism, free-market Third Way, triumphal

globalization—now behind us. But the revolutionary effects of the pro-
gramme remain. Social relations have been reconfigured across the
globe: finance capital severed from national industry and integrated
into global wealth circuits, decorated with new celebrity-media elites;
the white-collar workforce, public or private, subjected to new market
norms and compensated with small-scale financial assets; a two-tier
working class, with most of its youth in the casualized sector, deprived
of organizational reach and political project. Perhaps the most striking
feature of the 2008 crisis so far has been its combination of economic
turmoil and political stasis. After the bank and currency crashes of 1931,
governments toppled across Europe—Britain, France, Spain, Germany;
even in 1873, the Grant Administration was paralysed by corruption
scandals after the railroad bust, and the Gladstone Ministry fell. The only
political casualties of 2008 have been the Haarde regime in Iceland and
the Cayman Islands authorities. As unemployment mounts and public-
spending cuts are enforced, more determined protests will hopefully
emerge; but to date, factory occupations or bossnappings have mostly
been limited to demands for due redundancy pay. That neo-liberalism’s
crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic, in contrast to the bitter battles
over its installation, is a sobering measure of its triumph.

In his ‘Analysis of Situations’, Gramsci famously distinguished between

longer-term ‘organic’ historical developments and shorter-term ‘conjunc-
tural’ ones: ‘The conjuncture can be defined as the set of circumstances
which determine the market in a given phase’—‘the set of immediate
and ephemeral characteristics of the economic situation’. He went on to
warn—this was in 1933: ‘it may be ruled out that immediate economic
crises of themselves produce historical events’. At most, they might
create a terrain more favourable to raising certain questions; but the
decisive element in every situation was that of the organized forces pre-
pared to intervene.26 In retrospect, the conjunctures of 1873 and 1929
can be seen as marking the deepening of ongoing, organic movements:
the intensification of industrial-capitalist rivalries in the first, which
would eventually produce the inter-imperialist collisions of World War I;
in 1929, the explosive but uneven growth of the us, the dramatic for-
tunes of Germany and accelerating decline of Britain, against a backdrop
of bitter class contestation.

26
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, pp. 177–85.
 watkins: Editorial 21

The organic movements underlying the conjuncture of 2008 include,

first, the relationship between the long-term slowdown in the most
advanced economies and the explosive growth of China; second, the
continued extension of the us imperial state; and third, the global deteri-
oration in the position of labour. Politically, the outcome of the crisis has
been shaped entirely from above. The Treasury–Wall Street nexus has
extended its hold and ensured that the entire cost will be borne by work-
ing people. The result is a further worsening of conditions for labour,
above all in the core economic zones and their peripheries. Ideologically,
the triumphalism of big finance may be muted for now. But if the neo-
liberal paradigm is undergoing a mutation towards regulatory liberalism,
its principal components remain in place: untrammelled capital move-
ment, private ownership and shareholder value remain the goals.

Meeting no opposition, the neo-liberal programme has actually advanced

through the crisis, the bank bailouts effecting a larger expropriation than
ever before. Yet the massive transfer of wealth from labour to capital that
the ‘great moderation’ of neo-liberalism has brought may now be starting
to undermine the system itself. To shore it up with speculative profits
based on perpetual future growth can only be a makeshift solution, yet
the Treasury–Wall Street order is politically incapable of conceiving any
other. As for labour, it may be several generations away from rebuild-
ing a hegemonic alternative that could tilt or transform the world in
favour of its working billions. In the prc, the West encounters a different
Weltanschauung; but the Chinese ruling class, or caste, has done very well
by globalized neo-liberalism. Claims that the ccp stands for a more equi-
table world order are undermined by gaping domestic inequalities.

Futures

Does history offer any clues as to what the longer-term outcome of the
present crisis might be? After the post-1873 downturn, general profitabil-
ity finally returned in 1896 without a major slump, although the long
agricultural crisis helped loosen labour markets in the cities. Imperial
expansion helped find new outlets for goods—virtually all remaining
independent states and territories across Africa and the Pacific had been
subjected to metropolitan rule by 1896—and industrial-scale rearma-
ment got underway. Domestically, the great finance houses built up huge
concentrations of capital. Corporations and cartels intervened directly
to halt deflation. The technological and organizational innovations that
 22 nlr 61

would shape the Belle Epoque turned out to have been incubating dur-
ing the high-investment downturn: film, recorded sound, the internal
combustion engine and large-scale generation of electricity; the corpora-
tion, Taylorism, advertising, the department store and mass-consumer
markets. Full recovery after the Great Depression came only with rear-
mament for the Second World War, first in Germany, then in the us,
where massive industrial investment unleashed the conditions for the
post-war boom. Again, the breakthroughs that would shape the follow-
ing era—plastics, cathode-ray tube—had already taken place. At the
world-political level, American elites drew the lesson of the 20s and 30s
and planned single-mindedly for a hegemonic role, drafting the interna-
tional architecture of the post-war era.

In a recent contribution, Gopal Balakrishnan has argued that, contrary

to expectations of eventual shake-out and recovery in the 2010s, the
momentum of growth in the most advanced regions may be petering out
altogether.27 In this view, a conjunctural crisis of accumulation is converg-
ing with longer-term slowdowns, caused by greying societies and the shift
towards low-productivity service economies. The New Economy’s revo-
lution in production proved a myth—it, containerization, post-Fordist
production and supply chains ‘failed to show up statistically’—as will
notions of a China-centred phase of accumulation, since this offers no
new and more advanced organization of productive forces but merely a
broader dissemination of existing plant. Drawing on Brenner’s diagnosis
in Economics of Global Turbulence of a long-term decline in rates of return
on capital investment, Balakrishnan speculates that 2008 may be ‘the
end of the line’ for growth based on account imbalances, asset bubbles
and debt creation. In the absence of a far-reaching Schumpeterian shake-
out, the capitalist world seems set to drift towards a ‘stationary state’.

Countering such scenarios, Michel Aglietta has stressed the still unre-
alized potential for Chinese growth, while Nicholas Crafts and Kozo
Yamamura have pointed out that waves of technological progress are
not necessarily determined by levels of profitability: the 1930s saw
many technological breakthroughs. Increased entry may lead, as in the
1870s, to greater investment and innovation.28 The reasons why it and

27
Balakrishnan, ‘Speculations on the Stationary State’, nlr 59, Sept–Oct 2009.
28
See the symposium on Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence: Crafts, ‘Profits
of Doom’, Aglietta, ‘A New Growth Regime’, Yamamura, ‘More System, Please!’ in
nlr 54, Nov–Dec 2008.
 watkins: Editorial 23

semi-conductors failed to bring about a productivity revolution in the

1990s are still unclear; Crafts suggests that their weight in the overall
economy was too small, due to concentration in low-productivity service
industries. But the logic of these arguments suggests the possibility of
a non-stationary outcome, albeit after further years of depressive turbu-
lence and bursting bubbles. Visions of a synthetic-silicon breakthrough
that would solar-power the global South, revolutionize transport and
foster green-gold desalination programmes, to transform rising oceans
into spring-water irrigation supplies, are clearly far-fetched. But there is
clearly room for low-end consumer-market expansion across the villages
of China and India: the hundreds of millions trapped on the margins of
the world labour force are by no means outside the circuits of global con-
sumption. Shacks in the Brazilian favelas, with no sewage system nor
any family member in employment, boast tvs and microwaves bought
at extortionate cost through never-ending installment plans, courtesy of
the Bolsa família. The state has played a stalwart role throughout the neo-
liberal era in fostering social conditions for capital accumulation;29 there
is no doubt more that it could do to entangle populations in the net of
the world market. But whether a continuing slowdown or a rebooting of
the world economy lies in store, the law of unintended consequences—
viz., Japanese capital eventually redirected to the East Asian Tigers and
China in the aftermath of the Plaza Accord—will presumably continue
to apply as the latest recovery operations get underway.

II

What are the implications of neo-liberalism’s crisis for nlr’s publishing

programme? Its relaunch ten years ago scandalized many by demand-
ing from the left a lucid registration of defeat. ‘No collective agency able
to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon’, Anderson noted; at
the level of ideas, ‘for the first time since the Reformation, there are no
longer any significant oppositions—that is, systematic rival outlooks—
within the thought-world of the West.’30 Those judgements stand. To
attend to the development of actually existing capitalism remains a
first duty for a journal like nlr. In their different ways, Robert Brenner

29
For a landmark assessment of the state’s role across 23 oecd economies in the
first decade of neo-liberalism, see Göran Therborn, ‘The Prospects of Labour and
the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism’, nlr 1/145, May–June 1984.
30
Anderson, ‘Renewals’, nlr 1, p. 17.
 24 nlr 61

on the faltering of the us economy as world motor, Robin Blackburn

and Robert Wade on financial intermediation, Andrew Glyn on global
disequilibria have raised fundamental questions for future enquiries.
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Parallax View’ insists that consumption as well as pro-
duction be held in mind by radical critique. From the viewpoint of the
South, Giovanni Arrighi’s ‘The African Crisis’ and Mike Davis’s ‘Planet
of Slums’ open vast areas for new research. A priority for the Review in
the coming years should be a new typology of development outcomes in
the age of global finance. Another is a map of the global proletariat—
locations, sectors, differentials—alive to contemporary makings and
unmakings of class.

In the past few years Arrighi’s ‘Hegemony Unravelling’ and Anderson’s

‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’ have offered contrasting analyses of the
world-political order—for Arrighi, a crisis in recent American attempts
to impose a new imperial regime and possible emergence of China as
an alternative to us leadership, in East Asia and beyond; for Anderson,
a concert of powers, within which different states can jostle for rank,
held together by a single, superordinate one. For both, the extent to
which the prc represents a different system is—to differing degrees—in
question.31 These remain central issues for nlr to debate and explore.
There is a huge amount of work to be done on the new processes of
liberal-capitalist rule, its forms and legitimations: empirical research,
which might test Peter Mair’s findings on parliamentarism’s hollow-
ing in Western Europe against third-wave liberal democracies in Latin
America, Africa and Asia; conceptual analyses, like Chico de Oliveira’s
on the étatization of the pt in Brazil, Cihan Tuğal’s on nato-ization
of the Turkish akp, or Wang Chaohua’s incisive typology of national-
isms, not least in China and Taiwan. Tom Nairn and Lutz Niethammer
have raised commensurate questions about post-national social identity.
Far-reaching theorizations such as Wang Hui’s ‘Depoliticized Politics’,
bringing contemporary neutralizations into focus through the lens of
China’s short revolutionary century, or Luciano Canfora on the ‘mixed
constitutions’ of capitalist oligarchies, demand critical engagement at
the same level. Hard-fought debates in political sociology during the 60s
and 70s sparked a series of insights about the power elites of the time;
analysis of today’s famously large and fluid American ruling class—its

31
Arrighi’s positive answer in Adam Smith in Beijing, London 2009, pp. 351–78, was
reconsidered in ‘Winding Paths of Capital’, nlr 56, pp. 79–80, 84–6, 88–9. For
Anderson’s analysis, see ‘Two Revolutions’, below.
 watkins: Editorial 25

reproduction, changing component parts, mediated relations with the

imperial state—is another priority.

nlr’s record on ecological questions has been erratic, to say the least:
isolated if highly original interventions—Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
‘Critique of Political Ecology’, Alexander Cockburn’s ‘Meat-Oriented
History of the World’, André Gorz’s ‘The New Agenda’—interspersed by
long periods of silence. This should change. There are many different
registers to explore here: empirical syntheses, programmatic interven-
tions,32 political analyses—the Green parties, hard-line advocates for
nato’s wars, await a critical biography. With the movement’s programme
dismembered (recycling, gmos, forestation) and reduced to measures
acceptable to world-summitry, perhaps only utopian speculation can
reconceive the ecological totality of social, economic and environmen-
tal relations. In that spirit Mike Davis revisits Constructivist dreams for
greener cities in this number. The journal’s record on social issues has
been just as uneven, not least on what was once the Woman Question.
Again, the rightward shift in most discussion of this issue leaves large
areas unexplored. There has been no properly global balance sheet of the
historic changes in the division of labour and status between the sexes,
nor any satisfactory explanation of how and why these took place. Works
by Hester Eisenstein and Nancy Fraser on second-wave feminism’s elec-
tive affinities with neo-liberal capitalism are vital starting points.33

In understanding contemporary capitalist culture as a historical phenom-

enon, the Review has learnt an enormous amount from Fredric Jameson’s
work; a series of fields open up from this—the built environment, the
reign of the image, possibilities of literary or utopian rupture, readings
of specific works. In cultural practice itself, Archimedean points from
which a bead can still be drawn on the system as a whole mainly lie
on its peripheries: film and documentary makers working outside multi-
national studio set-ups, writers oriented to an audience, not a market.
Roberto Schwarz’s interpretations—of Chico Alvim’s minimalist poetry,
or Paulo Lins’s epic of the neo-favela—are outstanding examples of an

32
An example of the first would be Kenneth Pomeranz’s survey of Asian water
shortages, ‘The Great Himalayan Watershed’; of the second, Aubrey Meyer’s work
on per capita carbon budgets at the Global Commons Institute.
33
Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas
to Exploit the World, Boulder, co 2009; Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the
Cunning of History’, nlr 56, Mar–Apr 2009.
 26 nlr 61

acute social awareness and high critical intelligence brought to bear on

the finest instances of these forms. Future issues will chart the desperate
impasses of the Arab world through the unillusioned eyes of its young
writers, and momentous social upheavals in China through its outsider
films. nlr hopes to publish further explorations of past and future
radical worlds—Benedict Anderson’s trans-oceanic interconnections
between avant-gardes, anarchism and the anti-colonial imagination an
astounding examplar—and re-readings from the canon: Eagleton on
Beckett, White on Tolstoy, Plaks on Cao Xueqin, Wood on Platonov or
Moretti on Ibsen, below.

When the Review was founded, as Stuart Hall vividly evokes in this
issue, forging a ‘new left’ was an immediate practical project; in the sec-
ond decade of the 21st century, it is one for the longue durée. But the
journal can still think about how to prefigure the general intellectual
culture that an effective—therefore, pluralist and internationalist—left
would require. By definition, such a movement would defend the condi-
tions for a broader and richer critical culture, a more engaged political
practice, a more conscious economics; would be as hard-headed and
determined as the power it confronts. However notionally, this is the
horizon to be borne in mind as a younger layer comes to the fore. In its
early years, the Review benefited a great deal from the overlap of political
generations in the two journals that came together to found it, as a joint
project. The editors of the New Reasoner, born in the 1920s, fought in
the War and mainly acquired their political education through the cpgb.
The young writers and critics around Universities and Left Review were
more attuned to the new cultural currents and social rebellion. Today the
generational overlap stretches much farther—the ageing society proving
an unexpected boon for the left. Hobsbawm, Hall and others share its
pages with writers not yet born in 1960: Malcolm Bull in the fields of
aesthetics and philosophy; Gopal Balakrishnan, Dylan Riley or Benno
Teschke on political theory; Zhang Yongle on Chinese intellectual his-
tory; Tony Wood and Forrest Hylton on Russia and Latin America; Cihan
Tuğal and Ece Temelkuran on Turkey; Kasian Tejapira on Thailand, Peter
Hallward on Haiti; Sebastian Budgen or Alexander Zevin on France;
Tom Mertes and Naomi Klein on new social movements; Sven Lütticken,
Julian Stallabrass and Emilie Bickerton on the visual arts.

If anything, the inter-generational contrast is starker now than it was

in 1960. The editors who saw the Review through its first few decades
 watkins: Editorial 27

came of age in a still strongly delineated national culture and public

sphere, in which social classes were tangible realities; they hit their
intellectual stride in the mid-60s, a time of intense commitments on
the left, with victory seemingly within reach; positions were forged and
argued within a highly politicized and internationalist milieu. Today’s
young writers have grown up within far more depoliticized cultural and
intellectual environments, structured by the market and mediated, for
better or worse, by electronic forms of sociability. Flares of protest have
been ephemeral; every mobilization they have known—alter-globo,
climate change, marches against the invasion of Iraq—has ended in
defeat. But perhaps the very rarity of a serious left forum in these times
makes a journal like nlr more valued. The thought-world of the West
is increasingly patterned by Atlantic-centred structures of wealth and
power. University disciplines—international relations, economics, law,
social sciences, area studies—derive their curricula from the narrowing
perspectives of its rulers’ needs. A neutralized academic Marxism risks
being the unwitting reflection of this trend. nlr stands outside this
world, defines its own agenda. Can a left intellectual project hope to
thrive in the absence of a political movement? That remains to be seen.
But in the meantime it will have plenty on its plate.