Contraventions - Editorials From New Left Review

From 9/11 to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, the eurozone crisis to the Brexit vote, the Great Recession to the Arab Spring, the rise of China to the annexation of Crimea, the passage from Obama to Trump and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the London-based New Left Review has offered a series of sharply critical editorials, combining argument with analysis-radical antidotes to the self-serving accounts of the Anglophone press. Contraventions brings together a selection of NLR's key political writings, covering capitalist boom and bust, the changing forms of American hegemony, the combined and uneven development of world powers, the domestic politics of the US and UK and multiple revolts from below, at the ballot box or in the streets. Bookended by broader surveys of the political-intellectual conjuncture, these essays dismantle mainstream narratives and anatomize the ideologies, institutions and on-the-ground operations of liberal-imperial rule.

Contraventions includes texts by Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Mike Davis, Susan Watkins, Alexander Cockburn, Peter Gowan, Tony Wood, JoAnn Wypijewski, Tom Hazeldine and Dylan Riley.

List of contents

Introduction by Susan Watkins

I. A GLOBAL HEGEMONY
1. Renewals - Perry Anderson
2. Our Herods - Tariq Ali
3. Testing Formula Two - Perry Anderson
4. Flames of New York - Mike Davis
5. Force and Consent - Perry Anderson
6. Vichy on the Tigris - Susan Watkins
7. Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement? - Alexander Cockburn
8. US:UN - Peter Gowan
9. The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty - Susan Watkins

ii. CRISIS IN THE HEARTLANDS
10. Shifting Sands - Susan Watkins
11. Good Riddance - Tony Wood
12. On the Concatenation in the Arab World - Perry Anderson
13. Spring Confronts Winter - Mike Davis
14. Presentism? Reply to T. J. Clark - Susan Watkins
15. Annexations - Susan Watkins
16. The State of the Union - Susan Watkins
17. Passing the Baton - Perry Anderson
18. The Politics of Insecurity - JoAnn Wypijewski
19. Revolt of the Rustbelt - Tom Hazeldine
20. What Is Trump? - Dylan Riley
21. America versus China - Susan Watkins
22. Five Wars in One - Susan Watkins

About the author

Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He taught History at UCLA for thirty years and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics-including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome-as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.Mike Davis (1946-2022) was a writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and class in works such as City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012) was the coeditor of CounterPunch and the author of a number of titles, including Corruptions of Empire, The Golden Age Is in Us, Washington Babylon (with Ken Silverstein) and Imperial Crusades. One of three brothers, all journalists, he is the son of the journalist and author Claud Cockburn. Born in Ireland and educated in Scotland and England, he moved to America in 1972, soon establishing himself as a radical reporter and commentator, writing for the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, Esquire and Harpers. He also wrote regular columns for the Nation, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Statesman, and his influential newsletter CounterPunch. In 1991 he settled in Petrolia, a rural hamlet in Humboldt County, Northern California, where he remained until his death.Peter Gowan (1946-2009) taught international relations for many years at London Metropolitan University. He was the author of The Global Gamble and A Calculus of Power, co-editor of The Question of Europe, cofounder of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, and a longstanding member of the editorial board of New Left Review-who published an interview with Peter Gowan along with an obituary in Sept-Oct 2009.Tony Wood lives in New York and writes on Russia and Latin America. A member of the editorial board of New Left Review, he is the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence, and his writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, n+1 and the Nation, among other publications. His latest op-ed for the New York Times is "Putin Isn't as Strong as He Looks."JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer and editor based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at the Nation magazine. She has written for the magazine, as well as for Harper's, CounterPunch, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and other publications. She is on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. She was the co-editor with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.Tom Hazeldine was born in Manchester in 1982 and is now an Editor at New Left Review.Dylan Riley teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books are Microverses, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe and a memoir, Perdita: On Loss. He is a member of the New Left Review editorial committee.

Report

The longue durée is an insistent presence in NLR's collective editorial vision. It hints at the possibility that the defeat of the left is only ever localised and provisional Jeremy Harding London Review of Books

Product details

• Authors: Susan Watkins
• Assisted by: Susan Watkins (Editor)
• Publisher: Verso
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.10.2023
• EAN: 9781839761423
• ISBN: 978-1-83976-142-3
• No. of pages: 416
• Series: New Left Review
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; History, HISTORY / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology, 21st Century, 21st century, c 2000 to c 2100, Archaeology, Far-left political ideologies and movements, Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies, History and Archaeology, Marxism & Communism, Left-of-centre democratic ideologies and movements