On NLR

It often feels​ as though New Left Review has been around for as long as the King James Bible. It addresses its readers without condescension in a time-honoured idiom. Occasionally its writers serve up daunting preambles to their pieces. Here is Dylan Riley in 2018 explaining why it’s misleading to think of Trump as a fascist: ‘The classical fascisms that took shape in Italy and Germany would be inconceivable without the [earlier] and interlinked experiences of inter-imperial warfare and revolutionary-socialist uprising, unfolding in a context of massive excess productive capacity, on a world scale.’ Even at Sidecar, NLR’s freewheeling blog, which started in 2020, we can feel we’re up against it. As Emmanuel Macron prepared for his second term at the Elysée in 2022, Sebastian Budgen let rip at the failed racist contender Éric Zemmour: a ‘thersitical and thrasonical saprophage’ whose voters included ‘a range of corybantic bourgie supporters attracted by his social-Darwinist brand of neoliberalism’.

For more than sixty years, NLR has remained loyal to its Marxist origins as a journal of the left for readers on the left, who are happy with its Olympian readings of world events, even if they’re also quick to dissent. Debates in and around NLR can be fierce – the Nato intervention in the former Yugoslavia is a good example. So can family disputes inside the business – these, too, are often triggered by world events. Contraventions (Verso, £25) brings together roughly two dozen NLR editorials, published between 2000 and 2022, beginning with ‘Renewals’, a definitive statement of intent by Perry Anderson at the turn of the millennium, and closing with ‘Five Wars in One’, an analysis of the conflict in Ukraine by the journal’s current editor, Susan Watkins, published six months after the Russian invasion. The tone is consistent throughout: not a house style so much as a way of speaking that contributors have in common. Among them, here, are Anderson on the American left and the Democratic Party, the build-up to the Iraq invasion and the so-called Arab Spring; Watkins on the puppet regime in Baghdad post-2003, nuclear disarmament as a pretext for conflict with Tehran and the trouble with the EU; and Tariq Ali on military intervention during the Clinton/Blair ascendancy.

There are a couple of departures from the usual manner of address. One, shortly after 9/11, is an editorial by Mike Davis examining the ‘globalisation of fear’ through the prism of H.G. Wells, the poetry of the German-Jewish expressionist Jakob van Hoddis, Ernst Bloch’s reflections on ‘anxiety’ and the polemical works of Frantz Fanon. Another, by JoAnn Wypijewski, published in 2017, is a free-ranging look at Trump’s appeal and the people who voted for him first time around. It’s unusual for NLR editorialists to posit an ‘echt supporter’ of any presidential candidate without chapter and verse from Pew research. They are not often encouraged to state the obvious – ‘most people do not have a clear-cut ideological worldview’ – or to invoke the experience of a tool-and-die maker in Buffalo (Wypijewski’s father) in the 1970s and 1980s. Wypijewski does all of this. She even sketches out a ‘general politics of rage’ and bites back against the assumption that ‘identity politics’ is the central obstacle to a grand left revival. Crucially for her, ‘race, sex, origin are not add-ons’ to class politics, ‘not simply matters of “inclusion”, but deeply entwined, as they are in life’. Trump’s trajectory makes rich and remarkable sense when you read Riley, a sociology professor at Berkeley, alongside Wypijewski, a journalist.

In ‘Renewals’, Anderson worried about the ‘migration of intellectuals of the left into institutions of higher learning’. Perhaps he imagined the secular equivalent of a radical madrasa culture, cut off from the demoralised remnants of a beleaguered Marxist ummah. His own stints as an academic at the New School in New York and UCLA taught him that standards of writing in the academy were on the decline. Costive prose and a glut of obsequious apparatus would, he reckoned, have ‘left Marx or Morris speechless’. The tally in Contraventions is roughly even between contributors embedded in universities and those who aren’t: Ali, Watkins, the late Alexander Cockburn, Wypijewski, Tom Hazeldine. NLR’s editorial standards are demanding, and at least two of the contributors here are hands-on editors at NLR, which accounts for the quality of the writing. Keeping watch over the journal is the octogenarian duo, Anderson and Ali: the odd couple who never came to blows or relinquished their influence.

As for the quarantine of left intellectuals in American universities, were they really meant to retreat into counter-cultural oblivion, while conservative thinkers and charismatic post-structuralist celebrities from France waltzed in and out of humanities departments from the 1980s onwards? With their project in ruins, refugees of the New Left intelligentsia became sleepers on American campuses, biding their time, fairly rewarded for their services in terms of tenure and a measure of renown. Without their presence, a new generation of students might never have enlisted for Occupy in 2011 or raised the alarm against Israel’s eliminationist plan for the Palestinians in 2023 and universities would be the hermetic science hubs that governments dream of, where students pay extortionate sums to keep their heads down. Here, at least, was an outcome Anderson hadn’t foreseen in 2000 in his eloquent admission of defeat. Victory, he explained, had gone to a ‘virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism’. What was to be done? ‘The left needs a “cultural politics”; but what that signifies, first of all, is a widening of the limits of its own culture. It follows that NLR will publish articles regardless of their immediate relationship, or lack of it, to familiar radical agendas.’ There’s no doubt that Sidecar has extended NLR’s ‘cultural’ range. Or that most of those ‘familiar radical agendas’ are now obscure – and under attack, like the humanities faculties in which they were reanimated.

Throughout Contraventions it’s NLR’s realpolitik view of the world at large that is striking. The real ‘culture’ here is politics, and it has its own subculture of psephology: among the pieces is a sharp breakdown of the Brexit vote by Tom Hazeldine, who was at it again in the July/August 2024 issue of NLR, with a lucid reading of the general election results and what they portend for Labour’s term in office. The historian Matthew Karp’s analysis of Trump’s resounding success later that year takes the same granular approach to show Hispanic and Black votes falling away from the Democratic Party, whose ‘triumph at the scale of 1992 or 2008 – never mind 1936 or 1964 – is no longer conceivable’. In general, though, NLR is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical about the winners of the day, especially if they happen to be Labour or the Democrats. In her introduction, Watkins dismisses ‘the cult of Obama’ and the ‘execration of Trump’ as different sides of the same coin: faith in the ‘lesser evil’ is a kind of idiocy. One envies the journal its serenity and learns to live with its contempt for liberal anguish.

In 2018 NLR turned its attention to climate change and ran a year-long series of conversations among academics and writers about how to square up to it: at one extreme, miraculous feats of geo-engineering and self-imposed limits on climate-harming activity; at the other, massive investments in renewables to offset undiminished consumerism; between the two a range of positions including a plea for degrowth. This long conversation gave breadth and urgency to NLR’s thinking about climate change, which had originated in Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts (2000), a brilliant account of global famine in the 19th century as a conjugation of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation with imperialist extraction.

NLR’s refresher on climate coincided with Verso’s publication of the radical environmentalist Andreas Malm: from Fossil Capital in 2016 through How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) and on, most recently, to Overshoot. Climate protests were on the rise and NLR was always on the lookout for signs of mass mobilisation. Yet the journal’s discussion was a dramatic moment, largely because it took up so much space. Having dragged its heels on climate change, NLR finally rose to the occasion. It took a victory lap in 2019, with a long résumé of the arguments by Lola Seaton. As if it wasn’t obvious already, there was nothing melancholic about the new profession of defeat. When Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia appeared in 2017, the journal was indifferent: there was no enthusiasm, presumably, for Walter Benjamin’s idea that melancholy was a meditative pathway for the left as it toiled from one disappointment to the next; or for Traverso’s tautological sense of loss about the impossibility of old-fashioned left-wing mourning.

The left had shed a lot of baggage. Even Benjamin had become an uncertain guide in the Anthropocene. Where was the steady wind from paradise propelling his angel of history into the future, now that we were learning to adjust to freak weather events and giving innocuous names to devastating hurricanes? Why would the future be easier to contemplate than the ‘wreckage’ of the past that transfixed Benjamin’s angel? NLR must have grown impatient with commemoration, or that’s my sense of it. ‘Le temps des cerises’ was short-lived, even if world-historical time stretched out beyond the life of the journal. And here’s the other thing: these editorials in Contraventions are always punctual, but they never feel as if they’re written on the spur of the moment (something I miss). The longue durée is an insistent presence in NLR’s collective editorial vision, even if you don’t catch it on first reading. It hints at the possibility that the defeat of the left is only ever localised and provisional.