On Italian Marxisms by Peter Thomas in the last number of 'New Left Review'

As this blog happens to be particularly sensitive to the Anglo-Italian dialogue and to Marxist and leftist issues more in general, I recommend the reading of the first review essay on Italian Marxisms in the last number of New Left Review. The entire number is worth reading by the way!

New Left Review 58, July-August 2009

Kenneth Pomeranz: The Great Himalayan Watershed

From Asia’s mountainous heart flow rivers on which half the world’s population depends. Pomeranz examines the complex interaction between human water needs, fragile ecology and vast infrastructural projects—and the far-reaching consequences of their conjugation.

Miroslav Hroch: Learning from Small Nations

Leading scholar of national questions discusses his personal trajectory and theoretical development, against the backdrop of the Czech experience. Sociological and historical roots of national feeling, and comparative perspectives on their European destinies.

R. W. Johnson: False Start in South Africa

Disappointments of post-apartheid rule, marred by mass unemployment and corruption, amid the enrichment of a new black elite. Does the arrival of Zuma, and new salience of the SACP within the ruling alliance, portend a lurch to ethnic conflict and capital flight?

Patrick Bond: In Power in Pretoria?

Responding to Johnson, Patrick Bond locates the origins of the ANC’s neoliberal record since 1994 in the compromises of the transition era. Rhetoric versus reality, and the subordination of trade unions and SACP alike to capital’s prerogatives.

Etienne Balibar: Althusser and the Rue d'Ulm

Retrospective look at the life and work of Althusser, seen within the structures—personal, political, institutional—of the École Normale Supérieure. Teaching, thinking and writing at the intersection of private and public realms.

Fredric Jameson: Marx and Montage

The author of Archaeologies of the Future unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital. Encounters with Eisenstein’s unrealized equivalent, seeking a cinematic transposition of the commodity fetish.

BOOK REVIEWS

Peter Thomas on Cristina Corradi, Storia dei marxismi in Italia. Multiple inheritances of Labriola, Gramsci, operaismo and other currents. Can a pluralized theoretical tradition aspire to outrun reverses in praxis?.

Tony Wood on Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul. A revised neoliberal gospel for the region, courtesy of the Economist.

Max Gasner on Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. The 21st century as re-run of the 19th, shaped by the ambitions of ascendant autocratic powers.