New Left Review

NLR Editors, The Siege of Cuba, NLR I/7, January–February 1961 the most important events in the international socialist movement in 1960 took place in Cuba. And it may be that the most important event of 1961 will be the consolidation or overthrow of Cuba’s socia...

A prescient NLR editorial from early 1961, written as the Cuban Revolution came under tightening external pressure and anticipating the Bay of Pigs invasion:

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Rob Lucas, Stranglehold? — Sidecar On Cuba.

@roblucas.bsky.social on the US attempt to strangle Cuba by cutting its fuel supply:

"... between the chokepoint of oil-dependence and a green alternative... The question is whether Cuba has the capacity to hold out long enough to reach new strategic terrain."

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Rob Lucas, Stranglehold? — Sidecar On Cuba.

"Identification with the mambise guerilla; invocation of the machete-charge; rehearsal of ‘patria o muerte’ cries – often performed at the top levels of state, these are not without their residual popular bases."

On Cuba and Venezuela in @newleftreview.bsky.social
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In NLR 156, Maria Haro Sly reviews Carlos Pagni’s expansive political analysis of the Buenos Aires periphery.

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Nic Johnson reviews Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution in NLR 156:

‘What is significant for the fiscal sociology of morals is virtually irrelevant from the perspective of macroeconomic regimes of accumulation.’

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In NLR 156, Grey Anderson reviews Edward Luce’s biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski:

‘Brzezinski’s concept of “peaceful engagement” was an activist alternative to détente, not a softer version of it.’

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In NLR 156, Julieta Caldas on Frieze:

‘Frieze is for the most part a terrible place to see art, but a good place to glimpse the money that greases its wheels.’

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In NLR 156: Pierre Vesperini on the politics of public history.

'Societies do not seek the most accurate knowledge of their history. They instead seek to cast a favourable light on their origins, their way of life and the values they claim to uphold.'

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In NLR 156, Cédric Durand pays tribute to Michel Aglietta, founder of the Parisian Regulation School of heterodox economics.

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Why has ‘Wikipedia’ become a pejorative term among book reviewers in recent years?

In NLR 156, Ryan Ruby on fiction and encyclopedia, from Sterne and Melville to Rachel Kushner and Sally Rooney

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In NLR 156: George Kennan-Anders Stephanson correspondence.

Unpublished letters between the Cold War strategist and a young Marxist critic studying his work.

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In NLR 156: History’s Shadow.

Why is South Africa stuck in forms of social and economic segregation, 30 years after apartheid? Kevin Cox unpacks the white regime’s class-making processes.

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Tariq Ali, Abduction in Caracas — Sidecar What happens next?

Tariq Ali on Maduro's ouster:

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NLR 156, November–December 2025 NLR 156, November–December 2025. Includes articles by Anders Stephanson, Kevin Cox, Ryan Ruby, Julieta Caldas, Cédric Durand, Pierre Vesperini, María Haro Sly, Nic Johnson, Grey Anderson, Anders Steph...

NLR 156 out now.

Kevin Cox on South Africa; Ryan Ruby on the wikinovel; Cédric Durand remembers Aglietta; Pierre Vesperini on politics of history'; Julieta Caldas at Frieze; Nic Johnson on Melinda Cooper; Grey Anderson on Brzezinski and much more...

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James Wolcott, The Pattiverse — Sidecar On ‘Bread of Angels’.

'Destiny had little to do with it. From the moment Patti slid her dance slippers into the downtown poetry scene, a shark fin of ambition seemed to trail behind, slicing through the fug.'

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James Wolcott on Patti Smith:

James Wolcott, The Pattiverse — Sidecar On ‘Bread of Angels’.

James Wolcott on Patti Smith:

'Hers wasn’t the bolted-down, battle-mapped ambition of Madonna, but it had its own formidability, lightened and brightened by a goofball side alien to Madonna’s control panel.'

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New Left Review: The Perfect Gift Subscription

Gift subscriptions to NLR come with full access to the archive from 1960 to the present—1000s of articles, including classics from Adorno, Althusser, Brenner, Butler, Harvey, Jameson, Williams; Benedict Anderson, Mike Davis, Nancy Fraser, Ellen Meiksins Wood and many more.

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Tom Hazeldine, Decent Limits — Sidecar At Your Party conference.

'The bourgeois media buried the lede, which is that the conference passed off without a split, settled the Party’s constitution and endorsed the bare outline of a socialist credo.'

Tom Hazeldine reports from Your Party's inaugural conference:

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New Left Review: The Perfect Gift Subscription

Gift subscriptions to NLR come with full access to the archive from 1960 to the present—1000s of articles, including classics from Adorno, Althusser, Brenner, Butler, Harvey, Jameson, Williams; Benedict Anderson, Mike Davis, Nancy Fraser, Ellen Meiksins Wood and many more.

newleftreview.org/p/bsk

Tony Wood, Restoration in Chile? — Sidecar On the elections.

'The new right’s programme is in large part a revival of an older agenda. In Kast’s case, it derives from a balefully familiar source: the hard neoliberalism of the Pinochet dictatorship.'

Tony Wood on the Chilean elections:

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Edwin F. Ackerman, Sheinbaum’s Mission — Sidecar The Mexican President’s first year.

'Sheinbaum has pushed through a slew of constitutional reforms, expanded welfare programmes and successfully navigated a fraught relationship with the Trump administration.'

For Sidecar, Edwin F. Ackerman on Mexico:

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With great fanfare, the Trump Administration came to Milei's aid, laying on a White House visit, a $2o billion currency swap—at a fixed exchange rate, not the market price-and talk of another $2o billion in private and sovereign-fund lending. But Trump was alert to the risk of being associated with a loser and Milei's presidential term had another two years to run. 'If he does win, we're going to be very helpful', Trump told the press, with Milei sweating by his side. 'And if he doesn't, we're not going to waste our time.? Argentina's liberal-conservative media had been ambivalent about Trump, not relishing his threat of imposing a rare-earths deal on the country in exchange for his help. But at this point, he was seen as the country's only saviour.

With the Trump administration doing its best to get its desired outcome in the Honduras elections, we are seeing a new US Latin America policy taking shape. Martín Mosquera in the latest NLR has sketched what that looks like elsewhere on the continent.

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In NLR 155, Nicholas Mulder on Orain’s Le monde confisqué:

‘Is the world considered infinite and its systemic interactions accordingly positive-sum; or is it inherently limited in its growth potential and destined to be ruled by zero-sum competition?’

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Owen Hatherley, Painted Bodies — Sidecar On Aleksandr Deineka.

Owen Hatherley on Aleksandr Deineka:

'He was exactly the sort of realist a modernist would love – surprising and imaginative, uninterested in the classical canon, politeness or precedent and open to experiment.'

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Lily Lynch, Confections — Sidecar On Sanna Marin’s memoir.

Lily Lynch (@lilylynch.bsky.social) on Sanna Marin’s memoir:

‘Throughout Hope in Action, Marin invokes ‘the collective’ – sometimes to illustrate the qualities of the Finnish soul, at others to give her lust for power an egalitarian sheen.’

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Lukas Slothuus, Oil Futures — Sidecar Norway’s elections.

Lukas Slothuus (@lslothuus.bsky.social) on Norway's elections:

‘With the new government dependent on left votes in parliament, there is opportunity to continue to prise open the debate on the future of oil. This will not be easy.’

'AI is a true forcing move for literary criticism because it forces us to define precisely what kind of humane intelligence we can offer'

Nan Z. Da on LLMs and literary criticism, in NLR 155.

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Grey Anderson, Iron-Ass — Sidecar Dick Cheney (1941-2025).

'He dissimulated even when the truth would have served him. Disclosure invited scrutiny; scrutiny invited limits; limits imperilled the office.'

Grey Anderson on Dick Cheney (1941–2025):

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'To what extent, beneath the now-fetishized aesthetic, was socialist modernism meaningfully the product of a radically different social system to liberal capitalism?'

Owen Hatherley on 'Socmodernist' architecture, in NLR 155.

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'In the absence of growth, no party can offer a credible programme capable of sustaining an electoral majority. The outcome has been a new configuration of political struggle'.

In NLR 155, Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner reply to critics.

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