Anticapitalist Frontiers

Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle By Steven Best and Douglas Kellner Kellner homepage:  http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html Curriculum Vitae:  http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/DK97CV.htm Best homepage:  http://www.utep.edu/philos/best.htm "But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness," Ludwig Feuerbach. "There is no doubt for aynone who examines the question coldly that those who really want to shake an established society must formulate a theory which fundamentally explains this society, or which at least quite seems to give a satisfactory explantion," Guy Debord  

  Phil Hearse reviews  New Faces of Fascism  by Enzo Traverso, Verso, 2018 The forward surge of fascist and far right movements, symbolised by figures like Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, poses important theoretical and political questions for the militant left. Enzo Traverso’s new book is one of the best responses from a Marxist viewpoint. Unlike many studies of this subject, this book does not attempt to provide a factual account of the progress of the hard right, but goes straight to some of the main analytical problems. These include how we can understand the new hard right in relation to ‘classical fascism’ in the 20 th  century, the idea of ‘populism’, identity politics (left and right), Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, as well as the usefulness (or otherwise) of the notion of totalitarianism. This is a big agenda, undertaken by an historian with a deep knowledge of modern politics and culture, and is therefore quite dense – decidedly not a basi...

  Phil Hearse (2009) Most people outside the United States have probably never heard of Ayn Rand, and a brief introduction to her ultra-pro-free market views would doubtless be enough to convince most of them they haven't missed anything. Yet 27 years after her death, Ayn Rand continues to be seriously debated in the US, her books sell hundreds of thousands each year, her views are propagated by right-wing think tanks and foundations and - bizarrely - Charlize Theron is in discussions to turn Rand's 1088-page magnum opus Atlas Shrugged into a TV mini-series. The Times Educational Supplement claimed in July 2009  that the Ayn Rand revival is gathering pace on US campuses. According to the TES:

  Phil Hearse Two recent events have focused attention on extreme right social media. The shooter in the Christchurch massacre was an addict of white supremacist message boards on platforms like Reddit and 4Chan. Like the alt-right platform Gab, these noticeboards are filled with overt racism, homophobia, misogyny and Hitler worship. A very different sort of hard right social media fuels Vox, the Spanish neo-fascist party that won 13% of the vote in the April general election. Like its siblings in France and Germany its racism is thinly-disguised Islamophobia, and it tries to present a ‘respectable’ image. One aspect of far-right social media often overlooked, but highly relevant with Vox, is the immense amount of money that funds it – generally from millionaire or billionaire backers.

Peter Gowan died on 12 June 2009. This obituary was written at the time. Peter Gowan, Professor at London Metropolitan University, a member of the New Left Review editorial board and a former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG), died on 12 June 2009. He was probably the leading Marxist expert on international relations writing in English, and wrote and spoke with an astonishing grasp of the inter-relationship between economic, political and military power in the modern world. His ability to knit together theory with a vast range of factual knowledge held his audiences spellbound. But he was far from a detached academic; he was an utterly partisan, determined and vitriolic critic of American imperialism. For him, the central obstacle to world progress and social justice were what he called the “Dollar-Wall St regime”. After 9/11 Peter was in demand around the world to explain why the US had gone to war and what the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘war on terror’ were all about. He claime...