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NLR - wtf?
WILL PODMORE is glad to find that a survey of editorials exposes the pretentions of the New Left Review
TRUE VICTORS: National Liberation Front of South Vietnam guerrillas patrol the Saigon River in October 1966
[Public Domain]
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Contraventions: editorials from New Left Review
Susan Watkins, Verso, £25
THIS selection of editorials from the New Left Review in the years from 2000 to 2022 reveals more about NLR’s ideology than was possibly intended.
The self-important NLR team has always seen its role as indispensable — to inject correct theory into the somnolent masses. NLR’s philosopher-kings will enlighten the benighted masses across the world. There is no need for all the hard work of building a party, which it sees as inevitably doomed to bureaucratic deformation.
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