The January-February issue of New Left Review, the latest to reach us, is among the most interesting editions in recent years. It includes a short update on Donald Trump’s return to power by the editor, Susan Watkins. The emphasis here is on the foreign policy of the United States, weighing the incoming administration’s ambitions and early moves against the approach of others that have assumed office in the recent past. Here Watkins echoes some of the points we have made in International Socialism.
There is also a symposium, focused on the latest of five volumes by Robin Blackburn that together chart the rise and fall of slavery across the Atlantic world. The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888 (Verso, 2024) deals with the slave regimes in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, which survived the destruction of the system across most of the Caribbean and the attempt to ban the transatlantic slave trade by various European powers from the early 19th century. There are erudite engagements with the book from John Clegg, Enrico Dal Lago and Nancy Fraser, together with a reply from Blackburn.
However, the centrepiece of the issue is an article adapted from notes for a conference talk in Mexico a quarter of a century ago by New Left Review doyen Perry Anderson. This considers the role of ideas in history. Like a lot of Anderson’s output, it combines acute observation with sweeping generalisation. The latter can sometimes go astray. At times, Anderson seems to downplay the deeper material forces at work that can emerge in sudden ideological upheaval, for instance in the English Revolution of the 17th century. So too with the material roots of Mao Zedong’s so-called Cultural Revolution. Anderson’s claim that “Stalin entrusted the building of socialism to the material development of productive forces, Mao to a cultural revolution capable of transforming mentalities and mores” ignores the forces unleashed by the Chinese attempt to replicate Stalinist industrialisation after the 1949 Revolution, and the strains it created within the regime Mao headed.
Regardless, Anderson’s conclusion for the left is in some ways helpful: key ideas, such as Marxism, can develop “in conditions of initial isolation from, and in tension with, the surrounding political environment—with little or no hope of immediate influence”. That does not mean that the left should simply engage in “feeble adjustment or euphemistic accommodation to the existing order of things”. Instead, as Anderson implies, we should use the tools of Marxism to analyse the world and understand that our ideas can, in conditions of struggle, become the property of vast numbers.
However, in making a parallel between disparate ideas—ranging from neoliberal ideology to Marxism—Anderson gives us little sense here of how the left can intervene in actually existing struggles on the ground, moving beyond simply developing and propagating ideas from the fringes, to try to gain some implantation at least in sections of the working class.
The shifts in US policy towards the war between Russia and Ukraine have led to another intense wave of debate on the left. Andreas Bieler is among those who broadly shares the outlook expressed by authors in this journal. A recent post on his blog offered an early response to the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House’s Oval Office (https://andreasbieler.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-betrayal-of-ukraine.html). Bieler situates this in a broader series of “betrayals”, in which Western governments have fanned the flames of war in the region.
Michael Roberts published a concise analysis of the Ukrainian and Russian war economies on his blog The Next Recession, which broadly aligns with Bieler’s post (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-three-years-on). Unsurprisingly, the war has been devastating for the Ukrainian economy. Beyond destruction and the immense loss of life, Ukraine has become increasingly dependent on the International Monetary Fund and other Western creditors (and their harsh lending conditions). It is not just Trump taking advantage of this difficult situation to secure resources—Western European capital, including Swiss-based Nestlé and the German conglomerate Bayer, have already staked their claims. Contrary to many predictions, the Russian economy has held up relatively well. This is partly because Russia could expand its trade with China. As Western capital withdrew, the state stepped in, now playing a far more prominent role in the economy (a weakness, typical for Roberts, is that he treats the state as if it were separate from what he calls the “capitalist sector”).
JC & SR