What if Capitalism Does Not Last forever?

No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it had a beginning at all, but everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. “Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater… Read Corey Robin’s “Capitalism’s Long Revolution”

What We Call the West

It’s not every day that one comes across a contemporary novel about politics that wrestles with fundamental questions with such argumentative originality and intellectual depth that one walks away from its pages convinced that it ought to be discussed in philosophy journals just as much as in literary reviews. Now I Surrender, the third masterpiece by the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue to be brought into English by the brilliant translator Natasha Wimmer, is unlikely to be received as a major intervention in political theory, but that is precisely what it is. A collage of archival research, field diaries, film criticism, travelogues, nature writing, and narrative history that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Enrigue’s book accomplishes a nearly impossible feat: It succeeds equally well as a breathtaking historical novel and as a groundbreaking work of political theory that offers the final chapters of the centuries-long war that pitted Mexico and the United States against the Chiricahua Apache as a refutation of both the Hollywood western and the Western nation-state. Read Nicolás Medina Mora’s “The Radical Genius of Álvaro Enrigue”