Walter Benjamin memorial, Portbou. "It is more difficult to honor the anonymous than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous."

Popular accounts of Nazism often claim that Hitler rose to power democratically. But, historian Richard J. Evans argues, German fascism relied on armed militias, made up of disaffected veterans inspired by antisemitism, to crush communists and socialists. jacobin.com/2024/08/nazism…

How to map destruction in Gaza A lot of the maps showing damaged buildings in Gaza going viral are quite misleading and obscure the patterns of domicide we're seeing across the strip (with >50,000 structures fully destroyed) This map is a more faithful & accurate visualisation of

When Richard Billingham published photos of his poor and alcoholic family, critics asked whether he had betrayed or humanized them. Walter Benn Michaels reflects on the images' legacy and on working-class photography under neoliberalism 28 years later. jacobin.com/2024/08/rays-a…

“To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy” newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Blaming UK far right riots on “misinformation” is basically another version of Gustave Lebon’s psychology of the crowds in the era of twitter. What changed is that his élitiste and reactionary views are widespread among ‘progressives’.

Caitlín Doherty (Cait Doherty) on the character of Starmerism: 'In interviews, the Prime Minister claimed to have no favourite novel, to have suffered no childhood fears and never to dream.' newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

Joris Ivens's 1933 film New Earth features an amazing soundtrack by the German composer Hanns Eisler. Ivens met Eisler in the Soviet Union while working on a film about the industrial city of Magnitogorsk and Stalin's Five-Year Plan.

Vincent Van Gogh about the coal mining region of Borinage in Belgium.

The thirties are now fully back !

Gabriel Hetland, Fraud Foretold? newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/… via @newleftreview

They had Jacket potatoes in first class Titanic. One of the most horrendous dish ever created.

Forthcoming from Wolfgang Streeck (Verso): “Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism” (Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz): versobooks.com/products/2912-…

Wow! Get ready for Greg Grandin’s new book: “America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the

thomas chaney and I updated our working paper on "Trade and the End of Antiquity" (which recently got some airtime here). A short re-cap: 1/n

One of the few drawings (1879) of van Gogh while he was living in the southwest of Belgium, in the mining region of Borinage. At the time one of the most important coal industry in Europe.

I wrote a few words for the ⁦New Left Review⁩’s Sidecar blog about the elections in eastern Germany and the Left’s inability to turn the right-populist tide. newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…