Perspectives on the Conflagration

In the current dysfunctional global financial system, money flows from the neediest countries to the wealthiest. This results in developing economies making exorbitant interest payments, cutting spending on crucial sectors, and leaving half of the world’s poorest countries even poorer than before the pandemic. A polycentric financial framework has emerged, a decentralized system where various entities such as central banks, multilateral lenders, and regional alliances, provide liquidity and support to countries, particularly during crises, without a formal overarching structure. This is a response to the imbalanced global financial system and aims to address the needs of developing countries that struggle with debt and financial distress.

“World money has always been geopolitical, as political economist Mona Ali has argued. The global dollar system, headquartered in New York and London, is a “money-military matrix backed by legal armature. Most of the non-US arrangements amount to workarounds that are still in service of dollar-based obligations; extending them a little further than US politics would allow for, and with a few less strings than the IMF might demand. The dollar system’s solidity is largely based on the preferences and needs of global elites. Flexing underneath and against that system is likely to continue to be of a limited and ad-hoc nature—more about shielding from disaster and protecting interests than about upending the financialized global dollar system.”

Haslett analyzes Thomas Chatterton Williams’s argument for a post-racial society, as presented in his book Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. The author argues that Williams’s narrative is incoherent, relying on personal anecdotes and intellectual gymnastics rather than solid arguments, and fails to address the complexities of race and racism, particularly in relation to class and collective struggle.

“The fact is that “race” is made and remade at the vicious, jam-packed crossroads of class stratification and the force of the state—which is one reason why, as Williams notes with uncomprehending triumph, different countries have different racial paradigms. What he cannot grasp is that any effective challenge to white hegemony would have to take place not in the perfumed realm of private choices and elective affinities, but on the harsh terrain of real life: where collective struggle is waged, and wealth is made and spread. Apart from a single glancing mention (in parentheses) of the social democrat Bernie Sanders, there is no serious and explicit treatment of the gap between rich and poor. The omission reveals the fantasy that throbs beneath this memoir: that race can be yanked from the clanging machinery in which it’s lodged. Nothing could be more reassuring. No other hierarchy—not the advantages that, say, one gender or class lords over the others—will have to change or be abolished, as Williams attempts to leap through his little trapdoor in history.”

Black public intellectual Glenn Loury’s new memoir Late Admissions contains candid details of a life in the ivory tower and Boston drug dens. Loury has “spent decades in the thick of rancorous debates on race and inequality, affirmative action and identity politics, crime and punishment” and has been embraced by conservatives, liberals and conservatives again as his position on race favored one side or the other’s narrative.

“But even if speech isn’t free, Loury has been unique in his willingness to pay any price, and zealous in his refusal to conform. He is the Ivy League professor who rubbed shoulders with the downtown hustlers, the Black scholar who ran with the Reaganites, the reformed Reaganite who broke ranks with former friends, the repentant progressive who stands in opposition to Black Lives Matter; and now, he is the eminent scholar dishing the sordid details of a complicated life. That guy is biting his tongue?!”

Proctor explores the psychological toll of political defeat for leftist movements, particularly focusing on the aftermath of Labour’s losses in the UK’s 2019 general election. She critiques the concept of “left melancholy,” which she describes as a mourning for a past idealized left-wing movement, arguing that this perspective fails to address the emotional and experiential aspects of defeat. Instead, she suggests a need to acknowledge the pain of loss but also maintain a commitment to political organizing and change.

“In Benjamin’s description, the feelings of the left melancholic once lay in “dusty heart-shaped velvet trays” that are now empty, while Brecht describes revolutionary hearts that have been broken but remain full of feeling. The sliver of difference between the empty heart and the broken one may seem negligible, but it is the difference between resignation and commitment. A counterpart to left melancholia, which is characterized by a stubborn attachment to a thwarted future, might be mournful militancy. The latter not only responds to the losses and harms inflicted by social injustice in the past by struggling to make the future more livable but also acknowledges that the process of mourning requires time and space in the present to work through loss, contend with ambivalence, and sit with grief. The famous words of Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill have become something of a slogan on the left: ‘Don’t mourn, organize!’ But perhaps this needs to be replaced by a more emotionally complicated injunction: ‘Mourn, organize!’”