Critical engagement with Göran Therborn’s global analysis of 21st-century society and its prospects for the left. If the contradictions that anchored 20th-century socialism have been surpassed, what has taken their place? Perspective for an emancipatory politics working aslant the grain of history.

Cryptocurrency offered to the global underprivileged in exchange for biometric data; a fragmentary ‘common sense’ on Gramscian lines produced by training generative AI. Hito Steyerl reflects on the hegemonic relations of new tech models.

The oeuvre of Kehinde Wiley—art-world representative of the American super-rich—as iconography of capitalist desire in crisis. Can paintings transfixed by the glamour of the ruling class offer a coded indictment of it, via the assimilation of Romantic and Renaissance prototypes?

In radical counter-position to the ameliorative civil-rights tradition, the Afropessimist perspective blends memoir and theory, lyricism and abstraction, into a nihilistic vision of ‘slaveness’ as founding condition of black American life. Loïc Wacquant probes the political logic of this ‘excluvisist brand of race primordialism’.

Radical literary theory has defined itself in opposition to a ‘historical-contextual’ approach said to be exemplified by Fredric Jameson. Is this a misreading? Leo Robson on the author of The Political Unconscious as appreciator of plot and popularizer of a positive hermeneutics of globalization.