This was entertaining and all--gossip about Lenin and Stalin, and the difference between them being that Lenin would kill you for what you said and Stalin would kill you even if you kept silent; and reminding us that without tackling the problem of the excluded (these days, not just Marx's lumpenproletariat or Fanon's wretched but most of us, the new homo sacer), our other problems, be they ever so serious, become mere managerial ones for capitalism--the climate catastrophe the problem of sustainability, the matter of biogenetics an "ethical" question, and so on--and then we're sunk. That was fine but kind of we know it, right? And then this otherwise meandered. New Left Review. ( )