How can the economy's need to wipe out a mountain of fictitious value be squared with its need to maintain social control? Sander considers the potential for deflation, reflation and/or stagflation

The films of Stephan Dillemuth trace the changing habitat of artists from modernist bohemia to the culture industry. Through role-play and reflexivity, the film-maker's attraction-repulsion to romantic, modernist ideals of art and society is given compelling form. By Maija Timonen

Capital needs to sustain the fantasy of its health, efficiency and inevitability at all costs. As the crisis broadsides this fantasy, the spin-doctors are scrambling to reconstruct it. Now is our chance to stop them – writes John Barker

What lies beyond the failed utopias of the modernist welfare state and the free market? Gail Pickering's recent film/performance, despite its strictly internal focus on life inside a Brutalist housing estate, opens up scope for speculation. Review by Kate Rich

The English translation of Roberto Esposito's Bios appears to be an important contribution to the critical analysis of a politics of life, but can the book's claim to 'revitalise' politics really be thought from within the exclusive bounds of academic philosophy? Review by Erik Empson

David Panos & Anja Kirschner's film, Trail of the Spider, allegorises the public-private land-grab known as ‘urban regeneration’ using the form of the Spaghetti Western. This is no shallow postmodern genre surfing, writes Neil Gray, but a passionate re-engagement with history for the sake of the present

Having been studiously ignored for decades, computer art's early history is finally receiving the attention it deserves. Catherine Mason's book on its British variant uncovers how mainframe computing and arts education came gloriously, if briefly, together. Review by Simon Ford

The recent resurgence of interest in African music arguably breaks with existing stereotypes only to replace them with new ones. But who is benefiting from African music's soaring popularity?

The Liverpool Biennial '08's strand of site-specific installations, MADE UP, promoted an engagement with fantasy and beauty over criticality. But, in the context of Liverpool's current City of Culture status and the epic regeneration this entails, we should wake up, not be put to sleep – write the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home

Margarita Gluzberg's fascination with the fictions that sustain capitalism seems increasingly relevant as they start to unravel in the face of the financial crisis. Here the artist talks to Peter Carty about her recent show The Money Plot

Speculation and risk management, once the preserve of finance, have become defining traits of all facets of contemporary capitalism – from military planning to stem cell research. The Melancholic Troglodytes review two recent books exploring the expansion of this speculative logic

There are distinct ideological ties of continuity between these two contributions.

What's the difference between a commissar's propaganda and a Constructivist's poetics of production? Marco Deseriis reviews Gerald Raunig's 'Art and Revolution' and ponders some of the gaps in his aesthetic-political theory

There are books which are imbued with an anachronistic aura from their very release. Books whose untimely publication makes you wonder whether their moment has irrevocably gone by or is perhaps still yet to come.

By supporting NGOs, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere?

Paolo Virno's latest book contends that the question of human nature – good or evil? – is suddenly topical, thanks to ‘immaterial labour'. But, if true, how useful is this insight?, asks Nina Power

The 19th century 'Great Game' rivalry between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia is seeing a resurgence, with America taking Britain's place. The stakes are higher than ever, argues Loren Goldner