Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism

Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism PDF Author: Boris Kagarlitsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000199843
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
This provocative book addresses the ideological and political crisis of the Western left, comparing it with the problems facing leftist politics in Russia and other countries. The author presents a radical critique of the current state of the Western left which puts discourse above class interest and politics of diversity above politics of social change. The trajectory away from class politics towards feminism, minority rights and the coalition of coalitions led to the destruction of the basic strategic pillars of the movement. Some elements of this broad progressive agenda became mainstream, but in fact this made the crisis of the left even deeper and contributed to the disintegration of the left's identity. The author demonstrates that a simple return to ‘the good old times’ of classical socialist politics of the industrial age is not possible, suggesting that class politics must be redefined and reinvented through the experience of new radical populism. This book speaks directly to the way the identity politics/class politics divide has been framed within the English-speaking world. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of political science and political sociology, international relations, security studies and global studies, as well as socialist activists.

Unity on the Global Left

Unity on the Global Left PDF Author: Barry K. Gills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000367681
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
This book brings together a collection of essays by progressive global activists in response to Samir Amin’s call for a new global organization of progressive workers and peoples. Amin’s proposal is applauded, criticized and reformulated by these scholar-activists who are all proponents of ways forward toward a more egalitarian world society. Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-system tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ to coordinate support for progressive movements. Amin, an Egyptian economist, was an intrepid intellectual and organizer of popular movements whose scholar activism provided inspiration to the global justice movement. The essays in this volume are by other prominent scholar activists who praise, critique and reconfigure Amin’s proposal in order to help humanity confront the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and move toward a more egalitarian global society. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Globalizations.

Capital Redefined

Capital Redefined PDF Author: S. A. Hamed Hosseini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003805612
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
Capital Redefined presents a unique perspective on the nature of “capital,” departing from the prevailing reductionist accounts. Hosseini and Gills offer an expanded perspective on Marxian value theory by addressing its main limitations and building their own integrative value theory. They argue that the current understanding of “value” must be re-examined and liberated from its subservient ties to capital while acknowledging the ways in which capital appropriates value. This is achieved by differentiating between “fetish value” created by capital and “true value” generated through various commons-based forms of coexistence. The authors propose a defetishization of value by rejecting the commonly accepted idea of its objectivity. They introduce their “commonist value theory,” which redefines capital as both the product and process of perverting the fundamental commoning causes of true value into sources of fetish value. Capital is theorized through a “modular” framework, where multiple intersecting processes constitute a comprehensive power structure, a “value regime,” representing an unprecedented degree of the domination of capital over life. Their theory reconciles two apparently incompatible views on the notion of value. One view encompasses all inputs involved in capitalist value production and conflates intrinsic and commodity values. The other warns against this conflation as it treats capital as an entity tightly associated only with commodity production and wage labor. The authors believe that establishing alternative forms of value creation based on normative principles of living in commons is crucial as an analytical base for criticizing existing power structures and economic systems. The book offers a theoretical foundation for transforming our life worlds toward “post-capitalist” futures. It appeals to scholars and students in various fields, such as political economy, capitalism, and post-capitalist studies, economic and political sociology, globalization, development studies, social ecology, and ecological philosophy.

Sociology in Post-Normal Times

Sociology in Post-Normal Times PDF Author: Charles Thorpe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793625980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
The Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions of climate change are features of post-normal times. In Sociology in Post-Normal Times, Charles Thorpe contends that the modern project of creating normalcy within the nation state has broken down. Integral to this is sociology, which is the science of social reform. Drawing from the work of seminal theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, Thorpe contends that sociology's “society” is no longer viable because globalization has put an end to social reform, thus the assumptions and goals of sociology must be left behind in order to create a new global humanity. In the face of the pandemic and climate change, Sociology in Post-Normal Times demands no less than the birth of a global humanity beyond nation states as the precondition for human survival.

Multiplicity

Multiplicity PDF Author: Justin Rosenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000383822
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
This volume takes up the idea of ‘multiplicity’ as a new common ground for international theory, bringing together 10 scholars to reflect on the implications of societal multiplicity for areas as diverse as nationalism, ecology, architecture, monetary systems, cosmology and the history of political ideas. International relations (IR), it is often said, has contributed no big ideas to the interdisciplinary conversation of the social sciences and humanities. Yet this is an unnecessary silence, for IR uniquely addresses a fundamental fact about the human world: its division into a multiplicity of interacting social formations. This feature is full of consequences for the very nature of societies and for social phenomena of all kinds. And in recent years a research programme has emerged within IR to theorise these ‘consequences of multiplicity’ and to trace how the effects of the international dimension extend into other fields of social life. This book is a powerful indication of the contribution that IR may yet make to the human disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

The Interface of Domestic and International Factors in India’s Foreign Policy

The Interface of Domestic and International Factors in India’s Foreign Policy PDF Author: Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000368831
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
This book investigates the interplay of internal and external constraints, challenges and possibilities regarding foreign policy in India. It is the first attempt to systematically analyse and focus on the different actors and institutions in the domestic and international contexts who impose and push for various directions in India’s foreign policy. Rather than focusing on any one particular theme, the book explores the myriad aspects of foreign policymaking and the close interface between the domestic and external aspects in Indian policymaking. In turn, this relates to the structural issues shaping and reshaping the Asian regional dynamics and India’s connectivity within a globalized world. This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students; scholars of Asian Studies, development, and political science and international relations; and all those involved in policy – especially foreign policy – within India and South Asia. It will also be useful for people working in professional branches of consultancy and the private sector dealing with India and with South Asia in general.

Rising Powers, People Rising

Rising Powers, People Rising PDF Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000376001
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Rising Powers, People Rising is a pathbreaking volume in which leading international scholars discuss the emerging political economy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social movements oriented towards structural transformation. The contributions in this book focus on the ways in and extent to which these trajectories generate distinct forms and patterns of mobilization and resistance, and conversely, how popular struggles impact on and shape these trajectories. The book unearths the economic, social, and political contradictions that tend to disappear from view in mainstream narratives of the BRICS countries as rising powers in the world-system. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Reglobalization

Reglobalization PDF Author: Matthew Louis Bishop
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000373703
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
This book charts the way towards a better, repurposed globalization, which it calls ‘reglobalization’, and shows how this can be built, incrementally but realistically, via reforms to the partial and fragile existing structures of global governance. In making this argument, the book firmly rejects the new fashion for a politics of deglobalization, which has appeared of late in both left-wing and right-wing variants. Instead, it suggests that a reformed Group of 20 (G20), for all its current inadequacies, can still provide the critical coordinating function that the management of a process of reglobalization requires. The book argues that globalization is too important to be lost; rather, it needs to be saved from its capture by neoliberalism and rebuilt around different values for a post-neoliberal era. The emergence of global pandemic as an issue only goes to emphasise the necessity, importance and urgency of the reglobalization project. Reglobalization is essential reading for everybody living in the era of globalization, which is all of us, and worried about its many economic, social and political problems, which is a growing number of us. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.

The Redesign of the Global Financial Architecture

The Redesign of the Global Financial Architecture PDF Author: Stuart P. M. Mackintosh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000199959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
More than ten years on from the most intense phase of the global financial crisis, and the collective international response in the G20 summit in London, a ‘new normal’ has emerged with systems in place to mitigate against further banking crises. This updated new edition analyzes this post-crisis international and national regulatory framework and asks whether the current paradigm is fit for purpose as new dangers gestate and develop. This new edition includes a discussion of the impact of the aggressively deregulatory and anti-globalist policies of the Trump administration and its pursuit of an ‘America First’ policy and explores its implications for the regulatory landscape constructed and tended by previous leaders. The author addresses new and future systemic risks, many outside the regulated banking sector, which have grown in importance since 2015. He develops possible future scenarios for the international regulatory architecture, both negative and positive, asking, ‘Are we better prepared for future banking crises?’ New risks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crash, are testing the global system; and the G20, without US leadership, may be failing in this latest most severe crisis of our lifetimes. This book provides a unique narrative explanation drawn from leading actors of key events and policy changes as they unfolded immediately post-crisis. The author builds upon the first edition to capture key developments that have occurred during the past five years, while raising key questions and vulnerabilities, and looking at future risks and challenges that may emerge. This text will be of great interest to students, teachers and researchers of financial frameworks, globalisation and political economy.

Challenging Inequality in South Africa

Challenging Inequality in South Africa PDF Author: Michelle Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000194175
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
In Challenging Inequality in South Africa: Transitional Compasses leading scholars of South Africa explore creative possibilities to challenge structures of economic, social and political power that produce inequality. Through concrete empirical examples of movements, workers’ struggles, initiatives, and politics in challenging inequality, the authors illustrate ‘transitional compasses’ that go beyond protest politics to a ‘generative’ politics, a politics of building the alternatives in the interstitial spaces of capitalism. The conceptual framing is oriented around the way in which power is produced and reproduced through intricate relationships between hegemonic projects and everyday life. While power underpins all social relations, it is often taken for granted, as it is frequently hidden behind other social relations. Resistance to power emerges through engendering counter-hegemonic projects that are intertwined with alternative everyday practices. The authors highlight sources of alternative forms of power found in resistance to dominant forms of power through concrete experiences to create transformative alternatives. To concretize the conceptual framing, the authors look at the emancipatory possibilities of a universal basic income, the use of law in tackling inequality in health and education, creative initiatives to establish a people-centred food system through food sovereignty, new forms of organizing led by precarious workers, democratic possibilities in local state delivery, and attempts at reconceptualizing the good life by looking at issues of happiness and ecosocialism. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Globalizations.