Böcker i Studies in Critical Social Sci-serien

In Unravelling the Social Formation: Free Trade, the State and Business Associations in Turkey, Akif Avci examines the role of business associations and the state in Turkey in analysing the dialectical relationship between global free trade and Turkish social formation since 2002. The manuscript constructs three-levels of analysis based on the social relations of production, forms of state and world order. It explores the class characteristics of the business associations, the role of the Turkish state in the process of integration into global capitalism, and at the same time, internalisation of the global class relations inside Turkey. It offers a fresh neo-Gramscian evaluation of theories of imperialism, and of the uneven and combined development (U&CD) framework for understanding social formation.

The Radical Right examines five cases of political hatred from the margins of global capital: Turkey under Erdogan, Hungary under Orbán, India under Modi, the Philippines under Duterte, and Brazil under Bolsonaro. With probing insights it asks, how did these rightwing figures come to power? What strategies of legitimation do they employ? What resistances do they face?The authors use case studies of individual countries to lay the foundation for a systematic comparison that illuminates the key dynamics of a novel political form. By analyzing each regime's response to the Covid-19 pandemic further light is shed on their methods in a time of crisis. The book closes by considering the Trump presidency, and how we can understand these leaders by comparison to their pronounced counterpart in the Global North-and vice-versa.More than a mere collection of texts commissioned from specialists, The Radical Right is the result of a two-year-long collective endeavor by an international taskforce assembled to respond to a global phenomenon of far reaching significance.

Chinese economic growth is an extraordinary phenomenon that deserves an original analysis. Dynamics of China's Economy traces this dynamism from the origins of the People's Republic to the present day. The analysis offered is unique, first, because the authors have reconstructed statistical databases in time series for the stock of physical capital, the stock of human capital, expenditure on research and development, and Gini income inequality index. Their methodologies screen a very wide range of theoretical currents: neoclassical, Pickettyan, and Marxist. It further stands out from similar inquiries because the most modern tools of statistics and econometrics are mobilized to carry out their research.

Known for his most famous works, such as The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) and The Problem of Corruption (1986), as well as his concept of the “captive mind,” Syed Hussein Alatas (1928-2007) made significant contributions to decolonization theory, social theory, and other forms of thought critical of the current neo-colonial and neoliberal world. Although Edward Said acknowledged his debt to Syed Hussein Alatas’ work, especially its influence on Orientalism, his most well known book, Alatas’ work has long been overlooked by Eurocentric Western academia.  Spurred by the commitment to celebrate and develop Syed Hussein Alatas’ work, this edited volume attempts to demonstrate its relevance to numerous academic fields, and the potential for his thought to be transformative in the international socio-political realm. Twenty authors from various disciplines and countries have contributed, in the hopes of bringing his work to the forefront of social and political theory. Contributors are: Mona Abaza, Joseph Alagha, Masturah Alatas, Sharifah Munirah Alatas, Syed Farid Alatas, Syed Imad Alatas, Hira Amin, Dustin J. Byrd, Zawawi Ibrahim, N. Jayaram, Teo Lee Ken, Habibul Haque Khondker, Victor T. King, João Marcelo E. Maia, Seyed Javad Miri, Carimo Mohomed, Chandra Muzaffar, Norshahril Saat, Mostafa Soueid, and Esmaeil Zeiny.

Digital Fissures offers numerous lenses through which to explore the relationships between genders, bodies and technologies. It rethinks feminist archives, argues for inserting postpornography into academia, approaching sex toys from a transpositive perspective, and examines attempts to dismantle the foundations of techno-capitalism. Each chapter works to reimagine the body as a hybrid, malleable and subversive source of potentiality. These essays provide readers with road maps for unimagined and uncharted social scapes: guides to working within a space of monstrosity demanded by the relationship between bodies-technologies-genders. Through this embodied discomfort, Digital Fissures questions existing techno-social norms, and imagines transfeminist futures.Contributors are: Carlotta Cossutta, Valentina Greco, Arianna Mainardi, Stefania Voli, Lucía Egña Rojas, Ludovico Virtù;, Angela Balzano, Obiezione Respinta, Elisa Virgili, Rachele Borghi, and Diego Marchante "Genderhacker".

Global Marx coheres a collective assessment of Marx's account of capital's domination, through his critique of disciplinary languages, investigation of political structures and analysis of specific political spaces within the world market. His discourse appears here as global not only because global is the geography of the world market but also because Marx redefined the relationships between the spaces on which capital exerts its command. Global Marx proves that Marx's texts do not identify any global working class, nor a centre of power to be conquered, but show that – within and against the world market – there is a social movement that is irreducible to any identity or to a single space from whose perspective one can write a universal history of class struggle. Contributors are: Luca Basso, Michele Basso, Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Michele Cento, Luca Cobbe, Isabella Consolati, Niccolò Cuppini, Roberta Ferrari, Michele Filippini, Giorgio Grappi, Maurizio Merlo, Mario Piccinini, Fabio Raimondi, Maurizio Ricciardi, Paola Rudan, and Federico Tomasello.

Much ink has been spilled on poverty measurements and trends, at the expense of attempts to understand root causes. Assembling multi-disciplinary and international contributions, Global Poverty shows that a causal understanding of poverty in rich and poor countries is essential for relieving its ravages. Contributors to this volume argue that our understanding must be based on a critical interrogation of the wider social relations which set up the mechanisms producing poverty as an outcome. Processes that widen/strengthen crisis-ridden market relations, that increase income/wealth inequality, and that 'enhance' the policy-biases of nation-states and international institutions toward the affluent-propertied strata cause global poverty and undermine poor people's political power. The processes concentrating wealth-creation are the same processes causing poverty. Through theoretical and empirical analyses this volume offers important insights and political prescriptions to address global poverty.Contributors are: Raju J. Das, Deepak K. Mishra, Steven Pressman, Michael Roberts, Jamie Gough, Aram Eisenschitz, Anjan Chakravarty, Mizhar Mikati, Marcelo Milan, Tarique Niazi, John Marangos, Eirini Triarchi, Themis Anthrakidis, Macayla Kisten and Brij Maharaj, David Michael M. San Juan, and Thaddeus Hwong.

This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux's materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings 'always-already-there' instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux's consequential work in respect to Ferdinand de Saussure's epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning.Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, John Searle"s philosophy of language, B.F. Skinner's indwelling agents, J.L. Austin's speech situations, Jacques Lacan's symbolic order, and the influential theories of other linguistic researchers, are cited to explain imaginary semantic systems. The broader implications for structural metaphysics in language use are tacitly conveyed.

Contending Global Apartheid: Transversal Solidarities and Politics of Possibility spells out a plea for utopia in a crisis-ridden 21st century of unequal development, exclusionary citizenship, and forced migrations. The volume offers a collection of critical essays on human rights movements, sanctuary spaces, and the emplacement of antiracist conviviality in cities across North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Each intervention proceeds from the idea that cities may accommodate both a humanistic sensibility and a radical potential for social transformation. The figure of the 'migrant' is pivotal. It expounds the prospect of transversal solidarity to capture a plurality of commonalities and to abjure dichotomies between in-group and out-group, the national and the international, or society and institutions.

This important book critically engages with the dynamics of caste in the politics of West Bengal, which unlike other parts of India has remained relatively free from large scale caste-based political mobilisation. The insignificance of caste in West Bengal politics has remained an enigma. Despite a growing interest in the politics of caste in West Bengal in recent years, in part due to the end of the world's longest serving democratically elected Communist government (1977-2011) - which put forward a class centric non-identitarian politics, the Caste question in West Bengal politics has remained under-researched. In this context, scholar Ayan Guha explores the reasons for the relative insignificance of caste in post-colonial West Bengal's politics and also assesses the future possibilities of caste-based identity politics in the state.

In Crisis, Inequalities and Poverty, Schettino and Clementi provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the economic breakdown that has characterised the last two decades of capitalist development-from the Lehman collapse to the Covid-19 pandemic-with a particular focus on the impact on poverty and inequality. The book provides a materialist account of the current global crisis of overproduction and looks at the link between capitalist crisis and systemic inequity, making the case through detailed quantification that the principal engine of these structural phenomena is in fact the general law of accumulation of the capitalist mode of production.

Prepared by an international team of authors representing leading universities from different parts of the world, this expansive volume elucidates various aspects of the theory of noonomy, developed by Professor S. Bodrunov. A positive assessment is given to the key provisions of this theory (the transition to knowledge-intensive production, the gradual socialisation of economy, the diffusion of property, the progress of solidarity relations, the removal of simulative needs and the progress of a culture). Significant attention is also paid to the global context of ongoing technological and socio-economic transformations, undergirding a political, economic and philosophical understanding of the theory of noonomy.The contributors to the volume are Sergey Glazyev, James Kenneth Galbraith, Oleg Smolin, Enfu Cheng, Siyang Gao, Alan Freeman, Andrey Kolganov, Jesús Pastor García Brigos, Anatoly Porokhovsky, Radhika Desai and Leo Gabriel.

In National (un)Belonging: Bengali American Women on Imagining and Contesting Culture and Identity, Roksana Badruddoja focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and nationalism among contemporary "second-generation" Bengali American women. Badruddoja engages in a yearlong feminist ethnographic study with a nationwide sample of 25 women in the U.S. to poignantly explore perceptions about daily social and cultural practices.Exploring the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migrations, Badruddoja interrogates assimilation to depict the messy nature of diasporic movement and the resulting complexities of diasporic identities. Badruddoja demonstrates racialized identities are often part of a constellation of loyalties that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and overlapping.

According to Matteo Battistini, The 'middle class' has become a fetish forged by the social sciences to legitimize American capitalism. In this invaluable monograph, Battistini traces the intellectual history of the middle class, and offers a social history of the political concept, whose specific scientific content has acquired an ideological centrality in the U.S. that has no equal in European history. Middle Class argues that the social sciences have freed the middle class from its historical relationship with work in an attempt to emancipate it from the tension into which it was continually dragged by class conflict. In the process, the social sciences overtun the image of opposing forces of labour and capital, replacing it with an image of a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy can coexist without tensions.Originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020.

This volume addresses pertinent questions related to cross-border labor migration and puts forward a "labor market" perspective that goes beyond the national frame of reference prevailing in most of the extant labor market scholarship. In four sections, the volume pulls together a number of key threads: How can we theoretically grasp "global labor markets?" What does existing empirical research reveal about the current state of affairs and the historical development of "global labor markets", provided that they can even be regarded as "global?" How is the emergence of border-crossing labor markets influenced by existing institutions, international intermediaries and social networks? The editors have crafted a coherent volume that enriches our understanding of both globalization and labor markets.Contributors include: Patrik Aspers, Peter-Paul Banziger, Martin Buhler, Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick, Richard Hyman, Sven Kesselring, Eleonore Kofman, Ursula Mense-Petermann, Sigrid Quack, Alexandra Scheele, Helen Schwenken, Karen Shire, Marcel van der Linden, Thomas Welskopp, Tobias Werron, and Anna Zaharieva

Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes a new history of social practice art in the United States.From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

This collection dives head-on into the central contradictions of 21st Century North America and beyond with cutting-edge approaches to conflict-driven social change. Diverse forms of social movement resistance from environmentalists, migrant communities and others are analyzed by distinguished critical sociologists.

Bernie Bros Gone Woke offers a provocative analysis of the Sanders campaigns and argues for the continuing importance of emancipatoryuniversality.In 2016 and 2020, the Bernie Sanders campaign gave American leftists a path towards social change through electoral politics. In order to combat neoliberal and reactionary uses of identity, the 2020 Sanders campaign combined a working-class agenda of universalist policies with various forms of social movement activism. In doing so it compromised on universalist principles and socialist radicalism in order to appeal to distinct demographic groups and win the election.Bernie Bros Gone Woke reveals how intersectional politics contributed to the failure of the Sanders campaign - a lesson that the organized left must learn if it is to challenge progressive neoliberalism and move beyond postmodern post-politics.

Workplace compensation has become an industry unto itself. What are its relations of production and role in contemporary capitalism?In Lost-Time Injury Rates Rodrigo Finkelstein examines the information-intensive operations of recording and processing work-related accidents, diseases and fatalities carried out by Workers' Compensation Systems. Situated within the field of political economy of information, this critique contributes to the understanding of how injury rates service a specific sector of the economy by constructing lost labour power for sale. Finkelstein convincingly argues that injury rates must be seen as grounded in the capitalist mode of production, and that they constitute a historical social relation that, by taking the semblance of inductive indicators, conceal specific capitalist relations that bring about the exchange and distribution of lost labour power among capitalists and wage labourers.

The Art of the Creative Commons is a book about peer-to-peer production, providing a unique model of commons from the creative industries. The book expands the knowledge about the role in which an alternative framework of copyright protection (Creative Commons) regulates and establishes norms and conventions within the commons. The book gives insight into a vibrant community that fosters creative projects and a variety of works, from elementary school plays to exhibitions in the Smithsonian or multimillion-dollar Hollywood films.Taking up the perspective of the creative workforce involved in production and collaboration allows us to understand the rules of production that follow an alternative model of production. By analyzing issues of media production, this book engages with current scholarship on critical management, political economy and cultural studies.

"Marx Matters is an examination of how Marx remains more relevant than ever in dealing with contemporary crises. This volume explores how technical dimensions of a Marxian analytic frame remains relevant to our understanding of inequality, of exploitation and oppression, and of financialization in the age of global capitalism. Contributors track Marx in promoting emancipatory practices in Latin America, tackle how Marx informs issues of race and gender, explore current social movements and the populist turn, and demonstrate how Marx can guide strategies to deal with the existential environmental crises of the day. Marx matters because Marx still provides the best analysis of the capitalism as a system, and his ideas still point to how society can organize for a better world"--

In Law of Value and Theories of Value, Tiago Camarinha Lopes presents the genesis of Karl Marx's understanding of the law of value by showing that the labor theory of value of utopian socialists and the utility theory of value of the Marginalist Revolution are subject to equal criticism by Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Following Marx's distinction between classical and vulgar political economy, Camarinha explains the difference between a reactionary and a progressive strand in the world of non-Marxian economics. Commonly portrayed as a dated work targeting the general framework of economic thought of the 19th century, Das Kapital appears here as the blueprint for the ongoing construction of economic science of the working class in any period of History.

Dependency Theory After Fifty Years is an insightful and timely review of dependency theory, its strengths, weaknesses, and how to reinvent the concept for the modern day.Dependency theory as a framework initially included distinct forms of Marxism, liberalism, and developmentalism that should be differentiated, despite sharing the same name. In this important intervention, renowned scholar Claudio Katz argues that, while the concept has fallen out of favor, its postulates are being proven more and more true by present-day events. In Latin America, for example, the effects of dependency are more acutely felt than in the past, making it imperative to understand the logic of the region's peripheral subordination. In Dependency Theory After Fifty Years, Katz shows that in its original form Dependency Theory is incapable of providing a convincing explanation of contemporary reality; it must be updated to interpret the current modalities of dependent capitalism. This book offers analytical clues to beginning that reinvention.Recipient of the Libertador Prize for Critical Thought (2018).

Sanctions as War offers the first comprehensive account of economic sanctions as a tool for exercising American power on the global stage. Since the 1980s, the US has steadily increased its reliance on economic sanctions, or the imposition of extensive financial penalties for violation of given rules, to fight its foreign policy battles. Perceived as a less costly and damaging alternative to kinetic military engagement, economic sanctions have been levied against over 25 other countries. In the process, sanctions have destroyed thousands of innocent lives and wreaked inestimable damages to civil society. To understand how sanctions function as a war-making strategy, this collection offers chapters that address the theory and history of economic sanctions as well as chapter-length case studies of sanctions exercised against the civilian populations of Iraq, Venezuela, and other nations. Contiributors are: Shireen Al-Adeimi; Tim Beal; Renate Bridenthal; Jesse Bucher; Stuart Davis; Gregory Elich; Manu Karuka; Jeremy Kuzmarov; Fangfei Lin; Washington Mazorodze; Tanner Mirrlees; Corinna Mullin; Junki Nakahara; Nima Nakhaei; Immanuel Ness; Sarah Raymundo; Muhammad Sahimi; Saif Shahin; Greg Shupak; Gregory Wilpert; Zhun Xu; Helen Yaffe

The third volume in this comprehensive study of social security in the Balkan states.Social security is presented from a broad perspective as a mechanism that addresses human needs, provides protection against social risks, reduces social tensions and secures peace. Various sectors of social policy, pension systems, health care systems, disability insurance, labor policy as well as social risks, such as poverty and unemployment, have been analyzed from historical, economic, political, sociological and security perspective. This book offers recommendations for improving the level of social security in the region.This volume focuses on the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Montenegro.Contributors are: Dritero Arifi, Ngadhnjim Brovina, Pëllumb Çollaku, Dorota Domalewska, Besnik Fetahu, Remzije Istrefi, Maja Jandri¿, Gordana Matkovi¿, Ruzhdi Morina, Artan Mustafa, Katarina Stani¿, and Marzena ¿akowska.

This thorough and timely book collects essays on the political economy of Brazil, focusing on the federal administrations led by the Workers' Party (PT), under Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff. The essays examine the economic, political, and social aspects of these governments, and a whole spectrum of policies implemented - or not - between 2003 and 2016, with implications for the subsequent period up to, and including, the administration led by Jair Bolsonaro. What emerges from this examination is the inescapable recognition that those left leaning governments were neoliberal, but in different ways when compared with other administrations in Brazil's history. Their similarities and differences are examined in detail. Contributors are: Adalmir Antonio Marquetti, Alessandro Miebach, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Ana Paula Colombi, Andre Singer, Andreia Galvao, Armando Boito Jr, Barbara Fritz, Cecilia Hoff, Celio Hiratuka, Claudio Castelo Branco Puty, Cristhiane Falchetti, Daniela Magalhaes Prates, Denise Gentil, Eduardo Fagnani, Fabiano Santos, Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos, Glaison Augusto Guerrero, Guilherme Mello, Gustavo Codas Friedmann, Humberto Martins, Jose Dari Krein, Lena Lavinas, Lucas Salvador, Andrietta, Luiz Fernando de Paula, Luiz Filgueiras, Marcelo Arend, Patricia Rocha Lemos, Paula Marcelino, Pedro Cezar Dutra Fonseca, Pedro Mendes Loureiro, Pedro Paulo Zuluth Bastos, Pedro Rossi, Rafael Moura, Ruy Braga, and Soraia Aparecida Cardozo.

In this rousing study, Alessandro Olsaretti argues that we need a new approach to fundamental questions to turn back neoliberal economic policy. The Struggle for Development and Democracy makes the case that we need significantly new theories of development and democracy to answer the problem posed by neoliberalism and the populist backlash, namely, uneven development and divisive politics. This book proposes as a first step a truly multidisciplinary humanist social science, to overcome the flaws of neoliberal economic theories, and to recover a balanced approach to theories and policies alike that is especially needed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. These led to divisive culture wars, which were compounded by the divisive populist politics. This book begins to sketch such a humanist social science, and applies it to answer one question: who is responsible for neoliberalism and the populist backlash?

COVID provoked a multi-dimensional crisis that overwhelmed existing concepts of social resilience that focus on a singular crisis. This volume proposes an alternative. In The Coronavirus Crisis and Its Teachings: Steps towards Multi-Resilience Roland Benedikter and Karim Fathi first describe the pluri-dimensional characteristics of the Coronavirus crisis. Then they draw the pillars for a more "multi-resilient" Post-Corona world including socio-political recommendations on how to generate it. The Coronavirus crisis has proven to be a bundle crisis consisting of multiple, interconnected crisis dimensions. Before Corona, most concepts of a "resilient society" implied a rather isolated focus on only one crisis at a time. Future preparedness in the 21st century will require a multi- and transdisciplinary risk-management concept that the authors call "multi-resilience". "Multi-resilience" means to systematically enhance the universal resilience competencies of societies, such as collective intelligence or overall responsiveness, making them appliable to pluri-dimensional crisis contexts. If the Coronavirus crisis in retrospect will have contributed to implementing multi-resilience, then it will ultimately have contributed to progress. This volume includes a Foreword by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and an Afterword by Manfred B. Steger.

This book examines the Brazilian political process in the period of 2003-2020: the governments led by the Workers' Party and their reformist policies, the deep political crisis that led to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the rise of Bolsonaro neofascism. The author maintains that the Party and ideological conflicts present in the Brazilian politics are linked to the class distributive conflicts present in the Brazilian society. Defeated for the fourth consecutive time in the presidential election, the political parties representing the international capital and segments of the bourgeoisie and of the middle class, abandoned the rules of the democratic game to end the Workers' Party government cycle. They paved the way for the rise of neofascism.

This landmark volume re-centres class analysis as a critical method in the study of states.