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The End of the Democratic State
This edited volume takes a close look at Nicos Poulantzas’s thought as a means of understanding the dynamics of the capitalist, neoliberal state in the 21st century. Nicos Poulantzas has left us with one of the most sophisticated theories of the state in the second half of the 20th century. Poulantzas’s influential theory draws inspiration from Marx, Lenin, Weber, and Foucault, among other thinkers, conceiving of the relationship between capitalism and the state as particularly original. This book aims to use Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state in order to understand important political and economic trends that have taken place since Poulantzas’s death in 1979. By entering into a dialogue with current Marxist and critical research in diverse fields such as political science, philosophy, sociology, history, and geography, this volume purports to evaluate the actuality of Poulantzas’s thought.
Critical Theory Today
Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.
The Left Hemisphere
As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part be decided, is that of theory. Over the last twenty-five years, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas. The endeavour to transform the world without falling into the catastrophic traps of the past has been a common element uniting these new approaches. This book-aimed at both the general reader and the specialist-offers the first global cartography of the expanding intellectual field of critical contemporary thought. More than thirty authors and intellectual currents of every continent are presented in a clear and succinct manner. A history of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also provided, helping situate current thinkers in a broader historical and sociological perspective.
Nature is a Battlefield
In the midst of the current ecological crisis, there is often lofty talk of the need for humanity to ‘overcome its divisions’ and work together to tackle the big challenges of our time. But as this new book by Razmig Keucheyan shows, the real picture is very different. Just take the case of the siting of toxic waste landfills in the United States: if you want to know where waste is most likely to be dumped, ask yourself where Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other racial minorities live and where the poorest neighbourhoods are. This kind of ‘environmental racism’ is by no means restricted to the United States: it is very much a global phenomenon. Keucheyan show how the capital...
The Revival of the Left in the Balkans
This book explores how the critical discursive breakthrough of social movements in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia disrupted the post-socialist transitional status quo. While critical ideas have long fueled social and political actions, the specifics of their relationship with activism have received limited scholarly attention. This book discusses the emergence of new left actors through the lens of a maturation of consciousness, rather than the opening of structural or other “windows of opportunity,” suggesting the potential for such actors to emerge stemmed from the exposure of a segment of the populace to critical ideas. Questions surrounding the relevance of different typ...
The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital
The worsening environmental crisis has become a serious threat to mankind. The search for a solution to this crisis must begin by understanding its causes. Taking an eco-socialist perspective, The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital explores the logic of capitalism as a fundamental cause of today’s environmental crisis, in particular the thirst for profit and the capitalist mode of production. By demonstrating the inherent antagonism between capital and ecology, this book argues that proposals to resolve the crisis within the capitalist system are utopian, that proposed remedies relying on scientific progress, alternative energies, low-carbon technologies or the introduction of ecological ethics and new attitudes toward Nature into market mechanisms are doomed to failure without a radical overhaul of the principles that govern capitalism.
Rethinking Development
Development and underdevelopment are the main determinants of life-chances worldwide, arguably more so than social class. Marxism, as the underlying theory for social revolution, needs to have a clear understanding of the dynamics of development and social progress. Exploring the intersection of Marxism and development, this book looks at Marx’s original conception of capitalist development and his later engagement with under-developed Russia. The author also reviews Lenin’s early critique of the Russian populists' rejection of capitalism compared with his later analysis of imperialism as a brake on development in the non-European world. The book then considers Rosa Luxemburg, who arguab...
The Well-being Transition
The purpose of this volume, bringing together key actors of the well-being community, including scholars and policy-makers, is to advance the understanding and undertaking of the well-being transition away from growth and toward resilience and sustainability, at a time when this progress has become a vital necessity. A decade after the publication of the Stiglitz Report (2009), alternative visions to GDP and growth, that flourished in the 1970s, have re-emerged from all corners of the world, at all levels of governance. Yet, GDP and growth remain very much dominant in defining public policies, influencing businesses and shaping imaginaries. This book moves forward on two urgent tasks that stand before us in order to make progress in the well-being transition: first, connecting well-being to sustainability in a consistent framework highlighting their complementarity, using health as a pivot; second, operationalizing well-being indicators, i.e. integrating them into policy at all levels of governance.
Wars and Capital
A critique of capital through the lens of war, and a critique of war through the lens of the revolution of 1968. “We are at war,” declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly? In Wars and Capital, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (re...
We are Forests
From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.
