Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was one of the most original Marxist philosophers and literary critics of the twentieth century. His work was a major influence on what we now know as critical theory. Almost fifty years after his death, Lukács’s legacy has come under attack by right-wing extremists in his native Hungary. Despite efforts to erase his memory, Lukács remains a philosophical gadfly. In Confronting Reification, an international team of fourteen scholars explicate, reassess, and apply one of Lukács’s most significant philosophical contributions, his theory of reification. Based...

Marx's oeuvre is vast but there are key elements of his ever evolving, class-based contribution to social theory. Declining usefulness for him of Hegelian philosophy and his deepening confrontation with Ricardian political economy were expressions. While the French edition of Capital is closest to Marx’s mature thought, Engels did not understand how work on Russia related to Marx’s evolution, and Engels distorted the outcome. Accumulation of capital is particularly difficult conceptually, including use of ‘primitive accumulation’, and is carefully addressed, as is composition of...

In Introduction to Africana Demography: Lessons from Founders E. Franklin Frazier, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Atlanta School of Sociology scholars from across the country wed Black Sociology with critical demography within an Africana Demography framework. Contributors speak to innovative ways to address pressing issues and have the added benefit of affording many of the scholars denied their rightful place in the sociological and demographic canons. Specifically, the book includes an introduction outlining Africana demography and chapters that provide a critique of conventional demographic...

Growth and Change in Neoliberal Capitalism brings together selected essays written by Alfredo Saad-Filho, one of the most prominent Marxist political economists today. This book offers a rich analysis of long-term economic development in the current stage of capitalism, the new relations of dependence between countries, the prospects for poor countries, and the progressive alternatives to neoliberalism. The volume also provides a detailed set of studies of the political economy of Brazil, tracking its achievements, tragedies, contradictions and limitations.

Winner of the 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In contrast to analyses that view systemic violence in Mexico as simply the result of drugs and criminality, a deviation of a well-functioning market economy and/or a failing and corrupt state, Muñoz Martínez argues in Uneven Landscapes of Violence that the nexus of criminality, illegality and violence is integral to neoliberal state formation. It was through this nexus that dispossession took place after 2000 in the form of forced displacement, extorsion and private appropriation of public funds along with widespread violence by...

This book constitutes a sociological research on the current “narrations” of the economic and refugee crisis which has mobilized all the aspects of social storytelling during the last decade, most particularly in the European South. Because the different (mass and social) media reflect the dominant ideas and representations, the research on the meaning of different media narratives becomes a necessary report for the understanding of the relation (or “inexistent dialogue”?) between official political discourses and popular myths (based on everyday life values of prosperity, mostly...

This volume critically examines gender inequality, its origins, and its social and economic implications in Latin America, with a particular focus on Ecuador. For that purpose, Pablo Quiñonez and Claudia Maldonado-Erazo bring together a collection of articles that provide insights from different disciplines, including political economy, history, development studies, political science, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. In Ecuador, as in Latin America as a whole, women dedicate more time than men to unpaid activities while being discriminated against in multiple areas, including labor...

Responding to the deteriorating situation of migrants today and the complex assemblages of the geographies they navigate, Coercive Geographies examines historical and contemporary forms of coercion and constraint exercised by a wide range of actors in diverse settings. It links the question of spatial confines to that of labor. This fraught nexus of mobility and work seems self-evidently relevant to explore. Coercive Geographies is our attempt to bring together space, precarity, labor coercion and mobility in an analytical lens. Precarity emerges in particular geographical and historical...

How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive introduction to the techniques used by the early Frankfurt School to study and combat authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the writings of the early Frankfurt School, at the same time as authoritarian populist movements are resurging in Europe and the Americas. This volume shows why and how Frankfurt School methodologies can and should be used to address the rise of authoritarianism today. Critical theory scholars are assembled...

We live in a society that promotes the universal process of producing knowledge and truth making as fundamental social process. Such promotion of universality seems to subjugate others forms of knowing rendering them invisible, unintelligible, and ineligible and subsequently outside the community of knowing. This has material and symbolic consequences in terms of how research informs policy and subsequent victimization of those who live, and experience subjugation meted by Western truth making universalism. In the words of Foucault, this book is an insurrection of subterranean and clandestine...