Examining how Marxist theory is missing but necessary, this book traces the theoretical maze in which Marxism currently finds itself, and from which it is trying to exit whilst at the same time remaining epistemologically intact. When stripped of any or all of its core elements – such as class formation/consciousness/struggle, and a socialist transition – it ceases to be what historically Marxists have claimed it is. Consequently, the book constitutes an attempt by Marxist political economy to extricate itself from mistaken attempts to conflate it with the cultural turn, identity...

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 of how to generate it. The Coronavirus crisis proved 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...

This book received the Libertador Prize for Critical Thought (2018), demonstrating a renewal of interest in Dependency Theory. That conception initially included distinct forms of Marxism, liberalism, and developmentalism that should be differentiated, despite sharing the same name. The later retreat of that approach contrasts with the growing present-day relevance of its postulates; Latin America bears the effects of dependency even more acutely than in the past, making it imperative to understand the logic of its peripheral subordination. Dependency Theory in its original form is...

This 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. It is shown that those governments were neoliberal, but in different ways when compared with other administrations in that country. Their...

Matteo Battistini offers a critical deconstruction of the fetish that social sciences have forged for legitimising American capitalism. The intellectual history of the middle class provides the social history of a political concept that assumes a specific scientific content acquiring an ideological centrality that has no equal in European history. 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 this way, the social sciences overturn the image...