Labor Conflict and Capitalist Hegemony in Argentina delves into the dynamics of labor conflict during a decisive moment in the history of Neoliberalism and its crisis. How did workers react to labor flexibilization, market reforms and massive layoffs? In what way were employers able to keep hold of industrial hegemony during the crisis of Neoliberalism? This book explores these questions from a Marxian approach on peripheral capitalist countries with the aim of contributing to a new conceptualization of labor relations, labor history and collective class action. The analysis focuses on...

Using the historical-materialist method to unravel the promise and limits of critical practice since the Revolutionary Age, John E. O'Brien investigates the problems and prospects of cultural criticism for the 21st century through absorbing studies of the contested perspectives of Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton and Hayden White. In spite of recurrent crises due to a flawed Western political-economy, why is there so much critical intellectual activity with so little effect? Framing his study with the early work by Max Horkheimer, Luc Boltanski...

This book is a critical analysis of a selection of Adorno's work framed by four essential concerns: 1) Adorno's method of analysis; 2) the absence of a theory of social change; 3) the relationship of his approach to the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, particularly, to others in and around the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Kracauer, Marcuse), and in contrast to scholars such as Lukacs and Bloch; and 4) Adorno's use of his approach with respect to jazz, popular music, radio and pro-fascist propaganda of the 1930s and 40s as an instrument to disparage the working class. The argument is not an...

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians' clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. The colonial administration's hookworm campaign involved many Puerto Rican physicians in complex struggles with other elites, rural peasants and U.S. colonial administrators for political legitimacy....

As founder of the humanist version of sociology, Simmel sent powerful messages that are identified and explained in this book: interpretation - things are often not what they appear to be; change- culture and society evolve over time; interaction - reality is socially constructed; alienation - people define the value of money without taking responsibility for this construction. Simmel sees humans defining objects in interaction as valuable or worthless, but then they refuse to acknowledge having anything to do with the process of value attribution. He is critical...

In Come Hell or High Water: Feminism and the Legacy of Armed Conflict in Central America, Tine Destrooper analyzes the political projects of feminist activists in light of their experience as former revolutionaries. She compares the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan experience to underline the importance of ethnicity for women's activism during and after the civil conflict. The first part of the book traces the influence of armed conflict on contemporary women's activism, by combining an analysis of women's personal histories with an analysis of structural and contextual factors. This...

Neoliberalism has pushed capitalism to its limits, hollowing out global economies and lives in the process, while people have no voice. John Asimakopoulos addresses the problem with a theory to practice model that reconciles Marxism, with its diverse radical currents, and democratic theory. Social Structures of Direct Democracy develops a political economy of structural equality in large-scale society making strong empirical arguments for radical transformation. Key concepts include filling positions of political and economic authority (e.g., legislatures and corporate boards) with...

Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth. Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing. Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, 'ordinary' or well-disposed towards 'those below', whose interests they share, underwrite populism and...

Protesters and mass demonstrations by citizens of many democratic countries are increasingly daily occurrences reported in today's news media. These protests are often considered to be illegal or are charged with disrupting the peace, and even when they are non-violent assemblies they are attacked by police and riot squads called in to disperse the protesters. Through a careful review of opposition to injustice, this book demonstrates that most often these protests and demonstrations are in support of and defend moral and legal principles that their democratic governments have forgotten to...

In 1936, director John Ford claimed to be making movies for "a new kind of public" that wanted more honest pictures. Graham Cassano's A New Kind of Public: Community, solidarity, and political economy in New Deal cinema, 1935-1948 argues that this new kind of public was forged in the fires of class struggle and economic calamity. Those struggles appeared in Hollywood productions, as the movies themselves tried to explain the causes and consequence of the Great Depression. Using the tools of critical Marxism and cultural theory, Cassano surveys Hollywood's political economic...