The current lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic has, I am sure, led many people to re-assess their circumstances, projects and aspirations. The first thing to say in this very personal and hence circumscribed re-appraisal is that I am exceptionally fortunate in my starting point. I am only too aware that a confinement between walls… Read More »
I have referred on and off to the chances of a left-movement anticipating, hastening and responding to a state legitimation crisis caused by COVID-19. I have always insisted that to stand any chance of affecting real social change such a movement would have to be class-driven. In a recent post I approvingly quoted Erik Olin… Read More »
I have been dipping into the writings of Hannah Arendt recently, encouraged to do so by Richard Bernstein’s Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? She is not a writer I’d been attracted to, solely because I found her style uncongenial. But I have found a better acquaintance with her work helpful, as this blog betrays. I… Read More »
For anyone who thinks Marx irrelevant to the contemporary world, this passage is from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the… Read More »
This blog again draws on the excellent work of Erik Olin Wright, this time directly on concepts of social class. In his essay on ‘working class power, capitalist class interests’ in his Understanding Class, Wright acknowledges that class – together with related concepts like class structure, class struggle, class formation and class compromise – can… Read More »
It is always something of a challenge to try and capture the central ideas and contributions of social theorists in a short blog. This is especially the case with a thinker like Bruno Latour. I am indebted here to Steve Matthewman’s (see ref) summary account as much to my own reading and understanding, and he… Read More »
I have written a few blogs about the work of Erik Olin Wright, and here’s another, although this time it arises out of an earlier collection of essays of his entitled Understanding Class (published by Verso in 2015). I focus here on his distinctions between three different approaches to class within sociology: (1) class as… Read More »
When considering assorted potentials for effective collective action against financialised capitalism in the UK, I have so far put the emphasis on a triad of factors: Permanent reform – or the significance of constantly pushing and campaigning for achievable shifts in policy and practice, and doing so on a sliding scale from minor to major… Read More »
This is a third and final blog on Erik Olin Wright’s elegant and enlightening How to Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century. Its focus is on what I have previously called ‘triggers for change’ and Wright terms ‘agents for transformation’. It is important to register at the outset a point made by Michael Burawoy… Read More »
This is a second blog arising out of my reading of Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century. While the first focused on general modes or strategies for resisting capitalism, this one summarises and comments on his listing of pragmatic interventions to this end. I have always found a tension… Read More »