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Sustainability within food systems (FS) transcends approaches that only consider FS transformation via changing agricultural practices or consumption patterns. The essence lies in addressing the root causes of current unsustainable FS and their associated social and environmental ramifications. This paper aims to outline the solutions needed to revamp these challenges, by paying special attention to the state-capital nexus in the context of the FS'global core-periphery dialectics. Thereby, we embrace radical political agroecology as being essential in promoting sustainability within the FS, especially in the Global South. Agroecology is proposed as the strategy to address the food system's complexity in terms of the social, environmental, and economic embeddedness. We conclude with potential solutions that contribute to the pathway for FS sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three articles were originally presented as papers on a panel organized by Robert Latham, at the Socialist Studies Conference at York University in 2023. While more or less focused on Marxism in academia, the articles deal with different regional contexts: Hyun Ok Park deals with South Korea, Robert Latham with the US, and Raju Das with India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses socio-economic relations of the bourgeoisie and proletariat relating them to present-day contemporary Pakistani society. The paper is broken down into sections where class consciousness, struggle, and mobility are discussed in view of a Marxist framework and aligned with that of the Victorian English era and that of today's Pakistan. The present paper, therefore, employing qualitative research methods, including close reading, finds persistent class conflicts and socio-economic disparities, in unison with the struggles laid down by Dickens in his narrative. The implications of the findings strongly hint at the fact that these historical literary insights can be of substantial help in guiding socio-economic reforms within the domain of Pakistan. Future research recommendations are to point towards precise measures on how class disparities in Pakistani society could be alleviated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the archaeology and history of labor is based on organized labor, unions, and strikes, and the common rhetoric emphasizes the success or failure of union strike activities. This frames labor activism with clear winners and losers and inadvertently adopts the vantage point of capital. Given the modern world where union membership is plummeting, "success" seems even more unlikely. In this paper, I use the case of the Coalwood lumber camp to argue that labor's "success" was much more complicated than simply winning strikes. Recognizing the difference between concrete and abstract labor provides a way to think about worker's decisions to structure their lives based more on concrete than alienated labor that gives them more autonomy over their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxists often link the emergence of finance capital to developments in the categories of capital, such as flight to money capital, sometimes associated with changes in the organic composition of capital. While not disputing the importance of transformations in capitalist categories, this paper examines the causal role of working-class agency in the emergence of finance capital. The paper addresses finance capital in Britain, giving due consideration to a variety of causal factors cementing its dominance. It then considers the role of labour unrest in developing a working class in itself, gravitating towards and away from political expressions (syndicalism, social democracy) in pursuance of its immediate economic struggles. The overall argument is that the emergence of finance capital in the parasitic form it took in Britain was fundamentally a response to the power of a working class in itself. Parasitism became the default trend to control the working class and prevent any potential movement towards a working class for itself from gaining hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the variety of agrarian classes of labour and the challenges they face in organizing and pursuing their interests. By taking the cotton sector in Burkina Faso as a case study, it analyses how various 'classes of labour' organize and mobilize for collective action to raise their claims: poor cotton farmers and workers in the cotton factories. Poor and middle farmers recently came to the fore when they boycotted cotton production in large numbers. The study focusses on the boycott campaign, and more broadly on class struggle and collective action by farmers and workers, on interclass alliances, and on capital's attempts to play the classes of labour against one another. The boycott campaign provides an outstanding case to analyse the interests of the various classes of labour and of opportunities for rural–urban mobilization and alliances across classes of labour. I argue that poor farmers and factory workers along the chain of cotton production can be considered as various classes of labour that are not necessarily antagonistic to one another but, first and foremost, to capital. In order to achieve radical transformation in the agrarian context, what is needed are networks and organizations to establish interclass solidarity and alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this Special Issue of the journal Art & the Public Sphere, titled 'The Struggle Before Us', addresses the aims and outcomes of the project. It reiterates the themes of the call for papers and focuses on the impact of postmodern theory and the cultural turn on socialist class struggle. The political tendencies within radical democracy, Marxist autonomism and left populism are related to the growing influence of the anti-liberal and anti-Marxist – because anti-universalist – academic trends of privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. This is related to political developments since the Cold War and the rise to hegemonic status of a petty-bourgeois mode of cultural appropriation. The introduction takes issue with the notion that post-Fordism represents the termination of the so-called classical phase of socialism and argues instead that contemporary contradictions between identity and class are inscribed within the ongoing struggle between labour and capital. A lecture by Alain Badiou is used to complete the analysis, with definitions of Marxist militancy related to Marx's class-oriented transformation of German idealism, English political economy and the French workers' movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Marx, "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force" ("A Contribution To The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"). Marx also says, "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." It is this materialization of critical thought as theory which this paper expounds on. Marx says that this materialization happens in man himself, hence theory--or thought--is embodied. This paper, first, strives to expose the underlying class struggle which helps shape the discourse, which in this case, is literary criticism. Second, it aims to zero in on how literary theory and criticism places itself in a movement according to the theory and practice of Marx-Lenin-Mao, and see how these principles were initially theorized and practiced in the context of the Philippine National Democratic Movement until the present in broad strokes. From the writings of Marx-Lenin-Mao, to the workshop guides by ARMAS, to the polemical attacks of Edel E. Garcellano against reactionary "literary shitheads," and the many organizations and persons who have followed, this paper seeks to emphasize that the place and method of critique parallels the class line and development of the revolutionary struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the notion of taste for teaching a subject, especially science, as a conceptual framework to analyse the aesthetics of teacher development as a lifelong process. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey in order to account for how teachers distinguish admirable practices and, in doing so, distinguish themselves as inspiring professionals. In order to illustrate this framework, we report a narrative inquiry on the life story of Tomas, a white man nationally prized for his science teaching. This inquiry was inspired by sociological portraits recommended by Bernard Lahire. Results indicate how a practical disposition (as opposed to a theoretical one) played an important role in developing Tomas's individual taste for science teaching, producing a strong continuity between his early experiences as a masculine boy raised in a family of construction workers, on the one hand, and his later experiences as a biologist and a science teacher enacting inquiry-based activities. The significance of the findings for science education is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The progressive integration of Tunisia into the international capital market implies deep institutional and social transformations as well as the positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. From the mid-19th and during the twentieth century, the growing Tunisia's debt paved the way to a compulsory financial administration of the North African country by 1870. Likewise, this process favoured the development of a capitalist class, whose origins were both exogenous and endogenous, drawing its power from doing business with the global financial élites. Thus, we assist to the birth of a capitalist class with local and international interests, also called afterward compradors. Adopting an original comparative approach, this article shows that the integration of a country into the global economy, mainly when occurring through a growing foreign debt, paves the way not only to the birth of a local capitalist class drawing its power from the circulation of capital but also to the permanent positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. The access to the international capital markets, according to the rules of the controlling powers and elites, makes the indebted country less independent in its economic policy choices, thus modifying its class structure in favour of the new capitalist elites, and their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates the contemporary vitality of Lenin's theory of ideology. Since the collapse of Soviet socialism, some have attempted to dismiss Lenin's theory as anti-Marxist and lacking in critical power. More recent studies of the Marxist theory of ideology have neglected Lenin entirely. Contrastingly, this article argues that Lenin's theory of ideology remains relevant, albeit misunderstood. First, Lenin highlighted the class essence of ideology with unparalleled force and clarity. He emphasised that every ideology serves the power of a definite class. Second, Lenin clarified the role of ideology as a weapon in the class struggle. He urged the working class to use socialist ideology to further its interests and overthrow capitalism. Third, Lenin outlined the principles for engaging in the ideological struggle. He instructed Marxists on how to advance their ideas and defeat bourgeois ones. These insights remain indispensable for communists, a hundred years after Lenin's death in 1924. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jim Crotty was a beloved teacher and mentor and a treasured colleague at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In this short essay, we try to convey Jim's enormous contributions to his students, colleagues, and friends, and to the development and reproduction of heterodox macroeconomic theory and practice. JEL Classification: B4, B5, E [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability within food systems (FS) transcends approaches that only consider FS transformation via changing agricultural practices or consumption patterns. The essence lies in addressing the root causes of current unsustainable FS and their associated social and environmental ramifications. This paper aims to outline the solutions needed to revamp these challenges, by paying special attention to the state-capital nexus in the context of the FS’global core-periphery dialectics. Thereby, we embrace radical political agroecology as being essential in promoting sustainability within the FS, especially in the Global South. Agroecology is proposed as the strategy to address the food system’s complexity in terms of the social, environmental, and economic embeddedness. We conclude with potential solutions that contribute to the pathway for FS sustainability.

The aim of the study is to explore the underlying repressive Marxist ideologies such as socioeconomic conditions, class system, class struggle, consumerism and commodification in the movie. Drawing on superstructure model, the study also aims to explore the ways in which historical and material circumstances and their relationship manifest in the movie, how it perpetuates capitalist tendencies in society, providing a deeper understanding of the underlying power dynamics and exploitation present in society from a Marxist perspective. The researcher adopted the exploratory re-search framework. The study utilized a qualitative research approach by applying Marxist theory for content analysis on an animated movie "The Jungle Book" as a sample. The sample was determined through typical and critical case sampling methods from animated movies of the world that has basic elements of Marxism. The findings of the study reveal that there are implicit Marxist tendencies present in the movie that conform to the superstructure model of the world. The major characters of the movie strive for economic prosperity and have convenient interactions with one another, which lead to capitalistic attitude, imperialistic dominance, class struggle resulting in consumer culture and commodified relationships. The summative discussions within the light of the findings acquired in this study imply that Marxist elements have been deeply portrayed in the movie and serve as a platform to unveil socioeconomic battles within an animated world through a Marxist lens, exposing the underlying power dynamics, exploitation, and capitalist tendencies present in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates states' choice of social classification? Existing explanations highlight scientific beliefs of modern states or social engineering by ideological regimes. Focusing on the initial state-building period of two Communist regimes, China and North Korea, this article complements the existing literature and suggests that social classification reflects three missions of political leaders: regime distinction, governance, and power consolidation. Population categories are created to distinguish the new government from the old, to selectively provide welfare, and to attack political opponents. The varying weight of the missions and their manifestation in social classification depend on new ruling elites' cohesion and past experiences. This comparative historical analysis sheds light on the rise of political chaos in China and the personalistic dictatorship in North Korea in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simon Clarke left an invaluable critical mark on Marxism. Despite his magnanimous work, he is relatively unknown in Latin America because very few texts have been translated into Spanish. We focus on Clarke's vision and theory of the state, which is of fundamental importance to research in Latin America. First, we focus on his comprehension of the class struggle category to understand the capitalist state's emergence. Second, we show the importance of his analysis of the subordination of the state and civil society to the rule of money and law. Third, we emphasise his particular way of understanding the social relations of production, which results in his incisive critique of structuralism and the regulation school. Finally, we point out that his understanding of the social relations of production led to a specific way of understanding Marxism that is 'Simon Clarke's Marxism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article carves out a focus on certain authorized mainstream perspectives and their theorizations of world order, and how they have become dominant at the expense of excluded and silenced contributions. This task begins, first, by asserting that the anarchic conditions of world order have been mainstreamed at the expense of contributions to Marxist political economy. Here, my focus extends the methodological approach of juxtaposition to explore competing understandings of anarchic orders in Kenneth Waltz's and Nikolai Bukharin's work to disclose, in the latter, the anarchic structure of world capitalism. Second, the method of juxtaposition enables me to cast attention to the parallel profiles of E. H. Carr and C. L. R. James and their weighty understandings of world revolution to reveal, in the latter, neglected classed conditions of racial capitalism. In a fresh manner, then, my approach juxtaposes key figures that have been present (Waltz, Carr) and absent (Bukharin, James) in understanding world order through the anarchic structure of the world economy and racial capitalism. In conclusion, the argument left for academic study and the elucidation of policy is the extent to which a necessarily historical materialist moment to understanding world order can and should be further extended and deepened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze Marxist activists' narratives of becoming Marxist and their practices in activist spaces. Drawing on Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khansnabish's notion of "militant ethnography" and on Jodi Dean's recuperation of the political party form of organizing, I ethnographically describe activists' motivations to become Marxist and examine two events—a pro-Bernie political meeting and an anti-Trump rally—in which activists intervened with the Marxist idea of "uniting working-class struggles" in democratic spaces. I argue that the socialist party form of organization addresses two related dilemmas that anti-capitalist activists face in the context of systemic economic and political crises in the United States: how to develop class consciousness and how to engage in the seemingly impossible, personally risky endeavor of radically challenging capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists and scholars have debated whether "agrarian populisms" premised on multiple classes and groups can pursue progressive objectives if exploiters and exploited are in the same movements. In Pakistan, the militant Pakistan Kissan Ittehad emerged in 2012 by uniting different classes of owner‐cultivators who are largely not in direct relations of exploitation with each other. We argue that the PKI nevertheless advances the interests of a "second tier" of rural capitalists, who exploit rural labourers, while underplaying the interests of owner‐peasant farmers. This divergence of interests has contributed to the fragmentation of PKI along class and political lines, including attempts by peasant farmers to independently organize around issues particular to them. We suggest that progressive agrarian populism must hinge on the interests of rural labourers and peasant farmers and that second‐tier capitalist farmers may be tactical allies as they oppose neoliberal globalization. However, rural labourers and peasants are ideologically and organizationally weak, and thus, the possibility of left‐wing agrarian populism requires much legwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, scholars have turned to Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution to explain the reproduction and development of capitalism. Most accounts focus on elite maneuvers from above. With specific attention to the case of South Africa, I examine the relationship between passive revolution, secured by elites through the negotiated democratic transition of the early 1990s, and mobilization from below in the post-apartheid period. South Africa's passive revolution featured formal racial inclusion, the preservation of extreme inequality and economic insecurity, the demobilization of popular forces, and narrow elite struggles for state resources. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists and residents in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I show how passive revolution produced fractured militancy: the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of popular resistance. I demonstrate this process by examining the policy, organizational, and leadership dimensions of the relationship between passive revolution and popular mobilization. The analysis has implications for the study of both capitalism and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political importance of Chayanov transcends his own time and space, influencing as it has done – and continues to do – both the debate about rural development in Third World countries and – more broadly – resurgent agrarian populist interpretations in academia and elsewhere. Less well known, but epistemologically as revealing of his politics, are his non-economic writings, particularly his contributions to the Gothic literary genre. Examined here, therefore, are three stories written pseudonymously by Chayanov, each of which is structured by the same discourse. All were composed over a short period just after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, and reveal as a sub-text the political divergence and concomitant struggle between neo-populist and Bolshevik versions of societal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the "colonial modernisation" thesis and its nationalist critique, the thesis of "colonial plunder" in the context of Korea. The two accounts have long been subject to politically charged disputes: while the former posits a causal link between Japanese colonialism and Korea's rapid industrialisation, the latter suggests that Korea's transition to capitalist development was blocked and distorted by Japanese colonialism. This article offers a critique of both accounts at the theoretical and historical levels. For a theoretical critique, it draws on the Marxist discussions of the notion of the "peculiarities" of national capitalism with reference to Britain and Germany. The article argues that both theses, by deriving the presumed ills or virtues of Korean capitalism from Japanese colonialism, assume the existence of a "normal" and "benign" path to capitalism and look at Korean capitalism and Japanese colonialism in isolation from the universal contradictions emanating from their being integral to the capitalist world-system. For a historical critique, this article assesses the dissolution of Chosŭn Korea at the turn of the twentieth century and the formation of the Korean capitalist class and shows that Korea's transition to capitalism was both an inherently global process and driven by violent class struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) represents the most dramatic regional departure from neoliberalism under Latin America's pink tide, based on principles of anti-imperialism, mutual development, and barter exchange. Since 2015 however, trade and social programmes between member countries have deteriorated, while regional support for ALBA has declined. In order to account for the rise and relative fall of ALBA-TCP, this article mobilizes the theory of social property relations to trace the international, regional and national forces and structures that have shaped the development trajectory of the ALBA since its creation in 2004. It argues that ALBA's characteristics are principally constituted through concrete class formations, struggles and institutional resolutions that shape the pattern of ALBA's international relations. Ultimately, the contradictions of ALBA's social base with its uneven insertion into the broader international division of labour has created a series of tensions and roadblocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: right to the city; urban appropriation; capitalism; identity; class struggle EN right to the city urban appropriation capitalism identity class struggle 697 702 6 04/12/22 20220501 NES 220501 Kohn, Margaret (2016). As a serious critique from the Left, rights within the liberal state are contradictory in that they seem to give to the people but reinforce a state's mechanism of domination. Kohn provides an excellent summary for this essay on struggle and appropriation in light its evaluation of "the public", of democracy and deliberation, and the strengths but also the shortcoming of rights' claims. "Lefebvre argued that the power to make urban spaces, which he viewed as the control points of modern capitalism", writes Herod, "must be wrested from capital and the state and located instead in the hands of the working-class people" (Herod, p. 197). [Extracted from the article]

Financialization and rising income inequality are two of the most pronounced economic developments of recent decades, and there is increasing evidence that these trends are somehow related. However, explanations of this link are still limited, and pay little attention to workers themselves. As a result, the impact of financialization on income inequality appears at most as an unfortunate side-effect. This article takes a different approach by investigating both financialization and income inequality from within the historical development of the class struggle in the United States economy. It shows that the economic problems of the 1970s that provided the impetus for financialization were closely related to the escalating conflicts between labor and capital, in which the state served as an increasingly important terrain of struggle. Viewed from this perspective, rising income inequality appears less as an unexpected outcome of financialization and more as its very raison d'etre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is an account of my own personal involvement, over the last 20 years, with a circle of militants in California's San Francisco Bay Area who have been researching changes in the class composition of global production. We have been using informal and formal inquiries with rank-and-file workers to analyze how transformations in communication, data gathering, and transportation technologies have revolutionized the logistics industry. Our goal has been finding supply chain vulnerabilities, where working class solidarity has the greatest possibility to spread up and down these value chains, and for class struggle to be effectively cross-sectoral and international. The following is a balance sheet of our efforts, demonstrating the instances when we were able to realize our goals, as well as critiquing our limitations. We hope this will point to the importance of workers' inquiries in the current era, especially in adjusting to the many changes the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, exposing the weaknesses of just-in-time production chains spanning the planet, changes to class composition, and encouraging new forms of class struggle along ever-changing value chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between economic and political realms by reference to the Marxist conception of the economy as the 'motor of history'. The discussion is framed through a recent debate around Cultural Political Economy (CPE) and its efforts to keep Marx's materialist premises without falling into economic reductionism, or 'bend the stick too far' into the opposite direction and fall into 'constructivism'. Despite the efforts to avoid said extremes, CPE have been criticised for being both reductionist and constructivist This piece will defend CPE against the above charges while also highlighting some unresolved tensions within the method. I will then propose ways to resolve said tensions as well as providing the means of extending the scope of CPE to deal with political issues going beyond the economic realm, without losing sights of their connections to regimes of accumulations and resulting material needs and grievances of various groups. I will argue that this further development is necessary to analyse an increasingly unpredictable political landscape where tribal enmities and xenophobic feelings are returning to mainstream politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I study the supermarket in Diamela Eltit's Mano de obra as a site of class struggle. Despite readings that see in the novel a representation of post-work society, several scholars have noted that Mano de obra can be productively read as a novel that explores the centrality of labour in present-day capitalism. In this article I suggest that Eltit's novel offers, at the level of form, a powerful reflection on labour exploitation as mediated by the sale and purchase of labour-power. I emphasise two processes that the novel registers in relation to the neoliberal working-day: the changes in the inward notation of time brought about by the expansion of the service industry, and the compenetration between the disciplinary practices of the workplace and the affective structures of the household. I conclude the essay by showing how the punctuation of the novel, in particular the overabundance in the use of parentheses, gives formal expression to the fundamental reality hidden behind the sale and purchase of labour-power: the dispossession of the worker from her own living body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huxley's Brave New World (1932) offers a nightmarish portrait of a futuristic world where human beings are reduced to the level of automations for establishing stability. In fact, Huxley's portrayal of the World State is heavily influenced by the socio-political climate of his time. Contemplating the possible misuse of emerging technologies by rulers for perpetuation of power, Huxley attempts to alert the readers about the perils of mass culture which diminish people's ability to think critically. Brushed aside as an insignificant work by many critics initially, the novel's social relevance and Huxley's concern for social welfare was later felt, the application of Marxist and Neo-Marxist literary principles to it indicating that it continues to remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Marxism interprets history in terms of class struggle. It affirms that the modes of production of material life condition social, political and intellectual life process in general. The Marxian notion that those who control material production have control over the rest of the society is taken literally in Huxley's Brave New World where the World State owns the production of human progeny. However, the production of babies in Hatcheries, chemical conditioning of embryos and hypnopaedia ensure that class struggle is avoided in the imaginary world, as the citizens are made to accept their social status without dissent. It would, however, be simplistic to assume that Huxley's dystopia aims merely to terrorise modern society. In the words of Raffaella Baccolini "...utopia is always maintained ... only outside the text" (520) and the readers are expected to consider dystopias only as warnings, so that they can prevent them from becoming reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]