The point, after all, is to change the world.
The recent global wave of revolt has reinvigorated a crucial (and longstanding) question on the Left: what kind of a politics is to be pursued, here and now, if we are to build a more democratic and egalitarian society?
Occupy Wall Street participant Jonathan Smucker takes a critical look at the movement’s “prefigurative politics” through the theoretical lenses of Gramsci and Habermas.
When revolutionaries do not produce ideology, demands, and leaders, does this mean that the revolt will have no ideology, demands, and leaders? Cihan Tuğal discusses the limits and traps of Egypt’s “leaderless revolution” in light of the nation’s current military rule.
How do relationships between left-leaning political parties and social movements change over time? Rebecca Tarlau looks at the case of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT), examining the complexity of state-society relations — asking whether social movements can be “prefigurative” while still contesting state power.
Few know more about democracy and governance in Iceland than Jón Ólafsson. Thomas Hintze interviews Ólafsson, asking if it is fair to characterize Iceland’s “cutlery revolution” of 2009 as prefigurative or leaderless.
Hong Kong’s Occupy Central campaign is part of a thirty-year struggle for democracy. As it enters it second week, activists have to confront not only police and violent thugs but internal dissent over the future direction of the protests.
The vast tailings of South Africa’s gold and copper mines have given rise to an informal scavenger economy. What many see as waste, the immigrant laborers of the mine dumps see as a vital source of income.
In one of the world’s countries most affected by climate change, the struggle for sustainability is directly linked to the struggle for democracy. It remains an uphill battle: Despite the urgency of positive change, reform efforts are constantly—and sometimes violently—thwarted.
The South African government has delivered well over 3 million formal homes free of charge since the 1994 transition. But in post-apartheid Cape Town, many recipients of these houses are fed up. Rather than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.
On Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land, the phenomenon of Palestinian-blindness, and the legitimation of massacres.
What role can a graduate-run publication in sociology fill in the 21st century? Here’s our answer: Instead of publishing traditional research articles, we are writing the history of the present.