Critical Sociology

In 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois published an article ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ (‘The Negro Worker in America’) which draws from original survey data and historical analysis to develop a theory of Black labors’ structural disadvantage in post Civil War US capitalism. ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ has essentially been forgotten. It has been accessible only to French speakers and has yet to be the subject of analysis or commentary. It deserves the full attention of not just Du Bois scholars, but all scholars who seek to understand the relationship between race, class, and capitalism in antebellum and post-Civil War America. Du Bois shows how White organized labor restricted Black workers’ access to union protections and the booming post-war labor market. His analysis highlights the interplay between racist ideology and the forces of racialized capitalism and reveals that the ‘early’ Du Bois critical, historical, materialist and attuned to socialist and labor politics.

The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to increased scholarly attention to an important ‘human need’: good health. This article is about the relation between workers’ health and capitalist production, as Marx examines it in his magnum opus. While Marx’s main focus in Capital Volume 1 is on the production of surplus value by workers and its appropriation by capitalists, he does provide insights into how capitalism ruins the health of workers themselves, although these insights are scattered. In this article, I systematically re-articulate and analyse Marx’s thoughts about workers’ health in relation to some of the key-categories of his political economy: the value of labour power relative to wages; employment precarity; long working day; hidden abode of production; capitalists’ despotic control over workers; and the capitalist transformation of nature. I briefly relate Marx’s ideas about workers’ health from Capital Volume 1 to some contemporary research on the social dimensions of health. I also show that Marx’s explicit ideas about workers’ health, which are my main focus, point to a broader approach to the topic that is only implicit in his thinking. I draw out some practical implications of this approach.

Gramscian scholars have engaged with Gramsci’s leitmotif (‘rhythm of thought’) and the stato integrale (integral state), a concept he introduced in Autumn 1930. This represents remarkable progress in the Marxist community. But what requires further attention is the interconnection between an integral state and a totalitarian one, two of the three expressions of state-society formations that Perry Anderson identified as Gramsci’s antinomies. This article argues that the integral state is fragile but hegemonic if it can be sustained. Otherwise, it can degenerate into a totalitarian state. The article refigures the ‘integral state’ as the ‘integral state-society’. It exists relatively, depending on whether the ‘integral momentum’ or the ‘totalitarian tendency’ prevails in a dynamic interaction between radical Left, Far Right, and those currents in between. Identifying this relativity helps to formulate a deeper understanding of Gramsci’s thought and show how his legacy supports a class struggle perspective on the COVID-19 interregnum.

Forty years have passed since the implementation of the pernicious neoliberal structural reforms on the African continent in 1981. If 2021 marked a 40-year commemoration of a diabolical neocolonial project such as neoliberalism, then the year 2020 signified another 40-year period of rebirth aborted, as the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980 was undermined in favour of the Berg Report of 1981. These two periodizations delineate African liberation or continued neocolonial oppression, yet also coincide with Thandika Mkandawire’s life’s strivings. How do Mkandawire’s ideas on social policy, inspired by radical African Nationalists, aid in the dismantling of contemporary forms of racialized neoliberal social policy making? Mkandawire’s life straddled two 40-year periods (1940–1980 and 1980–2020) marked by sui generis contributions to African and global social sciences. This paper recasts his scholarly contributions on transformative social policy as a prophetic theoretician of African liberation. Mkandawire’s scholarly corpus provides a programmatic approach to the unmaking of a hierarchical racialized neoliberal global order.

Scholars have argued that megaprojects’ turn away from issues of employment, and mass housing are among the core traits of neoliberalism. Turkey, though once seen as a paragon of neoliberalism, problematizes this generalization. Erdoğanist megaprojects have created jobs and residence for millions, and garner consent. ‘Embedded neoliberalism’, a concept frequently used to explain increasing state involvement under neoliberalism, sheds light on the governing AKP’s power, but is insufficient in explaining its core dynamics. Whereas the ‘embedded neoliberalism’ literature downplays the role of the government as a producer, the ‘state capitalism’ literature, as applied to Turkey, overrates the extent to which this country has moved away from neoliberalism. The concept ‘neoliberal statism’ (which puts the emphasis on the consent-generating and political aspects of the new economy) better captures the AKP’s path. Megaproject-driven growth and popular consent, however, are restricted by vulnerabilities that also afflict neoliberal statism as a broader growth strategy.

With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition.

Using unconditional basic income (UBI) as its empirical prism, this article offers new impetus to the foundational debate within critical theory as to whether and how redistribution and recognition can relate productively to each other. We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution may be a means of furthering the recognition of different subjectivities that are not solely defined by their productive relations of labor. Seeing such redistributive solidarity as a potential but not necessary outcome of UBI, we develop a typology of existing UBI experiments that divide these according to whether they seek to affirm or transform the current social order based on principles of growth or degrowth. Surveying these four types of UBI, we find that the envisioned form of economic redistribution shapes the potential for social recognition. While the relationship is one of utopian potential rather than causal necessity, UBI may indeed enable redistributive solidarity.

While political science has probed the ideological, political, economic and even psychological motivations behind the drive to war, socialist theory has made a unique contribution by highlighting the relationship between the development of capitalism and war. There’s a long and rich tradition of the Left’s opposition to militarism that dates back to the International Working Men’s Association. It is an excellent resource for understanding the origins of war under capitalism and helping leftists maintain our clear opposition to it. In this article, the author examines the position of all the main currents (socialist, socialdemocratic, communist, anarchist and feminist) intellectuals (Engels, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jaurès, Luxemburg, Lenin, Mao and Khrushchev) of the Left on the war and its different declinations (‘war of defence’, ‘just war’, ‘revolutionary war’).

Max Weber insisted that followers grant charismatic authority, but he did not address the cultural prerequisites that enable leaders to acquire it from them. Prophecy is the royal road. When a prophetic tradition has taught people to expect saviors in times of crisis, believers are primed to award charismatic authority to someone who resembles their expectation. The case of Donald Trump illustrates the importance of prophecy on the bestowal of charismatic authority. Within the Republican Party, two distinct prophetic traditions validated Trump’s salvific mission, thus enabling him to acquire power of command. Adhering to Biblical prophecy, conservative Protestants identified Donald Trump as God’s agent in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ. Also within the Republican Party, adhering to developmental economics, secular conservatives identified Donald Trump as a heroic entrepreneur whose vigor would restore America’s greatness. Because of Trump’s striking resemblance to Batman, the comic superhero’s many fans also had prior ideational access to Trump’s salvific mission. In the United States, the messianic prophecy of a tough-guy entrepreneur can derive from sacred culture, academic culture, popular culture, or from all three. The confluence produced a voter bloc primed to award charismatic authority to Trump.

Sociology is one of the major disciplines to foster understanding and protection of the livelihoods of local people. For instance, the discipline can describe the linkage between the environment and people and the effects of environmental change on local groups of people in a Delta country such as Bangladesh. However, the imperial philosophy of modernity that dominates the discipline and which is evident in the Sociology department at the University of Dhaka (UofD) underscores a considerable distance between academic conceptualizations of local perspectives on issues such as climatic change and the actual views of the local people of Bangladesh. Grounded on this assertion, this paper explores a question: What are the challenges for Sociology to represent Delta people and protect their social justice? The paper depends on the content analysis of sociological practices at UofD: imperial modernity and climatic adaptation. The findings of the paper argue that Sociology has been failing to represent the local meanings of climatic change due to the domination of imperial conceptualizations of modernity. Climate finance conceptualized by a Western perspective, and Sociology, as a discipline, fails to represent locally contextualized meanings related to climate finance; thus, the marginalized groups of people are increasingly facing survival challenges responsible for climate apartheid. Only a decolonized Sociology can challenge this imperial domination and play an effective role in reducing the discipline’s gap of understanding of the local people and in promoting social justice in Delta Bangladesh.