Chamsy el-Ojeili

Critical Theories of Globalization

Critical Theories of Globalization is a highly accessible text that provides a comprehensive overview of globalization and its consequences. Exploring the insights of a wide range of critical theorists, this book provides an introduction to globalization from the perspective of social and political critical theory. Clearly organized around thematic chapters designed to provoke student inquiry, the book demonstrates how the views of critical theorists are crucial to understanding the global processes shaping the world today.

Anarchism as the Contemporary Spirit of Anti-Capitalism? A Critical Survey of Recent Debates

In the past decade or so, a sizable literature on anarchism has appeared. It has often been attached to the newer movements associated with alternative globalization and with post-modern theoretical currents. This literature is of significant interest for those working within the areas of social and political theory, globalization studies, and social movements. This article critically surveys the literature. It starts by examining the devices used to make the case for a renewed interest in anarchism, and traces the broad lines of historical anarchism. It then moves to explore the affinities between anarchism and the alternative globalization movement, and, at greater length, those between anarchism and contemporary theoretical issues. Critical of some of the post-modern excesses in this literature, and of the too sharp divide between Marxism and anarchism, this reconfigured anarchism is of great relevance. The article closes with some modest suggestions for further exploration in this work.

Politics, Social Theory, Utopia and the World-System

Introduction On Sociology Traditions and Concepts Transformations Ideologies and Utopias Masses Identities Movements Violence Globalization Equality Concluding Reflections Notes Bibliography Index

Introduction: Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global Age

How should human communities — and ultimately, perhaps, the community of humanity — be created anew, in the sense of ‘anticipating’ and imagining ‘that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147)? This question lies at the heart of utopianism. To be utopian, we suggest, is the stuff of politics, and it first involves subjecting the politics of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of political possibilities in the present and future. The perspective adopted in this book is that the question of how to anticipate and imagine communities that ‘do not yet exist’ animates many critical socio-political engagements with contemporary globalization.

Across and Beyond the Far Left: The Case of Gilles Dauvé

This essay explores the work of French ultraleftist Gilles Dauvé. Situating his contribution against a discussion of left communism as a unified intellectual-political current, it identifies and discusses three crucial moments in Dauvé’s work. A first moment, 1969–1979, sees Dauvé attempting to critically draw together council communist, Bordigist, and situationist contentions into a unified and unique communist perspective. During a second moment, coincident with the crisis of Marxism, Dauvé continued to solidify this position, in particular criticizing the confluence of liberal-democratic thought with antifascism. In a third moment, 1999–present, Dauvé has engaged in important rethinking and clarification, further underscoring communism as communization. The essay’s conclusion underscores the importance of Dauvé’s singular intellectual journey in terms of its novel synthetic quality, its resonance with contemporary discussions of the appearance of a new global Left, and its important contribution to the communization current.

Reflections on Wallerstein: The Modern World-System, Four Decades On

Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of Immanuel Wallerstein’s first volume of The Modern World-System. Wallerstein and world-systems analysis are frequently viewed, on the one hand, as successful and firmly established, and, on the other, as of largely historical interest, surpassed by a number of new realities and theoretical paradigms. This article seeks to restate the contemporary importance of Wallerstein’s project. It begins by recounting the key conceptual and historical claims of world-systems analysis, and subsequently surveys the broad varieties of critique across questions of economics, politics, and culture. It is argued that Wallerstein’s contentions have travelled well over time, still contenders for attention amidst the globalization literature, and still defensible against post-modern, post-colonial and complexity theory claims. In particular, the strong metanarrative, generative hypotheses, and the still productive research programme of world-systems analysis appear even more compelling in the face of current global turmoil.

Traditions and Concepts

It is often said, quite rightly, that theory is an extension of ordinary communication about social and political issues (Harrington, 2005), that everyone theorizes, that we all map our world by way of concepts, generalizations, abstractions. It’s also true, I think, that, as Ernesto Laclau (1990) notes, we only think out of traditions, that the structures of knowledge already in place — academic disciplines, ideological configurations, larger cultural currents, religious worldviews — crucially shape our ideas and practices: we never start from scratch. In this chapter, I want to deal with some of these already-in-place concepts and traditions, for the most part setting the scene by running with the convenient fiction of sociology’s three founding thinkers — Marx, Durkheim, and Weber — and, subsequently, focussing on the central political sociological question of power.

Two Post-Marxisms: Beyond Post-Socialism?

‘Post-Marxism’ is a troublesome notion — an autobiographical declaration (Heller and Feher, 1991, p. 4)? A distinct theoretical formation? An epoch? Each of these senses presents problems, and some of these difficulties are reflected in efforts to delineate the contours of this thing, ‘post-Marxism’.1

Book Review: The Ethics of Cultural Studies; From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Memory and Cultural Studies

Cultural studies today is frequently viewed as having lost its way – disastrously undisciplined and uncritically pluralistic, increasingly depoliticized (repetitive gestures towards otherness and ‘sites of resistance’ aside), veering dangerously into third wayesque cultural policy or mindless celebration of the fleeting. In the face of such charges, the texts under review here underscore the wealth of cultural studies, addressing, in very different ways, some of the anxieties around the discipline with strong programmatic suggestions. Zylinska controversially claims up-front that ‘cultural studies has not really engaged with difference’ (p. xi). The point here is to explicitly make cultural studies face up to the so-called ‘ethical turn’, Zylinska arguing that the discipline’s clear ethical underpinnings, obscured by its political drive, are not enough: ‘it is only through its openness to the ethical that cultural studies can understand, and meaningfully perform, its politics’ (p. 16). While Laclau and Butler provide important resources (in reflections on violence, contingency, universality, hegemony, performativity), the key figure is Emmanuel Levinas, Zylinska following him in insisting on ethics – read as our responsibility to the infinite alterity of the other – as prior to being and thus politics, ethics as ‘first philosophy’, then. The ‘Levinas effect’ has aroused a fair amount of compelling critique: for instance, as issuing in too much maudlin handwringing (Žižek), as inconsistently substantializing Otherness (Ranciere), as providing no brake in the least on any barbarism we might encounter, and as therefore demonstrating the need to prioritize the political. In this vein, the curmudgeonly critic will note the re-appearance of intelligent and well-written but all-too-familiar cultural studies’ wisdom: of moral panics, an ethical cultural studies can alert us to the power of ‘thinking anew about crime’ (p. 58); of the massacre of 1600 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941, ‘Jedwabne did perhaps involve the failure of language, of the discourse of national identity which could not think

Theorizing Globalization: Introducing the Challenge

The purpose of this chapter is to provide critical tools for, and background to, the chapters ahead. Part of this involves examining globalization’s historical dimension, which is vital in thinking about the specificity of the contemporary globalizing moment. In theoretical terms, we want to argue for the utility of critical theory as a way of approaching globalization, and critical theories of social change and analyses of modernity and development, which are linked in a number of crucial ways to discussions of globalization, are helpful in understanding the complexity of globalizing transformations. Above all, we insist on the inescapability of theorizing, and maintain that the imaginative and lively variety of critical theoretical approaches canvassed here shed significant light on globalization.