Elaine Coburn

Alternatives: New Canadian Political Economy and the relations of ruling: a comment on C. Hurl and B. Christensen

Abstract This comment takes C. Hurl and B. Christensen’s recent article in Studies in Political Economy as an opportunity to ask how their retrospective construction of the New Canadian Political Economy reveals the way that the “ruling relations” shape intellectual histories. Too often, perspectives from white, straight, male “standpoints” are centralized, marginalizing the contributions of feminist, Indigenous, and queer scholars, among others. This comment explores how intellectual histories reproduce the social inequalities of the historical moment in which they are born.

Counter-hegemonic Projects and Cognitive Praxis in Transnational Alternative Policy Groups

Since the mid-1970s, and particularly since the 1990s, alternative policy groups have generated ideas—both visionary and strategic—for a “globalization from below”. This chapter comparatively analyses eight transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) using a basic conceptual framework for understanding them as sites of cognitive praxis: producers and mobilizers of knowledge for social transformation. In contrast to neoliberal think tanks (NTTs), TAPGs endeavor to expose the problematic role of private interests in the global political economy. Their remit is not to centralize knowledge within elite policy networks, but to diffuse it, including by building the capacity of counter-hegemonic publics. Taken together, the TAPGs introduced here represent an important source of alternative knowledge production and an illuminating contrast to hegemonic think tanks.

Alternatives: Theorizing colonialism and Indigenous liberation: contemporary Indigenous scholarship from lands claimed by Canada

Abstract This essay makes the case for historical materialist scholars in universities across lands claimed by Canada to have serious engagement with Indigenous scholarship. Diverse Indigenous scholars theorize material dispossession by the Canadian state, by capital, and by non-Indigenous peoples; deconstruct dehumanizing ideologies in popular Canadian media and academic writing; and describe and analyze Indigenous resilience (survival), resistance (decolonization), and resurgence (existential self-determination). The conclusions suggest potential new collaborations across historical materialist and Indigenous scholarship in the Canadian academy.

Marxism and Social Movements

Marxists have sought to critically analyze and contribute to (left revolutionary) popular movements. Yet they have not explicitly theorized the term “movement” nor its relationships to other key Marxist concepts, such as class struggle and hegemony. This book seeks to fill that gap in a historical moment when there are worldwide “anti-systemic” movements against austerity, against inequality, against the “democracy deficit,” and to protect hard-won rights for subaltern classes, all within the context of the world’s most important economic crisis since the 1930s. Analysis helpfully moves back and forth between theory and empirical cases, with a view to informing more effective revolutionary political praxis. The empirical scope is deliberately and usefully broad. Cases are drawn from a range of national contexts in the global North and South and concern movements from the 19 th century up to the present. The book’s major shortcoming, however, is its failure to draw upon the whole range of historical materialist theorizing, including work by Black socialists, feminist socialists and Indigenous communists, among others. Nonetheless Marxism and social movements makes a useful, if radically incomplete contribution to both social movement theory and historical materialism.

Economic Inequality Matters: Reflections on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century

In Capital in the 21st Century , Piketty takes a central liberal claim about economic inequality seriously and asks: does capitalism reward merit? If true, we would expect salaries, presumably rooted in the reward of merit in the workplace, to be more important to personal wealth than inherited money and property, which is just luck. He concludes that capitalism does not reward merit more than inherited wealth. Piketty suggests that this is at once a political and moral problem. As such, it cannot be resolved through economics alone, especially in the profession’s current incarnation, characterized by mathematical fetishization. Instead, all of the social sciences and humanities will necessarily be mobilized to develop a full description and analysis of economic inequalities, which must then be made a central question for broad, public debate. This is an important epistemological and political argument, although Capital in the 21st Century has critical weaknesses, including an undertheorized empiricism, a tendency to treat economic inequality as a matter of money and not as a social relationship, and a failure to grasp how class, gender, race and age come together in social relationships of exploitation (and not merely statistical relationship of inequality).

Thinking About Class, Race, Gender: Himani Bannerji and G.A. Cohen on Capitalism and Socialism

Thinking About Class, Race, Gender: Himani Bannerji and G.A. Cohen on Capitalism and Socialism

'I Class Struggle': French Exceptionalism and Challenges for Socialist Studies

‘Je lutte des classes’ ‘I class struggle’ – sticker worn by protestors in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, and other major French cities on Tuesday, October 12, 2010, during the 5th day of strike action. The protests aimed to challenge proposed legislation to raise the legal age of retirement in France from sixty to sixty two years of age. As in the English translation, the original French is grammatically awkward, an ambiguous if not ambivalent union between ‘I’ and ‘class struggle’.

Rosa Luxemburg's Political Economy: Contributions to Contemporary Political Theory and Practice

Since her assassination, Rosa Luxemburg has been treated as an icon while her political and theoretical work is largely forgotten, neglected, or rejected. Recently, though, David Harvey used her ideas on capitalist expansion to explain the new imperialism. Other elements of her work are promising for socialist studies and the left, today. Her analysis of mass strikes in Russia in 1905, for example, may cast new light on workers’ struggles in China. Luxemburg’s critical discussion of nations’ right to selfdetermination inform, or ought to inform, contemporary Latin American struggles against imperialist domination. Her writings on mass strikes, parties and trade unions, like her better-known writings on ‘social reform or revolution’, offer insights into the role of (weakly) organized labour in political change. Although Luxemburg didn’t engage much with women’s issues directly, her work and its reception nonetheless have an important gender dimension. In particular, feminist women scholars have been quicker to recognize Luxemburg’s contributions to socialist political economy than their male colleagues.

‘Pulling the Monster Down’: Interview with William K. Carroll

William K. Carroll is one of Canada’s foremost sociologists. His research and teaching focus on the contemporary capitalist political economy and transformative social movements, as well as Marxist and post-Marxist theories, particularly those informed by Gramsci. His empirical work investigates central actors within the Canadian and world political economy, including social democratic governments, right wing think-tanks and the for-profit and alternative media. He is the author of more than a hundred books, articles, chapters and reports, making important contributions on many subjects, including globalization, neoliberalism and critical research methods.