Pedro M. Rey-Araujo

• Phd
• Post-doctoral Researcher at University of Santiago de Compostela

While the notion of populism has gained greater conceptual clarity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, its material conditions of existence have not yet been properly theorized. In order to grasp populism’s historical specificity, an analysis of the internal dynamics of capitalism is required. A crucial distinction between Liberal and Regulated Social S...

Post-Marxist discourse theory, initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, has become a central node of contemporary critical theory. This essay explores how, in their attack against orthodox Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe self-consciously expelled political economy from the vast array of post-Marxism’s theoretical influences. While attem...

Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders develops a novel political economy approach by establishing a dialogue between the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) theory and Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism theory. Using this synthesis, it provides an in-depth analysis of Spain’s recent socio-economic evolution since the early 1990s. The book deve...

This paper advances a reading of the social metabolism as a dynamic orchestration of heterogeneous rhythms, encompassing those intrinsic to human bodies and other natural processes, and those of relations mediating both. Contrary to pre-capitalist societies, as the collective mediation of the social metabolism adopts a capitalist form, it becomes a...

This paper critically interrogates the meaning attached to socialreproduction in the so-called Social Reproduction Theory [SRT]. WhileSRT represents an improvement over competing approaches to social reproduction along several dimensions, its understanding of social reproduction as referring exclusively to the ongoing reproduction oflabour-power do...

CONVERSA Poder e colonialidades: Espanha na Galiza de hoje. Poder e colonialidades: Espanha na Galiza de hoje. Galicia, Colonia ou champú? Esa foi a venturosa e repe-tida brincadeira que resumiu as disputas ideolóxicas no seo do nacionalismo galego entre mediados dos anos setenta e finais dos oitenta. Case cincuenta anos des-pois de que vira a luz...

This article deploys the notion of ‘employable femininity’, by which we refer to the mystification along postfeminist lines of an idealized womanhood suitable to be employed and worked upon, in order to explore how women’s relation to employment is currently being articulated and contested in contemporary Spain. Structural transformations during ne...

This article explores the evolution of Spain’s capitalism during the last decades in order to unveil the factors underlying the harshness with which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spain. We present a twofold thesis. On the one hand, we argue that Spanish capitalism has harbored certain internal vulnerabilities, relative to its productive specia...

In this paper, I provide a short reply to Jacobs’s critical appraisal of my previous article, “Ernesto Laclau’s Oblivion of Political Economy,” published in this journal, volume 32, number 2 (2020). There, I had argued that Laclau’s post-Marxism suffered from a marked incapacity to theorize the extent to which capitalist dynamics affect ongoing heg...

This paper uses social structures of accumulation theory in combination with Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory in order to analyze the institutional mechanisms that sustained the long economic expansion of the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2008. Productive deficiencies endogenously gave way to several trends that, despite displaying a highly con...

Partiendo de los preceptos de la teoría post-marxis-ta del discurso, desarrollada inicialmente por Er-nesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe, se aborda la figura de Jesús Gil y Gil en tanto que representativa de la dimensión caciquil que ha acompañado la estrategia financiero-inmobiliaria seguida por el capitalismo español en las últimas décadas. Con tal mo...

El presente artículo aplica la metodología del tiempo discrecional al caso de la sociedad española. Mientras que la noción de tiempo libre en los estudios sobre usos del tiempo es generalmente construida como el remanente tras sustraer el tiempo efectivamente empleado en el empleo, el trabajo doméstico y los cuidados personales, el tiempo discrecio...

This paper explores the similarities and differences that exist between the political approaches of Jacques Rancière and Ernesto Laclau, respectively. In particular, the areas analysed include their postulation of an antagonistic or conflictive figure at the centre of their political reflections, their understanding of the political as constitutive...

El presente artículo explora las similitudes y discrepancias existentes en las reflexiones políticas de Jacques Rancière y Ernesto Laclau. En particular, su postulación de una figura antagónica o conflictiva en el seno de sus reflexiones políticas, su entendimiento de lo político como constitutivo de la objetividad social, y su concepción del sujet...

This paper argues for the need to recast Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) debates regarding the relevance of contradictions other than that between capital and labor, as well as regarding the terms of the political struggle in times of SSA decay, in the light of the concepts of overdetermination and hegemony. To that extent, it introduces th...

El presente artículo hace uso de la teoría de las Estructuras sociales de Acumulación para discernir las causas de la actual crisis orgánica de la economía española, en base a un análisis de las dinámicas estructurales que la han gobernado en el período 1995-2007. La teoría concluye que debería dar lugar a un largo período de recomposición instituc...

The present paper deals with problems of institutional change and stability wthin the Social Structures of Accumulation framework, making extensive use of the Post-Marxist account of hegemony