Article

The Contexts of Class

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

Class now occupies a marginal position in much of contemporary social and political theory and (it seems) in politics in general. This is discernible most clearly in the proliferation of emancipatory projects constituted around non class axes where class appears to be of little (if any) relevance. This article suggests that class is still important for our understanding of political struggles (including ostensibly non-class struggles) but only if we are able to think of class in a much more fluid and open-ended way.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

Article
Full-text available
The politics of natural resource access, control and exploitation assume fundamental relations of social power; they imply them and consolidate them. Environmental issues reflect broader patterns of domination and social exclusion at work in global politics which enable us to understand who benefits from the current distribution of environmental benefits and which social groups shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden of pollution. The task, however, is not merely to identify those global structures that produce environmental inequities and injustices, but to show how, in some cases, those structures are supported and entrenched by the institutional configurations that we continue to assume are generating the solutions to environmental degradation. Towards this end, I connect debates about the global managerial class and critiques of the prevailing sustainable development historical bloc with more localized studies of the consequences of organized inequality and the strategies adopted by marginalized groups to contest their fate as victims of environmental injustice. Such an approach builds upon the project which Marian Miller began with her enquiries into the Third World in global environmental politics, emphasizing the importance of the global political economy in shaping those political relations. Political and social cleavages of race, class and gender are shown to be key to understanding the global organization of environmental inequality and justice, though it is the neglect of the first two dimensions, in particular, that forms the core concern of this paper. Their importance in understanding patterns of causation (distribution of benefit), process (access, voice, representation) and distribution (of harm) is highlighted through reference to a range of contemporary case studies in the global North and South. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Article
Full-text available
Book
This is a study of the choices faced by socialist movements as they developed within capitalist societies. Professor Przeworski examines the three principal choices confronted by socialism: whether to work through elections; whether to rely exclusively on the working class; and whether to try to reform or abolish capitalism. He brings to his analysis a number of abstract models of political and economic structure, and illustrates the issues in the context of historical events, tracing the development of socialist strategies since the mid-nineteenth century. Several of the conclusions are novel and provocative. Professor Przeworski argues that economic issues cannot justify a socialist programme, and that the workers had good reasons to struggle for the improvement of capitalism. Therefore, the project of a socialist transformation, and the fight for economic advancement, were separate historical phenomena.
Article
This book concerns the central role of gender in the massive reorganization of lives and livelihoods that accompanied the economic, social, political, and cultural revolutions of industrial capitalism in England. It primarily focuses on the importance of gender in class relations in the second half of the nineteenth century. England was in the vanguard of the industrial revolution, and it was there, during the nineteenth century, that industrial capitalism came into full flower. In the last half of the century, seeds that had been sown much earlier produced bounteous riches for some, along with bitter fruit for others. Factories replaced homes and workshops, altering landscapes from the level Midlands to the craggy hillsides of Lancashire in the north. Cities and towns swelled to accommodate rural immigrants as novel ways of manufacturing familiar goods replaced older ones and new commodities were produced for sale in markets that often lay an ocean away. © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Article
The argument. Preface. Acknowledgements. Part I: The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture: . 1. Introduction. 2. Modernity and Modernism. 3. Postmodernism. 4. Postmodernism in the City: Architecture and Urban Design. 5. Modernization. 6. POSTmodernISM or postMODERNism?. Part II: The Political-Economic Transformation of late Twentieth-Century Capitalism: . 7. Introduction. 8. Fordism. 9. From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation. 10. Theorizing the Transition. 11. Flexible Accumulation - Solid Transformation or Temporary Fix?. Part III: The Experience of Space and Time: . 12. Introduction. 13. Individual Spaces and Times in Social Life. 14. Time and Space as Sources of Social Power. 15. The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project. 16. Time-space Compression and the Rise of Modernism as a Cultural Force. 17. Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition. 18. Time and Space in the Postmodern Cinema. Part IV: The Condition of Postmodernity:. 19. Postmodernity as a Historical Condition. 20. Economics with Mirrors. 21. Postmodernism as the Mirror of Mirrors. 22. Fordist Modernism versus Flexible Postmodernism, or the Interpenetration of Opposed Tendencies in Capitalism as a Whole. 23. The Transformative and Speculative Logic of Capital. 24. The Work of Art in an Age of Electronic Reproduction and Image Banks. 25. Responses to Time-Space Compression. 26. The Crisis of Historical Materialism. 27. Cracks in the Mirrors, Fusions at the Edges. References. Index.