Activity

Are political hopes blurring our theoretical visions? Our answer is this: Reflexively admitting a connection between our hopes and our hypotheses is a necessary component of theoretical honesty in social science, especially when dealing with our own times. Social theory is often likened to lenses o…

In the meantime a different kind of popular movement began emerging from the Right. The New Right snatched many of its tactics and even former activists from the dispirited New Left. This turn to the right marked the end of the long period dominated by class politics with its familiar symbols, tact…

The futures of the Euro and the eurozone remain uncertain. Spain and Portugal have gained minimal stability only for Italy to wobble and Cypus enter a tailspin. No one knows how far the European crisis will spread: perhaps to old member Belgium or new member Slovenia, perhaps to the EU itself, enda…

[...] But we should recognize that the Soviet Union was not equivalent to socialism and thereby somehow directly analogous to capitalism. It was something more particular and of a different order.

This is so whether we treat capitalism as a set of practices that can be undertaken by capitalists …

Immanuel Wallerstein had been long (and very controversially) comparing communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike.' If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The workers might get a better distri…