Global Political Struggles of the Working Class

The Double Consciousness of Capital with author DAVID HARVEY
Social Sources of Political Polarization in Russia with authors ILYA MATVEEV and OLEG ZHURAVLEV
The Far Right, Corporate Power, and Social Struggles in Brazil with authors VIRGINIA FONTES, ANA GARCIA and REJANE HOEVELER

In “The Double Consciousness of Capital”. DAVID HARVEY turns to Marx’s Grundrisse and to W.E.B.Du Bois’ idea of  double consciousness, to locate a tension in anti-capitalist politics between the possibilities found in the creative destruction and technological revolutions of capitalism and the alienation and loss of human potentiality which is a result of the same process. The path to socialism requires navigating the contradictions of this double consciousness.

In “Social Sources of Political Polarization in Russia”. ILYA MATVEEV and OLEG ZHURAVLEV offer a compelling account of rising urban-rural and core-periphery polarization in Russia under the authoritarian nationalism of Vladimir Putin, which until recently was able to rely on the apathetic indifference of the people and general appeals to social stability to maintain unchallenged power.

In “The Far Right, Corporate Power, and Social Struggles in Brazil”. VIRGINA FONTES, ANA GARCIA, and REJANE HOEVELER contrast the fictitious polarization in Brazil between electoral oppositions that quarrel over cultural issues without challenging the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the real polarization resulting from a combative working class that is developing, as Gramsci says, a spirit of cleavage, determined to pursue its class interests.

DAVID HARVEY is Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York. ILYA MATVEEV teaches politics at the Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, St. Petersburg; OLEG ZHURAVLEV is a researcher at the Public Sociology Laboratory, Center for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg. VIRGINIA FONTES is professor of history at Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro State, and a teacher at the Florestan Fernandes National School of the Landless Workers Movement; ANA GARCIA is assistant professor at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University and the graduate program in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University, both in Rio de Janeiro; REJANE HOEVELER is a lecturer in the School of Social Service at Fluminense Federal University.

Socialist Register #58 is available for $28 including shipping via US Media Mail (this offer is only good for the US and Puerto Rico). In Canada Socialist Register is available from Fernwood Books and in Europe from The Merlin Press.

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