PROKLA - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft
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Die Krise privatisierter ‘Entsorgbarkeit’ und die Neuverhandlung gesellschaftlicher Müllverhältnisse in Bangalore
Get PDFIn this article, I trace the successive privatization of waste management in Bangalore throughout the last two decades. Thereby, I illustrate how the dominant mode of handling waste in capitalist societies is marked by a profound neglect of wastes’ materiality. In India, an increased production and altered materiality of waste was caused by the process of politico-economic liberalization of the 1980s, which has given rise to different and at parts contradictory modes of societal handling of waste. Inherently connected to neoliberal urban reform projects, the ‘modernization’ of public handling of waste in Bangalore enhanced the encroachment and displacement of an enormous informalized recycling sector. This has intensified specific forms of disposability in the societal handling of waste. The resulting ‘garbage crisis’, which struck Bangalore in the summer months of 2012, propelled the reconfiguration of the city ?s societal waste relations. As will be argued, these changes have been long prepared by a broad alliance of waste-related civil society organizations and revealed the possible contours of a local green economy of waste
Editorial: Materialist Feminism
Get PDFEditorial: Materialistischer FeminismusEditorial: Materialist Feminis
Klassentheorien – Die letzten 50 Jahre
Get PDFWhen at the latest with the crises of the financial markets a new focus on class issues was set on Marxian theorists’ agenda, there is the question, how to cope with it. The idea of class is central for Marxian theories, but enigmatic and controversal at the same time. Reason enough to review and to reconsider as well the dynamics of the discussions within the last 50 years and to focus the sets of problems and unanswered questions
What’s the „matter“? Der Materialitätsbegriff des „New Materialism“ und dessen Konsequenzen für feministisch-politische Handlungsfähigkeit
Get PDFThe article tries to highlight some similarities and differences between the meaning of the „material“ of a Marx-informed materialism on the one hand, and the „material“ predominant in theories belonging to the emerging field of feminist „new materialism“ on the other hand. It hopes to contribute to the further development of perspectives of critical social analysis within this field, while at the same time exploring the possibilities and limits of such an endeavour
Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Globalen Linken
Get PDFThis essay discusses the historical development of working class and resistance movements within the modern world-system. Departing from the French Revolution and the three modern ideologies – conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism – that emerged in its aftermath, the essay contextualizes social movements and political currents of the 19th and 20th century, and analyzes their relationships among each other, as well as their relationships to political power and to the state. Drawing from these lessons, the essay finally tackles the challenges that the divided Global Left is currently facing in its political struggle over a new, democratic, and egalitarian world-order
Mythen und Erfahrungen: die Einheit der deutschen Arbeiterklasse um 1900
Get PDFIn the last decades, farewell to the working class has been celebrated repeatedly. This perception normally goes hand in hand with the idea that in contrast to the socially fragmented present, a unified working class existed before 1914. I want to show that the German experience contradicts this. Two exemplary fields of ideological battles as well as concrete actions are presented: 1) the harsh rejection of specific demands of the proletarian women by the social democratic party, and 2) the struggles of the workers for higher wages and shorter working hours, where a coexistence of radically different strategies by workers in distinct branches, according especially to varying company sizes, could be observed. Even if the working class of this time was not unified in a way the left leaders wanted to see it, main parts of it achieved remarkable success. As a consequence, today’s over and over noticed weakness of the working class is not to be explained principally by a lack of unity, but by other circumstances
Mittelklassen, Klassenstellung und politische Klassenpositionen
Get PDFA reexamination of the borderline between the working and the middle classes is undertaken, focusing on the class identity of middle classes with respect to the question of class place and class position. Nicos Poulantzas’s approach to the subject is critically evaluated and a more accurate view of middle class subcollectivities is developed
Das transnationale Kapital und die Bearbeitung der Krise(n) der Europäischen Union
Get PDFThe article stresses the ideological and political dominance of productive capital fractions within the power bloc of the European Union (EU), by exemplifying their strategic influence in transnational struggles over the management of the current crises in Europe. Theoretically, it is shown, that the leadership of a fraction within the ruling class does neither result from its economic dominance in accumulation nor its hegemony in society alone, but rather depends on concrete struggles over power and meaning within the power bloc itself. In this regard, the economic and financial crisis management approach of the EU reveals that especially transnational actors from the European industry are able to use the crisis between 2008 and 2013 to further lock-in their global competitiveness strateg y into EU political structures. While the lobby groups of finance capital, although still economically important, are rather losing political ground and get lost in technocratic disputes among each, productive capital associations are holding the ruling class in Brussels together by using their privileged access to EU institutions and subordinating the interests of others capital fractions under the dominant discourse of a global and export-oriented growth regime of the EU
Krise und Protest auf dem Balkan: Von sozialer Emanzipation bis National-Chauvinismus am Beispiel von Kroatien und Bosnien-Herzegowina
Get PDFThe article examines the recent protest movements in Bosnia (especially in spring 2014) and Croatia („For the family“) and tries to draw conclusions on societal development in the Balkans since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Whereas in Bosnia the protesters were committed to democratic principles and represented an alternative to the official political system, in Croatia direct democratic means are more frequently used by right forces in order to discriminate minorities (such as homosexuals or the ethnic Serbs). Furthermore the article describes how these different types of protest in the given countries could emerge and asks for the limits and possibilities of the protest movements