Join our online workshop on 30 April at 6pm CET to discuss the recent article by Neal Harris and Robin Jervis!
On zoom, register here: tbd
Speakers
Neal Harris is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Politics at Oxford Brookes University. His research focuses on Social Transformation, Technology, and the Social and Solidarity Economy.
Robin Jervis is a Principal Lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton. His research focus is in the field of critical political economy, where he is interested in how transitions from capitalism might occur, and what those systems might look like.
Discussant
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Professor, Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath
Find the article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03098168251372456
Abstract
Over the past two decades, anti-capitalist social and political theorists have increasingly embraced the transformative potential of solidaristic organisations that exist within the ‘cracks’ (the ‘interstices’) of the capitalist system. The argument goes that by growing and expanding progressive organisations within capitalism’s ‘cracks’, activists can peacefully usher in a post-capitalist future. Such an approach is referred to as an interstitial strategy. Yet, despite the growth of the related literature, which increasingly extends far beyond social and political thought, the foundational ideas of such an interstitial strategy have not been sufficiently interrogated. We demonstrate that two of the key texts that explicitly endorse such an interstitial transformative strategy, Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias and John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism, use the term in significantly different ways, pointing towards qualitatively distinct and potentially incompatible theories of social change. In this article, we sympathetically reconstruct both accounts, identify their fundamental disconnects and stress the need for a coherent revolutionary strategy to undergird anti-capitalist activism.
See you there!
Critical Political Economy Research Network (RN06) 