The BVPS publishes today the fifth post of the international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?, which invited Brazilian and international specialists, drawing from three major areas of the social sciences — social theory, the sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought — to answer four questions around the intricate relationships between authoritarianism and capitalism in the contemporary world. The responses will be published in batches every Wednesday. By clicking here you can read the other publications from the symposium.
Today’s contributors are:
Klaus Dörre is a German sociologist, professor emeritus of Sociology of Work, Industry and the Economy at the Universität Jena, and is currently a visiting professor at the Kassel Institute for Sustainability, at the Universität Kassel. He focuses on the sociology of work, with research on precarization, flexible capitalism, trade unionism, and post-growth societies. He is, among others, co-author of Soziologie – Kapitalismus – Kritik: Eine Debatte and editor of Sozialismus von unten? Emanzipatorische Ansätze für das 21. Jahrhundert. In Brazil, he recently published Teorema da expropriação capitalista (2022) and A utopia do socialismo (2026).
Patricia Mattos is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ), where she coordinates the Center for Gender Studies (Nege). She holds a degree in Political Science and a master’s and PhD in Sociology from the University of Brasília (UnB), and focuses on the political sociology of recognition, with an emphasis on critical theory, gender, symbolic violence, and male domination. She is, among others, the author of A Sociologia Política do Reconhecimento: As contribuições de Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth e Nancy Fraser and of As Visões de Weber e Habermas sobre Política e Direito.
Edson Farias is an associate professor in the Department and the Graduate Program in Sociology at the University of Brasília (PPGSOL/UnB), a CNPq researcher, and coordinator of the Culture, Memory and Development Research Group (CMD). He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Unicamp and focuses on the sociology of culture and sociological theory, with research on popular culture, memory, cultural consumption, and the sociology of audiovisual media. He is, among others, the author of Ócio e Negócio: festas populares e entretenimento-turismo no Brasil and of O Desfile e a Cidade: o carnaval-espetáculo carioca.
The international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done? is organized by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and editor of the BVPS Blog), and has the editorial assistance of Miguel Cunha (PPGCS/UFRRJ).
See below!
Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?
1. What is your assessment of the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism today?
Klaus Dörre: My thesis is that the revolt of a radical right, as we are currently seeing worldwide, is showing a tendency towards Bonapartist democracy. Unable to assert their concerns in the form of organised democratic class struggle, parts of the subaltern classes, particularly male workers, are delegating the representation of their interests to the radical right. In their current form, right-wing populist or far-right formations present themselves as a political force that is in touch with ordinary people, promising workers effective protection, social recognition, and the preservation of their cultural identity. “We are taking back our country” (or: “Take back control!”) is the slogan of a revolt against the establishment. However, this revolt necessarily remains imaginary, as it aims to restore conditions that cannot possibly be restored. This is what makes the current revolt particularly dangerous.
Let us begin – firstly – with the question of electoral behaviour. The radical far right is receiving support from all classes and strata of society. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, for example, are true symbols of the capitalist elites. Their utopia envisages a world in which capital has been largely freed from social regulation. Yet the far-right bloc is also enjoying widespread support from among a class that the left placed its hopes on for the greater part of the 20th century – indeed, which it regarded as the revolutionary subject. For white male voters in the US, Donald Trump is a kind of Vademecum, because he has ingeniously identified and capitalised on the social shame of an entire group, as Arlie Hochschild explains in her book Stolen Pride. And she absolutely hits the nail on the head here: the New Right is receiving broad working-class support. It relies on this support to gain majority appeal. And, just like in the US, far-right forces are rather successful in Germany and across Europe as well.
We may establish: in Germany, the influence of the radical far right today extends well into the active core of the unionised workforce. Does this mean that far-right parties are on course for becoming the true workers’ parties? The unmistakeable answer is: No! The AfD, for instance, essentially has a free-market agenda. And yet, the ideologues of the New Right and their political arm are proving to be “masters of ambivalence”: they reconcile what appears to be politically incompatible.
In so doing, they are seizing on a political vacuum left behind by the democratic parties, and particularly by the political Left. As the revolt against the dishonouring of the working class is not being heard left-of-centre, it is searching for another outlet for its rage. The ideologues of the New Right and their political followers have evidently managed to successfully reframe class-specific conflicts between the top and the bottom as ethnic conflicts between inside and outside. Far-right ideologies are using the “problem raw material” – which contemporary societies produce in great abundance – by presenting themselves as a down-to-earth and rebellious project of democratisation. This is true for many EU countries. The Brexit campaign led by the right-wing populist UKIP also met with above-average approval among the working class. In France, ever since the 1990s, the Front National has achieved dramatic election results in former strongholds of the Communist Party (PCF); the successor organisation Rassemblement National (RN) also recruits voters from the working class with above-average success. Even more spectacular was the result of the Austrian federal presidential election in 2016, in which no less than 86% of workers voted for the narrowly defeated FPÖ candidate Hofer. Although the FPÖ suffered substantial losses in the 2019 general elections, it is still by far the strongest party among the working class. Likewise, even the Italian Lega and, in more recent times, the Fratelli d’Italia, with their openly racist leaders Salvini and Meloni, enjoy high levels of support among the working class.
In order to make sense of this, we need to specify who exactly the workers are. And here, we come across a second parallel: both in Europe and the US, workers are generally regarded as a disappearing minority. And, indeed, production workers do represent a minority among wage-earners in the US and Europe alike. But if we approach this from the perspective of class analysis, meaning, if we also include nurses, check-out staff in supermarkets, the warehouser at Amazon, or the qualified medical assistant in a doctor’s practice in the working class, it is a different matter. Those classes depending on wage labour directly or indirectly still make up the majority of “work-centred societies” (Claus Offe).
Irrespective of their social self-positioning, however, the working class by no means represents the “socio-economic centre” of society. Our class model, which distinguishes between three wage labor classes, illustrates this for the Federal Republic of Germany (Figure one). Production workers in the early-industrialising countries in particular are among the major losers of globalisation. According to the IMF, the reasons for this include: technological change (digitalisation), the corresponding replaceability of workers, the market power of large corporations, and the eroding cohesive force of trade unions. The privilege of internationally operating corporations to select their staff from more than three billion workers – the majority of them subject to precarious employment and working conditions – entails negative blowback effects for workers in the old capitalist centres: they suffer the consequences of a fierce competition for production sites and the related offshoring and outsourcing strategies, and of the corresponding pressure on wages and working conditions.
Adding to these factors that cause fears of downward social mobility are the current price hikes and real wage losses. Due to rising rents and energy and food prices, the real net income in Germany – meaning, the money one is left with after all bills have been paid (tax, social security contributions, fixed costs for rent, heating, etc.) – has continuously failed to keep up with the price increases despite high pay settlements in collective agreements. Despite declining unemployment figures and a low number of long-time unemployed, the at-risk-of-poverty rates in Germany saw a new record high at 16% in 2021. Furthermore, the share of the population under 65 affected by severe material and social hardship has risen from 4% to 7% in just a few years. In 2023, some six million people in Germany were unable to afford the cost for rent, mortgages, a one-week vacation, or a family meal at a restaurant. This constitutes the kind of “problem raw material” that the far right is able to exploit even in Germany.
The subjective forms of processing inequality reveal a third parallel between Europe and the US. Arlie Hochschild reconstructs a deep story of the Tea Party movement followers, which we also find, at least in a similar form, in Germany and several other European countries. In large part, our interviews reveal a deep story that the responding workers perceive to be the truth. Whether left or right-wing, they feel like they are patiently waiting in line at the foot of a mountain of justice. Against the backdrop of globalisation, German unification and mass unemployment, this deep story has constantly been fed new problems which demanded new sacrifices from those who have to stand in line. This is particularly true for employees in the new Länder (meaning, the states that once formed East Germany), who witnessed the collapse of the GDR economy and radical structural change, waiting patiently for the promised alignment with West German living standards. European financial and socalled refugee crises have added new twists and turns to this deep story. Accustomed for decades to the factual constraint of empty public coffers, the government’s crisis management has now evidently generated funds in abundance – first to rescue ailing banks and struggling public finances on the southern European periphery, then for more than a million refugees who reached Germany in 2015. Since then, standing in line has become pointless in the eyes of many respondents. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that the overall economic situation seems to have improved significantly. This has brought an end to a period of frugality, not least among younger employees, especially in the eastern part of the country.
However, little of the economic boom is reaching the many who have waited for so long. This is reflected in the subjective world views we encountered. The subjective sentiment, which is expressed in the electoral behaviour of workers who vote for radical far-right parties, was described quite accurately by French sociologists Beaud and Pialoux during the late 1980s as a feeling of being “dishonoured”. It is about the “the yearning for respectability of people who have worked hard all their lives to become home owners, provide their children with a good education, earn themselves a good reputation, etc. And this desire for respectability, which may seem ridiculous to those who have left the popular milieus behind, is not remotely being addressed currently. On the contrary: workers sense that their dignity is severely under threat: […] due to the social decline in their neighbourhood […]; but also because of the cloudy delegitimation of their value system; because of the erosion of local structures; or as a result of the depreciation of the ‘long-established’ as a principle of legitimation, which is sacrificed in the name of the cosmopolitanism of ‘multiculturalism’; or due to the discrediting of the traditional gender-based division of labour.” For the most part, the empirical findings of these two French colleagues also apply to the industrial workforce in Germany and other European countries today. Workers are haunted by the feeling that their work is no longer adequately recognised by society. They feel as if they have been made invisible and dishonoured. In the public sphere of media and political discourses, they hardly ever feature – nor do their professional activities or their way of life. No one takes any notice of them, except, perhaps, as a disappearing species; or, by the poor and by precarious workers, as a privileged worker aristocracy.
This brings us to the fourth similarity between the US and Europe. The widespread sense of not being noticed or recognised is another “problem raw material” the far right is exploiting. Evidently, the masterminds of the New Right and their mouthpieces have succeeded in establishing a meta-narrative in the everyday consciousness of workers that serves to ethnicise social (class) conflicts. This meta-narrative allows for reconciling socio-economic and cultural protest motives with a conformist general attitude. In fact, we observed this particularly among workforces in rural industrial regions. The leader of the AfD in the state of Thuringia Björn Höcke contends that the “new social question in Germany in the 21st century” is one in which the conflict dynamic no longer polarises the antagonism between the “top” and the “bottom”, but that between the “indigenous” (meaning, “native” or “autochthonous”) population and illegal immigrants, or migrants allegedly unwilling or unable to integrate. The main problem for the far right is the supposed immigration “into the welfare system”. This argument is rather successful especially among workers. This ethno-pluralism regards only “pure” (as in, “unmixed”) national cultures as strong and capable of surviving. It is gaining mass appeal because it addresses real protest motives. What Beaud and Pialoux wrote about the workers at a Peugeot factory is still true for a substantial part of those who sympathise with the AfD or other forces even further to the right today: “Foreigners become the focal point in a multi-layered threat scenario, the subjective side of which consists of fear. It is a fear of the future and of social marginalisation and non-recognition.”
The widespread dissatisfaction with unfair distributional relations is reflected in a typical form of thinking that can be interpreted as a distorted class interest. A dichotomic consciousness, nationalist ideas about causal relationships, and a reframing of the problem of security are constitutive of this form of thinking. What is significant, however, is that both distribution-oriented and community-centred thought patterns are deeply rooted in the everyday consciousness of the workers and employees surveyed, albeit with different weightings. It therefore makes no sense analytically to pit cultural against socio-economic explanations for right-wing populism/radicalism. Both dimensions are always present in people’s consciousness; subjective notions of conflicts concerning distribution and recognition form a cognitive double structure, so to speak. Only for this reason can the organised New Right successfully re-formulate the social question as one of cultural antagonism. The ideological achievement of the right-wing strategists is, after all, to translate socioeconomic disparities into a semantics of ethnic, cultural, or national divisions. What is characteristic of the above-outlined forms of thinking is that the image of the opponent remains quite vague. It is broadly directed at the political sphere as well as targeting individual politicians. Positive demands are usually addressed to the state and/or the government. Those who voted for the AfD as protest voters also emphasise that their main aim is to issue a wake-up call to the “big parties”, so as to cause them to respond to the concerns of “normal” citizens and their families. This demand for state protection against inequality, injustice, and a loss of community suggests that we are dealing with movements of the Polanyian type.
This marks the fifth parallel. Climate change and the necessary decarbonisation require a radical transformation of industry and the economy as a whole. The scale of this transformation is reminiscent of the first Industrial Revolution. The centre-left and centre-right parties were geared towards a green-growth capitalism which – as the promise goes – combines socio-ecological transformation and greater prosperity for all. Yet this promise failed to materialise. Instead, the early-industrialising countries have plunged even deeper into the economic-ecological pincer crisis. Any economic growth occurring under the currently existing conditions will aggravate major ecological dangers, above all, that of global warming. Moreover, workers generally benefit very little from economic growth. In the absence of economic growth, however, social hardship increases. In this sense, the societies of the Global North are in a kind of Scylla-and-Charybdis situation.
The old industrial class conflict is increasingly turning into a socio-ecological “transformation conflict”. Contrary to what sociologist Ulrich Beck suspected in his Risk Society, however, this conflict does not feed on two separate logics, wherein the “problems of the fat bellies” (the logic of wealth distribution) are increasingly overlaid and displaced by global ecological dangers (the logic of risk distribution). The social distribution conflict and the ecological-social conflict cannot be reduced to either; they are highly interwoven and can therefore be described as a socio-ecological transformation conflict. Regardless of whether the conflicts are located on the social or ecological conflict axis, both perspectives must always be considered. The related conflicts should be inclusive in the sense that they seek to combine the struggle for social and ecological sustainability, avoiding any false opposition. An exclusive dedication to the ecological conflict axis tends to ignore social sustainability goals; conversely, focusing exclusively on the social conflict axis leads to ecological objectives being neglected. In both cases, the conflicts become independent from one another in such a way that actors on either of the conflict lines essentially tend to act against one another.
For example, we are currentlywitnessing in the car industry how the social conflict axis isincreasingly developing in isolation from (or, indeed, in opposition to) the ecological one. One might be baffled, or even outragedby workers who see green parties as their main enemy. At the same time, this outrage is not very convincing as long as the problem of class-specific decision-making power concerning the What, How, What For, and with/from What of production is ignored. Decisions with regard to business models, products, and production processes have been monopolised by tiny minorities within the ruling classes. According to our heuristic, they make up less than 1% of the entire working population. Even the most powerful works councils and trade union organisations are largely excluded from these decisions. And yet, this exclusion is entirely tabooed in political debates on the left, which focus exclusively on consumption patterns. In fact, the main cause of climate-damaging emissions is not individual consumption. It is the investments associated with the private ownership of the means of production and the related exclusive right of disposition. Consequently, what is really needed is a radical democratisation of production-related decisions – which are currently the privilege of tiny elite groups. It is the only way that producers can assume responsibility for the products they make.
Unfortunately, the larger part of the political left is indifferent to this fundamental problem, seeing as questions of production, industrial work, and trade unions have long ceased to be the key topics of left-wing debates/strategies. That is why it is important to make visible those who have been invisibilised and to give a voice to those who have been forgotten. What matters to workers is professionality and expertise. They are tired of a political jargon ofsugar-coating and empty phrases. They prefer straight talk. Workers are open to measures towards climate action, as long as they are consulted and included. Strong works councils and trade unions are insufficient for this. But they are indispensable for successful workplace conflicts in the future, including saving jobs during the transition and implementing a reorientation towards ecologically sustainable jobs.
The introduction of “time for democracy” (“Demokratiezeit”) meetings – at least one hour per week during working hours – dedicated to discussing issues related to the transformation might appear as a small step. But it would still be an important measure – and one that will hardly be won without intense workplace conflicts; moreover, it would have to be followed by many more such steps in order to create conditions in which transition-related conflicts (or “transformation conflicts”) can be resolved productively. It might be an approach to breaking out of that downward spiral which production workers in particular feel caught up in. This could be flanked by emancipatory educational inputs that provide an interpretative frame for workers’ everyday critique of society and capitalism. Of the respondents in our surveys at Opel in Eisenach and at Volkswagen in Kassel, 77% absolutely agree or tend to agree with the statement that “climate change represents the greatest challenge of our time”; only 12% disagree. The statement, “I’m happy to spend more money in return for a sustainable lifestyle”, is supported by about 58% of respondents, with one-fifth “absolutely agreeing”. One indicator of the critical worldview we found is that 64% of respondents at both factories tend to agree or absolutely agree with the statement that “today’s economic system will not survive in the long run”; whereas only 2% disagree.
Protecting this anti-capitalist sentiment from being weaponised by the far right is only possible if that separation of production and conscience – which philosopher Günther Anders believes is responsible for conformism and the “blindness to the apocalypse” – is called into question. For the time being, we are lightyears away from a worker consciousness that actively claims responsibility for what is being produced. It could be the task of an emancipatory class politics to at least propose such a sophisticated, positive understanding of freedom. Such an approach might contribute to giving workers what they miss the most – their honour and dignity both in the workplace and in society as a whole.
In the absence of such transformative developments, the systems of government not only in North America and Europe will increasingly develop towards Bonapartist democracies. Theories of Bonapartism become interesting once the tension between capitalism and democracy openly emerges, without a resolution of this tension in sight. However, not every authoritarian or dictatorial form of rule can be classified as Bonapartism. Moreover, a simple transfer of Marx’s analysis to the present is not possible. Nevertheless, theories of Bonapartism always hold a great potential for stimulating state analysis when they are applied to historical configurations in which democracy is being, as it were, de-democratised from within – when the subaltern classes are blocked from progressive ways of asserting their interests. Understood in this way, Bonapartist theories can be used to explain contemporary right-wing populism and radicalism. If the “exceptional form of Bonapartism” is to be examined in its specificity, at least three constitutive elements of such a theory must be considered: the absent revolution, the political interregnum including the underlying balance of forces and relations of power, and a “transformismo” of (right-wing) law and order parties that is ultimately directed towards the past. Their rise serves neither the purpose of preventing revolution, nor is it a response to advancing socialist reformism. Contemporary rightwing Bonapartism is a reaction to the inability of the ruling social bloc to meaningfully compensate for the blowbacks of market-driven globalisation or – more broadly speaking – the failure to help bring about a long overdue eco-social sustainability revolution. The “transformismo” of the oppositional right-wing bloc attacks a political interregnum that is caused by the fact that the competing old and new elites – those formerly hegemonic, or those in the ascendency, or the various outsider factions of the ruling classes – have so far failed to offer ways out of the crisis. Of course, this attack of the far right is not aimed at accelerating the implementation of an ecological-social sustainability revolution. The opposite is the case. New right-wing populism and rightwing radicalism represent a backward-looking, authoritarian political version of the ecological-economic pincer crisis. Theradical far right responds to the blowback effects of globalization with nationalism, to increasing inequality with an ethnicization of the social question, to the ecological crisis and climate change by denying or downplaying the threats, to refugees and migrants with isolation and deportation fantasies, and to the spread of liberal-libertarian values with antifeminism and a return to a Social Darwinian performance ethos as well as an exclusive (and excluding) national culture.
The radical far right has occupied all these lines of conflict. All internal disputes aside, it is managing to act as a “mosaic right” in which every grouping has a specific role. Its rebellious authoritarianism heightens its assertiveness – if needed, by violent means. All this makes it appealing to workers who no longer trust the left. Indeed, the fact that they are delegating the representation of their interests to a far right that ultimately aims at the elimination of all forms of workers’ power is the great tragedy of our time.
Patricia Mattos: Various intellectuals have demonstrated the relationships between neoliberalism and the rise of the far right, with nationalist, xenophobic, and reactionary discourses in several countries of the Global North and South. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, discussions about the crises and the future of capitalism cooled down, only to return to the fore of debate within critical theory with the financial crisis of 2008. It is notable that capitalism, as Wolfgang Streeck aptly defined it, has always been a social formation full of distributive conflicts and contradictions which, in moments of crisis, led the elites to forge social pacts. With neoliberalism and its baleful effects – the precarization of labor; the loss of social and labor rights; a State acting on behalf of the market and incapable of resolving social conflicts; the privatization of public services, among others – distributive conflicts and social inequalities are intensified. Moreover, as Nancy Fraser points out, capitalism destabilizes the extra-economic domains of politics, social reproduction, and nature, generating countless “boundary crises.” It is in this context that democratic capitalism appears to be at risk, owing to the impossibility of establishing a social pact that reconciles the yearnings for unlimited accumulation with the idea of social progress, to use Streeck’s terms. The absence of consensus among intellectuals about the potentials of, and the obstacles to, overcoming neoliberalism, together with the lack of clarity on the part of much of the population that the causes of many of their problems are bound up with the neoliberal logic – as Rahel Jaeggi pointed out in conversation with Fraser – makes the debate about the relationships between capitalism and authoritarianism, and about the possibilities of resistance, more complex. Even though there is a multiplicity of factors that explain the advent of authoritarianism in various parts of the world, it is noticeable that authoritarian discourse in the Global North prospers, above all, in the face of individuals’ fear of losing their standard of living, by way of the blaming of foreigners, whereas in the Global South this discourse intensifies owing to the limitations of social advances. If, on the one hand, we have proposals such as that of a feminism for the 99%, which calls for an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, eco-socialist, and internationalist struggle, on the other hand we face not only the difficulty of sustaining the context of social conflicts beyond their sporadic character, but also the problematic lack of consensus among people about the social causes of their problems.
Edson Farias: We are the contemporaries of the most dramatic inflection point in the dynamics of capital reproduction in decades, since we are experiencing the worst outcomes of the socialization of the losses caused by the financial system, with the crisis that erupted in 2008. The economic stagnation, brought about by the excess liquidity stemming from central banks’ intervention to bail out banks, favored investment in the stock market to the detriment of investment in production. This left as its legacy the coupling of flattened incomes with sharp unemployment, widening precarity to unthinkable levels not only among fractions of the working classes but also reaching portions of the middle segments. This scenario plays out alongside the prominence achieved by disruptive solutions that, from within the political system itself, propose to annihilate it. These are authoritarian claims that attribute to the argumentative construction of consensus – through which contradictions are exposed so as to seek means of resolving them – the reasons for a presumed paralysis of the public powers in confronting the great challenges of the present. The premise is emphatic: state command, the legislative assemblies, and the courts of law must be in the charge of those who bear the morality of the victors – in this case, the members of a plutocratic oligarchy made up of the capitalist corporate leaders enclosed within the club of global billionaires.
2. How do you think your field of knowledge could engage with other disciplines in building this assessment?
Klaus Dörre: We need a public sociology and social science that engages with other disciplines by stepping out of the ivory tower of academic knowledge and communicating with the public. Originally, the idea of public sociology was developed by Michael Burawoy, an industrial sociologist and the current President of the International Sociological Association (ISA). I have to admit that for a long time I did not follow the debate initiated by Burawoy’s ideas. However, during a visit to Johannesburg, I came into direct contact with the application of his theory. In early September 2012, I was a participant at an international colloquium on ‘The Politics of Precarious Society: A comparative perspective on the Global South’ at the University of the Witwatersrand/Johannesburg. The colloquium, organized by the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) represented by its director Karl von Holdt, focused specifically on the concept of a ‘precarious society’. While the colloquium was taking place, the events at the Marikana platinum mine were reaching their tragic climax, and Karl von Holdt took this parallel development as an example to explain a ‘precarious society’. At that time, around 5000 workers at the Marikana mine had come out on strike. On the last day of the colloquium, the South African Times newspaper ran the front-page headline: ‘Miners declare war’. The striking miners, some armed, had presented the management with an ultimatum with their demands. Some days before, the police had opened fire on the miners with automatic weapons, killing 34 people – but those who died in that massacre were not the only ones killed. Over the previous weeks, ten people had already lost their lives, including two security guards and two police officers. Evidently, the strikers were also using violence, not only against security guards and police, but also targeting strike breakers and those miners wanting to continue working. William Stone, the strikers’ spokesperson, left no doubt that, if necessary, the workers were also ready to use violence to push through their demands. Stone responded to the call to sign up to a peace agreement with the words: “Can you eat peace? Can you buy food and clothes with peace? What is this peace thing? We do not want peace and will not accept peace. We need our money before we make peace… we will continue to fight and die for our money. We are not afraid to die or to do what we need to do for our money.”
While the official line initially attributed the strikes to a conflict between two competing trade unions and the police use of firearms as ‘self-defense’, the SWOP social scientists, including some who have been researching into the platinum and gold belt for years, presented a different picture. Against the background of falling platinum prices, they pointed out how the management’s cost-cutting strategies further intensified a fragmentation of the labor force. Moreover, they continued, many of the miners were migrants who did not speak English, and were also segregated in terms of social space. In contrast, the activists of the National Union of Miners (NUM), the dominant trade union, negotiated in English. Collective labor agreements were decentralized, concluded with and within the individual companies. Consequently, the social scientists reported, some mines paid a gross monthly wage of 4500 rand (slightly over 450 euros), while others paid 9000 rand a month – a situation encouraging mine workers to engage in decentralized ‘renegotiations’. Given that, to secure jobs, the NUM had linked elements of its wage agreements to management concessions, it was less flexible towards spontaneous strikes; this, in turn, offered an opportunity for smaller, more radical trade unions. Furthermore, they noted, increased social inequality under the ANC-led government had led to precarious groups no longer being represented politically and socially, and it was precisely this which promoted violent conflicts. In Karl von Holdt’s view, the readiness to use violence produces two different kinds of law in the everyday world of those living in precarity. He argues that during transformation processes new social rules need to be created and anchored in civil society. Such anchoring, though, does not succeed in societies experiencing extreme social inequality where precarious groups no longer see themselves as represented. Instead, this leads to the production of social spaces where particular groups regard themselves as justified in suspending the legislation in force and resorting to violence. According to Holdt, this in turn leads to a ‘habitus of defiance’ generating violent practices which are upheld despite the existence of democratic institutions.
In my view, irrespective of the various interpretations and evaluations of the events at the Marikana mine, this debate powerfully illustrates the force of public sociology. In Germany, public sociology is often reduced to the question of how sociology can successfully re-gain a public profile and audience. But for Michael Burawoy, who developed the idea of public sociology and was the colloquium’s patron and guiding spirit, it means very much more. He regards public sociology as capable of creating a new relationship between sociology and practices inducing social change. South African researchers, with their expertise on the work and life situation of the miners, have provided an excellent example of how this could work, contrasting the official picture of events at the Marikana mine with their differentiated sociological research, and so making the previously invisible visible. Their exclusive knowledge is the result of a close cooperation in a spirit of trust built up over many years with the unions, as well as with the miners themselves And of course, the SWOP scholars and researchers were willing, there and then, to input their knowledge into a debate critical of the government. Even during the colloquium, scholars and activists were already discussing a joint declaration leaving no doubt that these events represented a historical turning point with dramatic consequences for the stability of democratic institutions in South Africa. With such commitment very much in evidence, it was no surprise to find Michael Burawoy referring to SWOP during an evaluation session as the ‘ideal type’ of institute that understands how to apply public sociology successfully.
Yet despite working so well in this example, it appears to be rather difficult to put public sociology into practice – as became obvious at an informal meeting of the South Africa Public Sociology group, taking place on the fringes of the colloquium. Numerous groups, above all those active in the global South, now organize seminars which can be followed around the world on digital media by students and other interested viewers. After three intensive days of the conference, the participants discussed far into the night such questions as: What does it mean to involve activists without becoming a political actor oneself? How far does bias negatively impact scholarship? Should the seminars deal more with local topics, or exclusively address phenomenon that could have a global profile? And how can the idea of public sociology become a valuable tool for different local contexts?[1]
In essence, such questions are not really new. In Germany and Europe, they are located in discourse fields ranging from critical theory and sociology to action research, and have been discussed many times under different economic conditions and with different emphases. But what is particular about public sociology? Michael Burawoy himself has provided an answer to just this question in his discussion of a four-fold distinction in the production of sociological knowledge. In his view, traditional sociology (which he terms professional sociology) underscores the neutrality and value-free nature of sociological knowledge. This, he suggests, largely adopts an empirical and positivist approach, attempting more or less to develop types of theory and knowledge modelled on the natural sciences. The approach’s strength lies in its strict adherence to the idea at the heart of scientific endeavor: the search for the truth – an aspiration excluding superficial value judgments. Research findings based on empirical evidence are established and presented independently of any applied context and partisan interests. Sociological – and social science – research should never fail to meet this postulate of value-free scholarly research.
However, the problem of a purely descriptive sociology is then that “all sociology can observe is power relations” (Boltanski, 2010: 1). On the other hand, power and exploitation are veiled in societal relations; with the means available in standard sociology, it is impossible to uncover such mechanisms. The descriptive social sciences can observe their object of ‘society’ and analyze the most varied forms of power without needing to relate them to one another. In other words, traditional or standard sociology adopts a simple “exteriority” located in the ivory tower of pure science. From this “simple exteriority”, traditional sociology claims to maintain a distance towards its object. It reduces the complexity of its object to a point where it can be empirically investigated. Ultimately, though, traditional sociology must always fall short in its desire to emulate natural science theories since it is dealing with social actors within concealed power relations that remain closed to a purely descriptive sociology.
Hence, traditional sociology faces the challenge of seeking to ignore the tension necessarily inherent in any sociology aiming to critique social relations rather than just describe them. Yet as Luc Boltanski (2010: 16) rightly notes, this tension is “ever present”, and reveals itself in the “worthy” attempt – “necessarily doomed to fail” – of joining “the so-called positive sciences”. In Boltanski’s view, the external signs of this failure in emulating the natural sciences not only include an impersonal style of writing, citations reduced to an author’s name, and the “mania for quantification, expressed in an ostentatious accumulation of figures and tables”, but also the “‘sharp’ controversies polarized over the latest argument thought to make the difference – something that avoids examining shared premises, which are often overshadowed” (Boltanski, 2010: 16).
A practical sociology – in Burawoy’s terms, ‘policy sociology’ – resolves the tension in the scholarly production of knowledge, social critique and the practice of social actors in a different way. This type of sociology is directed to the production of applied knowledge, and is shaped by the needs of the market and its clients. Within this framework, practical sociology aspires to improve the practice of those utilizing this knowledge, or at least to place that practice on a more professional foundation. Its strength lies in its proximity to social actors. Practical sociology deliberately leaves the ivory tower behind, seeking to produce consultancy expertise which is, in essence, justified by the context of its application. To that extent, in a certain sense practical sociology is the opposite of what traditional or standard sociology claims to be. Just to prevent misunderstandings: practical sociology, in as far as it builds on scientific means and methods, also embodies a fully legitimate type of knowledge production in the social sciences. For example, if one looks at the research departments of large companies and consulting agencies, there can be no doubt that they are producing databases with considerable knowledge value.
Practical sociology’s strengths certainly lie in the highly effective and applicable transfer of knowledge through more or less powerful social actors; at the same time, though, this is precisely the weakness of this type of knowledge. In practical sociology, the object of its research becomes a business activity, and this makes the knowledge dependent on the patron or the clients. Since this type of sociological knowledge production is not interested in a social critique or criticizing prevailing power relations, it does not need a holistic view of society. Instead, it is concerned with solving problems or at least enhancing the basis for decisions taken by societal problem solvers. Given this focus, it generally loses sight of the prevailing power relations so that good social practice appears to be nothing more than merely applying the ‘right’ recipes. Consequently, social criticism or a critique of the practices of the social actors who are the clients seems disruptive and inappropriate, and so practical sociology constantly runs the risk of serving as instrumental and instrumentalised knowledge for well-funded customers capable of applying practical solutions.
Critical sociology does not have this problem. This differs from traditional or standard sociology in seeking to provide an analytical framework to identify societal contradictions and distinguish them from mere disparities. As a theory of power, critical sociology always contains a meta-theory of society. However, once critical sociology, on its own account, makes pronouncements on the social order, it surrenders any claim to neutrality. In order to integrate the discontent and frustration of social actors, though, it is also dependent on a trade-off on the critique of everyday life with dominated groups, since the “… idea of a critical theory that is not backed by the experience of a collective, and which in some sense exists for its own sake – that is, for no one – is incoherent” (Boltanski, 2010: 5). Consequently, critical sociology also needs standard sociology. A theory critical of power relations has to build on the descriptive, empirical analysis provided by a hermeneutic of everyday knowledge, moving from a “simple” to a “complex exteriority” (Boltanski, 2010: 6). The “simple” exteriority corresponds with the exterritorial standpoint necessarily required by descriptive sociology to guarantee analytical distance to its object. In contrast, “complex exteriority” is shaped by the fact that a sociology criticizing power relations always has to act on two levels: on the one hand, it depends on data to provide it with knowledge about the state of the social order, yet on the other, “to be critical, such a theory also needs to furnish itself … with the means of passing a judgment on the value of the social order being described” (Boltanski, 2010: 8). In essence, the tension between these constraints cannot be resolved. As a result, a social science’s potential is constantly established in a process of “forging” compromises (Boltanski, 2010: 10). The major sociological theories differ in their particular mode of dovetailing description and critique. Critical sociology often faces the basic problem that it absolutizes the “complex exteriority” which it adopts; it then frequently gives the impression to the dominated groups and social actors whose criticism of everyday life it remains dependent on that its critique is based on some abstract standard unable to be realized in practice. In this way, sociological critics can easily be characterized as eternal know-it-alls, and their critique then disregarded as relevant for the practices of social actors. Public sociology, the fourth type of knowledge production in the social sciences, adopts a particular approach to try and remedy this misunderstanding of knowledge production, social criticism and practices promoting social change.
In essence, public sociology is nothing more than a new attempt to establish a basis for the interaction of both critical academic theory and the practices of social actors critical of prevailing power relations. What is new, though, is that it starts from the changes in the academic field. The competitively-driven Landnahme of colleges and universities (Dörre; Neis 2010), or in Michael Burawoy’s words “a third wave of marketization,” has irreversibly destroyed the ivory tower of pure science: “Even deeper, third-wave marketization invades the hidden abode of knowledge production, the university. The ivory tower – academic freedom and university autonomy – may have been a defense against second-wave marketization, but today its ramparts are falling to corporatization, privatization and profit considerations. From a public good, it becomes an economic good. We can no longer build a moat around the university, but instead we must venture out of the ivory tower, and join forces with other publics that face the tsunami,” (Burawoy, 2008: 359). Cultural scholar Terry Eagleton has similarly expressed this idea: “As a centre of criticism, inquiry, reflection, and general and fundamental questions, the university is almost dead […] These institutions are increasingly becoming an instrument of advanced capitalism. I am neither joking nor exaggerating when I say that in twenty years’ time the humanities may not exist at British universities any longer […]” (Eagleton, 2014: 12).
The situation of the social sciences and the humanities may be slightly less precarious in Germany, yet the trend towards the ‘entrepreneurial university’ is also strikingly obvious here too – and it is this trend which has inspired the idea of a public sociology. However, although one talks of ‘public sociology’, one should not forget that this is a label embracing a collection of various research approaches and forms of knowledge production and transfer. Nonetheless, despite this heterogeneity, one can formulate six guiding principles of public sociology. The idea of public sociology inherently (a) questions the ‘entrepreneurial university’ as the basis for knowledge production in the social sciences and the field of sociology. This leads to (b) the interest of sociologists and social scientists in forming alliances with social groups and actors resisting this ‘process of competition’. From the scholarly perspective, these alliances are based on (c) the aim of using sociological instruments to make visible what is invisible or socially repressed. This best succeeds (d) through generating everyday knowledge – indeed, transformative knowledge – which researchers can only access if they are in a position to establish relationships of trust to dominated social groups and actors. Thus, research (e) has to be conducted in a close exchange with activists in social movements and social organizations; the findings are then transferred back to practitioners in a condensed form. They are prepared by scholars for civil society actors without the academics themselves taking sides. As a result, public sociology entails (f) creating privileged access for researchers to hidden bodies of knowledge and integrating the everyday criticism of prevailing power relations included in them in order to process them and provide them for an appropriate audience. This has a two-fold effect: sociological research becomes better and more interesting while, at the same time, through the scholarly analysis, everyday criticism gains a public voice, whose effectiveness increases with the quality of the underlying research.
Patricia Mattos: I believe it is possible to establish rich dialogues among social theory, sociological theory, and political theory in order to develop reflections on political domination and on the potentials of, and limitations to, a struggle against neoliberalism. Debates with Psychology could also foster interesting analyses of the psychosocial causes of authoritarianism.
Edson Farias: As a researcher of themes relating to socio-communicative phenomena, I cannot fail to observe that the broad diffusion and feedback of the ideas underlying the current authoritarian solutions finds formidable support in a contemporary mode of symbolization characterized by the triangulation of the human potentials of expression with information technologies and commodification. What is currently noted under the label “attention economy,” referring to the strategies employed by Big Techs in order to secure customer loyalty, intensifies the growth of the “psychology of consumerism” that, at least since the 1920s, has run through a broad set of market-regulated societies, resisting the decline of the Fordist economy of scale in order to renew itself within the global chains of production, circulation, and value, with extraordinary ramifications in the modulation of patterns of subjectivity and in the establishment of everyday customs and rituals across the planet. A psychology whose reach cannot be dissociated from the sociocultural dynamics defined by the entanglement of visual and audiovisual symbolic forms with the media supports proper to industrialization. I am speaking in particular of the popularization of screens which, gradually since the last century, have shifted from the collective settings of movie theaters, through the advent of television, until they immersed themselves in people’s intimacy through the uses of cell phones, supporting important interpenetrations between private and public life, but also between the symbolic and commodification. In particular, from the most recent turn of the century onward, the hegemony enjoyed by the audiovisual in the public and private spheres advanced – a scope that plays out alongside the crossings of human bodies with the informational socio-technical ecologies which, through the ascendancy of cybernetics over people’s experiences and behavioral patterns, drive the enactment of protocols of expression and of self-reporting to a level unprecedented in the history of the human species. By means of internet connection, grounded in the dissemination of digital screens, it articulates supports such as mobile phones, personal computers, televisions, and laptops, allowing the exchange of videos, photos, audio, and texts in instant messages, composing a formidable repository. In such an ecology, thanks to the subjectivation that fuses citizen, consumer, and activist, what Byung-Chul Han calls the “psychopolitical subject” gains prominence – made possible by the passage from the “spectator” to the status of “user,” endowed with expressive agency, owing to the assembling of social networks and the advent of video platforms and applications for mobile telephony.
3. In your view, what forms of effective action could emerge from this discussion to address the social consequences of the current deepening of authoritarianism?
Klaus Dörre: To counter the radical right in the realm of academic debates, first, we must correct what Didier Eribon has rightly denounced as the neglect of class by the social sciences and left-wing politics. If one simply removes “’class’ and class relations from the categories of thought and understanding – and thus from political discourse,” one “by no means prevents all those who are objectively affected by the conditions behind these words from feeling collectively abandoned” (Eribon, 2016: 122). When convictions are weakened or destroyed – convictions whose anchoring in everyday consciousness has helped translate experiences of social inequality and insecurity into acts of solidarity – class relations operate in other ways. Then a causal mechanism becomes apparent that controls behaviors primarily through the classunconscious – through distinction and self-aggrandizement by devaluing others.
In order to counter this, it is secondly necessary to use scientific methods to answer the question of which social forces in the 21st century could support a progressive “transformismo” (Gramsci, 1991: 101) that resists nationalist co-optation. To do so, we must bid farewell to the myth of the single working class, which – though subject to the constant dialectic of unification and division – is still regarded as a collective subject characterized by interest-driven “potential solidarity” (Lockwood, 2010: 83). This notion of class unity is antiquated. The capacity for action of 20th-century socialist workers’ movements rested on the fact that these movements could see themselves as representing general class interests. However, this was never “in the foolish sense of declaring themselves the representatives of everyone or – even worse – of a ‘majority’” (Ingrao; Rossanda, 1996: 10). The decisive factor was the view that, in the course of “production necessary for existence,” relationships arise between people on which their “freedom depends” (Ingrao; Rossanda, 1996: 10). According to our model (see Fig. 1), the conventional working class still constitutes the relative majority of wage earners. However, it is currently rather unlikely that, in its quest to maintain or improve its status, it will become a political-social subject that has “a deep interest of its own in a society of free citizens,” “in which men and women are finally freed from external control by the ruler, the church, or property” (Ingrao; Rossanda, 1996: 10).
Thirdly, above-average professional skills make the members of the New Working Class relatively invulnerable, especially given the shortage of skilled workers. Consequently, the combination of a sense of moral injustice and an ecologically ambitious climate consciousness is comparatively stable within this class. However, average values in attitudinal patterns must not obscure the fact that the New Working Class, like all other classes, is not only politically heterogeneous but also virtually divided internally. At the left pole, female class members predominate in an interpersonal work logic that pushes for a radical restructuring of the economic and social model. At the opposite pole stand those segments of the class whose conservative mindset corresponds to predominantly technical work logics. With regard to the dynamics of transformation conflicts, it is significant where the New Working Class is oriented socially and politically. The strong anchoring of political actors open to transformation within this class presents a dual opportunity. In the long term, a hegemonic emancipatory self-awareness could emerge that encourages members of the New Working Class to look downward – toward the Conventional Working Class and the socially excluded sector – rather than submitting to the definitions of normality imposed by the ruling class and the middle classes.
In this regard, fourthly, an emancipatory education would help by providing a democratic interpretive framework for everyday criticism of society and capitalism. Educational work would need to question the separation of production and conscience that the philosopher Günther Anders holds responsible for conformism and indifference toward what we produce – and thus for “apocalyptic blindness” (Anders, 2018[1956]: 317). To truly overcome the relative indifference toward products and production processes, conflict strategies would be necessary – what Anders once termed a “product strike.” Such a strike would no longer aim merely at improving working conditions but would involve producers’ refusal to continue manufacturing products that entail irresponsible consequences. Reuniting production and conscience by radically democratizing the property-based decision-making power over the material dimension of products and production processes thus signifies a genuine gain in freedom. For, according to Anders, producers are truly free only when they also assume responsibility “for what we produce” (Anders, 2018: 369).
The working class as it currently exists is far removed from a class consciousness that actively demands such an assumption of responsibility. It could be the task of an emancipatory education for the 21st century to at least put such a demanding – because positive – understanding of freedom up for discussion. This would call for something that is most lacking in today’s trade union labor movements – the capacity for utopia, that is: a positive vision that links the socio-ecological transformation of society with the prospect of a better life for all. “Better instead of more, for everyone instead of just a few!” could be the guiding principle of a movement that connects the social class axis with the ecological social conflict in a progressive way.
Antonia and her like-minded colleagues are already busy making this guiding principle their own. In a highly practical way, they are striving not to leave the question of the system to the radical right. In the 21st century, the question of ownership – the power to decide on investments and business models – is taking center stage in emancipatory education in new ways, for the challenge lies in what a young works council member interviewed puts into the following words: “I believe we need democratization in society […] I believe there is too little co-determination in the workplaces. What products are we investing in? How is the work done? How many people are involved? Under what conditions is the work done? We have a tremendous amount of catching up to do” (works council member, Opel Eisenach). The representative quoted hits the nail on the head because she addresses the exclusion from decisions that affect the survival of everyone. The task of critical transformation research would be to give these indispensable people a voice in the public sphere.
Patricia Mattos: I think the left needs to place the question of social justice emphatically at the center of its struggle. I agree with Nancy Fraser’s diagnosis that the hegemonic common sense, based on identity movements and on liberal feminism, offers few resources for emancipation. For this reason, it is necessary for the left to foreground the critique of contemporary capitalism. I find Fraser’s proposal very pertinent – that the left should resignify the ideal of the free and autonomous subject, exposing the limitations of an autonomy tied to entrepreneurial connotations.
Edson Farias: Mark Fisher conceives the idea of “capitalist realism” to refer to an ideology in which dystopia as reality imposes an inescapable sentence: there are no alternatives to capital and its vicissitudes. I suspect this realism is, to a great extent, underpinned by the collusion established between authoritarian resolutions of the challenges of the present and the hegemony enjoyed by the audiovisual within the informational socio-technical ecologies. However contradictory it may seem, in the first place I reject the diagnosis of the generalized encapsulation of our existences within a historical spiral of abstractions/simulacra that would now culminate in the complete domination of the bodily senses and of the imagination by the illuminated screen. The realism Fisher speaks of concerns the inevitability of an eternal present, to which we would be condemned as individuals isolated in our choices. The political problem at stake, therefore, bears on reinserting collective becoming into experience and imagination. Not becoming as the confirmation of a worldly teleology, but rather as the promise of a time that does not yet exist, to be made through the potentialization of the opportunities of the now. As a researcher in the Social Sciences, I understand that we stand before a problem that calls for an interdisciplinary research agenda, allied with studies and reflections; an agenda that, well beyond examining how the mental habit of demanding sight in the confirmation of being is renewed, will have to confront this trait of the contemporary social that is inseparable from the complicity established between the audiovisual and experience.
4. Which authors and/or works from your field of knowledge do you consider relevant to this debate? Please mention three or four.
Amlinger, Carolin & Nachtwey, Oliver. (2025). Zerstörungslust. Elemente des demokratischen Faschismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Becker, Karina & Ketterer, Hanna. (Hg.) (2019). Was stimmt nicht mit der Demokratie? Eine Debatte mit Klaus Dörre, Nancy Fraser, Stephan Lessenich und Hartmut Rosa. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Dörre, Klaus. (2023). In der Warteschlange. Arbeiter*innen und die radikale Rechte (2. Auflage). Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.
Eribon, Didier. (2016). Rückkehr nach Reims. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Frankenberg, Günter & Heitmeyer, Wilhelm. (2024). Authoritarian developments as a threat to democracy and pluralism, in: dies. (Hrsg.), Drivers of Authoritarianism. Paths and Developments at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Glos/Northampton, S. 2-58.
Griffin, Roger (2020). Faschismus. Eine Einführung in die vergleichende Faschismusforschung. Stuttgart: ibidem.
Heller, Hermann. (1992). [1933]. Autoritärer Liberalismus? In: ders., Gesammelte Schriften II, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, S. 643-653.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (2024). Geraubter Stolz. Verlust, Scham und der Aufstieg der Rechten. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.
Mason, Paul. (2022). Faschismus. Und wie man ihn stoppt. Berlin: edition suhrkamp.
Neupert-Doppler, Alexander & Meisterhans, Nadja. (2025). Themenschwerpunkt: Strategien gegen den Rechtsruck, in: Berliner Debatte Initial, Band 36, Heft 3.
Paxton, Robert O. (2004). Anatomie des Faschismus. München: DVA.
Quent, Matthias & Virchow, Fabian. (2024). Rechtsextrem, das neue Normal? Die AfD zwischen Verbot und Machtübernahme. München: Piper.
Sternhell, Zeev. (2019). Faschistische Ideologie. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag.
Patricia Mattos: ADORNO, Theodor W. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers.
FRASER, Nancy. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet — and What We Can Do About It. London/New York: Verso.
FRASER, Nancy & JAEGGI, Rahel. (2018). Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Cambridge/Medford, MA: Polity Press.
STREECK, Wolfgang. (2014). Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London/New York: Verso.
Edson Farias: I think the agenda I referred to above is not confined to a specific field, because it is traversed by an arc of questions that requires the crossing of disciplinary perspectives. Merely to suggest reading paths aimed at mapping the contemporary from the standpoint of the convergence of modes of symbolization, digital technologies, and authoritarian tendencies, I cite the following four works: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis; The Politics of Algorithms: Institutions and the Transformations of Social Life, by the political scientists Ricardo F. Mendonça, Fernando Filgueiras, and Virgílio Almeida; Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han; and The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, by the Law researcher Frank Pasquale.
Note
[1] A report on the colloquium was published in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie (Dörre/Ludwig/Sparsam 2012).
Klaus Dörre’s references
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BECK, Ulrich. (1986). Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Ed. bras.: Sociedade de risco: rumo a uma outra modernidade. (2010). Trad. Sebastião Nascimento. São Paulo: Editora 34.
BOLTANSKI, Luc. (2009). De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Paris: Gallimard. Ed. alemã: Soziologie und Sozialkritik. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2008. (2010). Berlin: Suhrkamp.
BURAWOY, Michael. (2008). What Is to Be Done? Theses on the Degradation of Social Existence in a Globalizing World. Current Sociology, v. 56, n. 3, p. 351-359, 2008.
DÖRRE, Klaus & LUDWIG, Carmen & SPARSAM, Jan. (2012). [Relato do colóquio “Politics of a precarious society – a comparative perspective on the Global South”, Joanesburgo, 2012.] Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, v. 64, n. 4, p. 842-848.
DÖRRE, Klaus & NEIS, Matthias. (2010). Das Dilemma der unternehmerischen Universität. Hochschulen zwischen Wissensproduktion und Marktzwang. Berlin: edition sigma.
ERIBON, Didier. (2009). Retour à Reims. Paris: Fayard. Ed. alemã (citada como “2016”): Rückkehr nach Reims. (2016). Trad. Tobias Haberkorn. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Ed. bras.: Retorno a Reims. (2020). Trad. Cecília Schuback. Belo Horizonte: Âyiné.
GRAMSCI, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere. [Citado como “Gramsci 1991: 101”, em referência à edição crítica alemã Gefängnishefte, Hamburg/Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1991-2002; conceito de transformismo.] Ed. bras.: Cadernos do cárcere. Ed./trad. Carlos Nelson Coutinho et al. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1999-2002 (o transformismo é tratado no v. 5).
HOCHSCHILD, Arlie Russell. (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. New York: The New Press.
INGRAO, Pietro & ROSSANDA, Rossana. (1995). Appuntamenti di fine secolo. Roma: manifestolibri. Ed. alemã (citada como “1996”): Verabredungen zum Ende des Jahrhunderts. (1996). Hamburg: VSA.
LOCKWOOD, David. (1992). Solidarity and Schism: “The Problem of Disorder” in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
OFFE, Claus (Hg.). (1984). Arbeitsgesellschaft: Strukturprobleme und Zukunftsperspektiven. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus.
POLANYI, Karl. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Ed. bras.: A grande transformação: as origens de nossa época. (1980). Trad. Fanny Wrobel. Rio de Janeiro: Campus.
