Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia.
Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation-states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate power along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, and intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state.
Written for both an academic and a general readership, in the U.S. and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics.
Introduction
1. Marxism and Early Capitalism
2. Capitalism: From Marx to Weber
3. From Lenin to Gramsci
4. Authoritarian State, Mass Society
5. Mills: Beyond Marx and Weber
6. Capitalism, Technology, Power
7. The Military Behemoth
8. The Road to Ecosocialism?
Sheldon Wolin - A Tribute
Biography
Carl Boggs has been professor of social science at National University in Los Angeles for more than 30 years. He has written 25 books in the areas of critical social theory, European politics, American politics, U.S. foreign and military policy, and film studies. For the past 25 years he has been a regular contributor to the online magazine CounterPunch. He is a member of the editorial boards of New Political Science, Theory and Society, and the Global Studies Association. He is recipient of the Charles McCoy Award for career achievement from the American Political Science Association.
"In Fugitive Politics, Boggs returns to his days as a campus radical, yolking together two influential yet seemingly disparate narratives in order to fashion a fugitive politics repurposed to challenge the misplaced ontological confidence of much of today’s academic left. In so doing he proves that today’s algorithmic understanding of politics often serves as an ontological block to capturing the analogue experience of political repression that Boggs and his contemporaries lived on a daily basis. Blending the prehensive nature of political activism with his pathfinding theoretical work on Gramsci, Lenin, and Marx, and his prescient forays into ecosocialism, Boggs creates new zones of contestation, sites of scholarly outlawry, enclaves of political insurgency and fugitive deploys that are equipped to challenge the arc of historical struggle that could not be anticipated by the political sages of yesteryear. This book is vintage Boggs, fearless and forward-looking, at the cutting edge of the political discourse of the day, a beacon of light in these dark times."
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University, USA
