Event: Who are the Ruling Class Today
The first of our free lectures on class, modern capitalism and political turmoil
In recent years, social class has returned to politics in a series of crises and explosive political confrontations. After decades in which the irrelevance of social class has been touted from politics to the media and academia, there is now a scramble across the political spectrum to pronounce on the importance of class. But how is modern class society composed? Do we still live under the same industrial ruling class which emerged with capitalism? Who are the modern middle classes, and how much influence do they really wield in public life? Who are the working class today, and are they still a threat to capitalism?
Conter and the Havens Wright Centre for Social Justice at UW Madison are proud to co-host a series of lectures with a range of leading thinkers on social class. These forums will challenge ideas in both mainstream academia and on the activist left, and equip us with an concrete analysis of class conflict and modern politics.
Who are the Ruling Class Today?
Monday, 13th February, 6pm
Doug Henwood
Doug Henwood is a journalist, economic analyst, podcaster and the author of “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class”. Henwood is the host of Behind the News. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, Grand Street, The Village Voice, Newsday, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and Jacobin. He is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Ho-fung Hung
Ho-fung Hung is Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books: China and The Transformation of Global Capitalism (2009), Protest with Chinese Characteristics (2011), and The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (2016). His analyses of Chinese political economy and Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC News, The Guardian, Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), The Straits Times (Singapore), Xinhua Monthly (China), and People’s Daily (China), among other publications.
Göran Therborn
Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His pathbreaking book, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? is a groundbreaking Marxist analysis of the relationship between economic and state power. His other books include Between Sex and Power (2004), The Killing Fields of Inequality (2013) and Cities of Power (2017). He is a regular contributor to New Left Review and other journals, and his works have been published in at least twenty-four languages.
"Death of a Yuppie Dream": Who Are the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) and What Do They Do?
Wednesday, 22nd February, 6pm
Catherine Liu
Catherine Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She works on Critical Theory of the old fashioned kind and is engaged in a long term critique of Professional Managerial Class driven liberal politics. She has written an unpublished memoir called Panda Gifts.
Gabe Winant
Gabriel Winant is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, which investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing. His second project, tentatively titled Our Weary Years: How the Working Class Survived Industrial America, explores similar problems in an earlier period. His writing also appears frequently in publications such as Dissent, n+1, and The Nation.
Peter Ramand
Peter Ramand is the coauthor of Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence and the editor of Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times: The Selected Works of Tom Nairn. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His research primarily engages questions of populism and nationalism using quantitative class analysis in the Neo-Marxist tradition. Pete is a member of the Conter editorial board.
The Strategic Dilemmas of Working Class Politics and Organization Today
Thursday, 13th April, 5pm
Cat Boyd
Cat Boyd is a Glasgow-based writer, campaigner and trade unionist. She is assistant editor at Conter and host of Contercast. She writes mainly on Scottish and American politics, culture and work.
Daniel Chavez
Daniel Chavez works at the Transnational Institute (TNI) where he runs their New Politics Initiative. After the defeat of left governments in Latin America following the 2008 economic crisis, and disappointments in European left projects, the New Politics project was initiated to learn the lessons of the past. A scholar-activist with a strong commitment to progressive Latin America, Daniel cut his activist teeth at the United Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM) in Uruguay where he worked for almost a decade.
He is the author and editor of several books, including The Left in the City: Progressive and Participatory Local Governments in Latin America (Latin American Bureau, 2004) and in Spanish as La izquierda en la ciudad (Icaria, 2004), The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn (TNI, 2008) and Nueva Izquierda En America Latina (Catarata, 2008).
Vivek Chibber
Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of The Class Matrix, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, which won the Barrington Moore, Jr. Prize. He is the editor of Catalyst and has contributed to many journls, including the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review and New Left Review.