Forthcoming Conter Projects
In the coming week, check out Conter's new radio channel and reading group...It's that or join The Queue
Over the past weeks, we have been preparing to significantly expand our range of free content, to bring cutting edge analysis of Scottish, British and global political-economy to the biggest audience possible. As always, we aren’t funded by millionaires, far less billionaires: so please support us if you can, and, as a bonus, you’ll get access to some great bonus content.
Coming Very Soon: Conter Radio
We are significantly expanding our podcast output, with dedicated podcasts on the economy, global affairs, trade unionism, history, interviews with key thinkers and activists and much more.
We want to produce more in-depth coverage, and expand our audience, in response to the massive changes we are witnessing around us.
Growing up, I was offered a number of certainties about the world – globalisation was creating world-wide prosperity, abolishing national borders and old ways of life. War, particularly in Europe, was confined to the nineteenth and early 20th centuries. And social class was dead – we were all networked individuals in an economy revolutionised by digitisation.
Today all those claims have been exposed as fantasies. A war between rival power blocks rages in Europe, with an economic war of global reach. Countries are retreating into protectionism and de-globalisation. The world economy lurches from one crisis to the next. Class inequalities and poverty flourish, and in the western heartlands stagnant incomes and insecurity have become the norm.
The world of my childhood is gone. To discuss what comes next we have an international podcast with Basque based journalist and author Ben Wray and Conter editorial board member Alice Gray, discussing a world in crisis from various vantage points.
Our podcast on contemporary workplace politics with veteran Unite activist Ray Morrell and young trade unionist of the year Lewis Akers will examine opportunities and challenges for the workers’ movement in an era of mounting industrial conflict.
Myself and Conter editorial board member Gregor Clunie will take a closer look at political economy as the era of peak neoliberal globalisation gives way to some new paradigm, as yet little understood.
James Foley and Pete Ramand will explore the world of contemporary ideas and ideology, as rulers and ruled alike struggle to make sense of it all.
Sara Bennett and Chris Bambery will explore a People’s History of Scotland and its significance for Scottish society today.
Our Encounters series will feature with key thinkers and actors from Scotland and beyond, to help us understand our momentous times.
We will of course keep our dedicated focus on Scottish affairs and our own domestic establishment. And of course Cat Boyd will return with Contercast.
All of this is available to you for free. To avoid missing anything, simply subscribe to Conter Radio on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can support our work and get access to exclusive content and events by joining our Patreon
Reading Group: Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix
The Conter Reading Group will be starting our next book on Saturday September 24th at 5pm. The reading group is held online on zoom, and is open to anyone interested.
The next book we will be reading is Vivek Chibber's The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn. This is a great new book that has reignited Marxist debates on class analysis.
If you're interested in joining, please email: reading_group@conter.scot
Author bio and praise for the book:
Vivek Aslam Chibber is a social theorist and professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst, a quarterly journal published by Jacobin. Chibber is the author of three books, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, 2022), Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013) and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, 2003).
“Along with a materialist critique of the cultural turn, Chibber restores the centrality of class. Lucid theory from a brilliant mind. Sure to generate vigorous debate.”
―Michael Burawoy, University of Berkley, California, author of The Politics of Production
Chibber’s profound reassessment of the Marxist theory of class in the light of the new culturalist arguments shows in a sophisticated and convincing way that the capitalist economic system and its class structure of capital and wage labor have a special force in constraining the choices of action open to capitalists and wage-workers.”
―Goran Therborn, University of Cambridge
“A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists―especially the anti-Marxist ones―can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is.”
―Chris Wright, CounterPunch
“Vivek Chibber’s magnificent new book carves a path forward for structuralist and materialist analysis in a post–cultural turn academic era. Chibber reformulates Marxist theory to recognize the fundamental role of class structure in shaping human well-being while allowing a place for contingency in the generation of collective action. He adroitly uses this framework to shed light on the trajectory of modern capitalism and class formation in the twenty-first century. The Class Matrix is the response to the cultural turn that structuralists like me have been waiting for, and the book does not disappoint.”
―James Mahoney, Northwestern University