Charles Derber is an American left-wing academic, activist, and Professor of Sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on perceived crises of capitalism, globalization, corporate power, neo-fascism, American militarism, the culture of hegemony, the climate crisis, and the new peace and global justice movements.
In Derber's view, the overwhelming economic and cultural power of global corporations, increasingly associated with the hegemonic power of the United States government and the issues of global capitalism and climate change, as well as with the rise of neo-fascist threats to democracy, has caused a crisis that has become the pre-eminent social issue of the 21st century. He advocates a new vision and political movement, orienting his research toward systemic analyses of what he believes are the intertwined crises society faces and the transformative potential of social movements aimed at creating a more democratic and egalitarian order.
Early life and education
Derber was born in Washington DC in January 1944, the son of New Deal economist Milton Derber. Evenings in the Derber household included dinner discussions of politics and economics, imprinting a New Deal ideological framework upon young Derber.[citation needed] Reaching adulthood in the 1960s, Derber buried himself within the works of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse while in jail for protesting the Vietnam War.[1] He attended Yale University, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1965 and was a member of Manuscript Society. He then studied at the University of Chicago where he earned a PhD in sociology.[2]
Career
Derber began teaching at Brandeis University in 1970 and switched to Boston College in 1980. He became a professor in 1991 and has been teaching in the graduate program on social economy and social justice ever since.[2] He has published 26 books, translated into 14 languages, with several best-selling works.
Derber's work falls into three major categories. One is a critique of individualism and American culture. His 1980 book The Pursuit of Attention focuses on ego-centeredness and "conversational narcissism" in everyday life as he argues is structured by class, gender, and America’s individualistic culture. In 2000, Oxford University Press printed a 20th year commemorative edition of the book.[3]The Wilding of America, in its sixth edition, is a widely used text in American sociology. It offers a sharp critique of the American Dream and hyper-individualism.[citation needed]
Derber is best known to the general public for his analysis of corporate power and globalization.[citation needed] His book Corporation Nation argues that corporations penetrate and control every sector of American life. In addition, his book People Before Profit, which critiques corporate globalization and proposes alternatives, has been published in five languages.
His books, Regime Change Begins at Home and Hidden Power deal with the marriage of political and economic power in America. It is an early commentary on what he describes as "corporate regimes" and how they can degrade into fascism, a theme of his later books, "Moving Beyond Fear" and "Glorious Causes," both co-authored with Yale Magrass. In 2006, the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) nominated Hidden Power as one of the three best American books on current events.
Derber's interests evolved to focus on ideology and political morality, as well as the new dynamics of global capitalism and of movements such as the Occupy Movement that challenge it. His 2008 book Morality Wars analyzes hegemonic discourses from the Roman Empire to the present. It also examines religious and "born again" ideologies, from German fascism to contemporary evangelical politics in the United States. Another 2008 book, with Katherine Adam, The New Feminized Majority,[4] examines the gendered character of values and politics in America. It argues that a new electoral majority has embraced progressive values historically associated with women, values now shared by millions of men.
In 2010, Derber published Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy,[5] which argues that climate change is a symptom of a "dysfunctional lifestyle" that can be solved only through a transformation of American capitalism and neo-liberal globalization. He asserts that society is seeing a third wave environmentalism that is inseparable from the broader social and economic justice movements. In 2011, he published Marx's Ghost: Midnight Conversations on Changing the World,[6] also translated into Korean and Chinese. In an imaginative encounter, Derber engages Marx's ghost in a provocative conversation about today's crises, relying extensively on Marx's own quotations. Turning to a genre of literary social science, based on conversation, Derber lays out alternative visions and political strategies for movements such as the Occupy Movement.
Derber's 2012 book The Surplus American: How the 1% Is Making Us Redundant,[7] co-authored with Yale Magrass, continues Derber's evolution into new genres of political writing. The Surplus American features not only an analysis of what he calls "surplus people"—that is, those without jobs or any meaningful place in society—but a concluding play that was performed at Boston College and other colleges.[citation needed] The book describes a dystopia in 2020 in which the majority of Americans have been rendered redundant through outsourcing, technological change, and a corporate strategy to abandon the entire US economic infrastructure. While first drafted before the rise of the Occupy Movement, the analysis is structured around a confrontation on Wall Street between financial elites and "surplus people" protesters.
In 2013, Derber published his book Sociopathic Society with Paradigm Publishers. The book states that a society can be based on what he views as "anti-social values," which lead toward violence, fascism, and sociocide. Derber argues that today's hyper-individualistic version of the American Dream is the "master cultural script" of US capitalism and helps fuel these potential perils in the US today.
In 2017, Derber published Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice.[8] It explores the anti-Trump resistance movement and the anti-systemic universalizing movement that believes are needed to transform contemporary militarized capitalism. In conjunction with that book, Derber has brought together leaders of unions and many social justice movements to examine what those groups should do next to achieve their political goals. With Routledge Publishers, Derber edited the Universalizing Resistance Book Series, in which leading critical theory intellectuals and activists analyze and flesh out stories of mass anti-systemic resistance that move beyond the siloes of identity politics in the left and progressive movements. Derber purportedly began directing a series of films and books about and with Noam Chomsky, funded by the progressive Wallace Global Fund, although the films have yet to be given a release date and their status remains uncertain. His most recent book, published in July 2023, is Dying for Capitalism: How Big Money Is Fueling Our Extinction - and What We Can Do About It with Suren Moodliar; the book analyzes corporate capitalism, climate change, and militarism as a deadly "triangle of extinction" and offers an approach to combating it. In August 2024, Derber and Yale Magrass published a new book titled Who Owns Democracy?. The book is written in a conversational format, focusing on the history and future of capitalism, fascism, and democracy in the US. It asserts that Trumpism is the latest expression of a long tradition of American fascism, but also discussed various historical struggle for economic and political democracy.
Derber is known as a public sociologist, who offers his ideological critiques and visions for general audiences, rather than formal academic research for policymakers. He has appeared on talk shows, podcasts, and social media, and has written opinion pieces for media including the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Tikkun, and Truthout. He has uploaded interviews to Youtube called "Failings of the Left" and "Security Tales," both with Chris Hedges. His books have been excerpted in Salon, Alternet, Common Dreams, and other left-leaning online publications. He champions the sociological imagination conceived by sociologist C. Wright Mills, and, like Mills, believes in melding critical scholarship with social justice activism.
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