Charles Derber is an American academic, author and political activist. He is a professor of sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on capitalism, globalization, corporate power and oligarchy, populism, authoritarianism and democracy, militarism, the climate crisis, cultural individualism, and social justice movements.
Derber began teaching at Brandeis University in 1970 and switched to Boston College in 1980. He became a professor in 1991 and has taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs.[3]
Writings and views
Early works: attention, narcissism, and wilding
In 1980, he published a book entitled The Pursuit of Attention that focuses on ego-centeredness and "conversational narcissism"[4] in everyday life, which he shows are structured by class, gender, and America's individualistic culture.[5] H. Wayne Hogan wrote that the book "...adds nothing to the existing stock of knowledge on this subject."[6] Mary F. Rogers, however, from the University of West Florida, wrote: "...this study is a refreshingly balanced, strongly grounded exploration of the routines Americans exploit in competing for attention. The author argues convincingly that those routines exhibit many features of market behavior."[7]
In Beyond Wilding (1994), he used 1989 Central Park jogger case as a lens to examine "wilding," a term some perpetrators used to describe random acts of violence, as a larger metaphor for pervasive anti-social behavior in American society.[8] He went on to publish the The Wilding of America: Money, Mayhem, and the New American Dream in 1996.[9][10] Derber defines wilding as "self-oriented behavior that hurts others and damages the social fabric."[11] Barbara Chasin wrote that the book analyzes "...the consequences of an unregulated American capitalist system."[11] In 2013, Derber published his book Sociopathic Society.[12] He writes that we are raising too many males to not have empathy.[13] Relatedly, he has written that "Climate change is a symptom of the sociopathic character of our capitalist model."[14]
Critiques of corporations and capitalism
Derber criticizes the expansive role and influences of corporations in society in his writing and commentary. In Corporation Nation: How Corporations Are Taking Over Our Lives and What We Can Do About It (1998), he argues that America has entered a new Gilded Age dominated by corporate oligopolies, likened to robber barons, that seize wealth, erode democracy, and shape every aspect of life, from work and consumption to politics, while relying on public subsidies yet prioritizing profits over societal well-being.[15] Using a polemical style, he critiques trends like massive mergers, job displacement with contractors ("job genocide"), while synthesizing views from thinkers like William Greider and John Kenneth Galbraith.[16] Derber proposes "positive populism," a broad alliance to reform large corporations into "public" entities accountable to stakeholders (workers and society).[17] He also wrote People Before Profit, which critiques corporate globalization and proposes alternatives.[18] After the February 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, which killed 17, sparked teen survivors' #boycottNRA campaigns, leading over a dozen companies to sever ties with the National Rifle Association.[19] Derber told USA Today that companies face little downside in severing NRA ties: "The corporations (breaking ties with the NRA) are not taking a large risk by engaging in this. They’re incurring greater risk if they don’t try to ally themselves with this strong population majority and the emotionally compelling voice of these young people." He emphasized corporations' superior leverage over states and municipalities by citing Amazon's HQ2 bidding war as proof of municipalities' dependence.[19]
Derber's 2012 book 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.
Political regimes
Derber's Regime Change Begins at Home (2004) and Hidden Power (2005) analyze what he sees as the fusion of political and corporate power in the United States, framing it as a threat to democratic institutions. In Regime Change Begins at Home, Derber conceptualizes American history since the American Civil War as a succession of alternating regimes, defining "corporate regimes" as systems of rule that undermine democracy via "corpocracy," the marriage between big business and big government while prioritizing monopolies and profits over citizens and fair competition. He saw George W. Bush era marking the third such regime rooted in Gilded Age and Roaring Twenties precedents.[20]Hidden Power scrutinizes presidential alliances with corporate interests as hidden mechanisms that threaten democracy.[21]
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,[22] 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.
Environmentalism
In 2010, Derber published Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy,[23] 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.[24] 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 has co-edited some books about and with Noam Chomsky, including Internationalism or Extinction in 2019 and Chomsky For Activists in 2020. His 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.
Resistance movements
In 2017, Derber published Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice.[25] 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 edits 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.
Democracy, authoritarianism, and sociocide
In a 2024 Truthout interview, Derber and Yale R. Magrass discussed their book Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America (2023), defining the "deep state" as an entrenched corporate-military-governmental alliance since the American Civil War that upholds class and caste hierarchies, undermining democracy.[26] They note the military-industrial complex, through Pentagon ties to contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as its core, enabling secret policymaking and a permanent garrison state post-WWII that is rooted in America's dual capitalist and racial legacies that influenced authoritarian regimes, including Nazi adoption of U.S. racial ideas.[26] Tracing this through the Gilded Age, Jim Crow, and post-WWII "garrison state," they highlight bipartisan roles, growth of the military-industrial complex under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Republican deregulation under Ronald Reagan and racial appeals under Donald Trump which fueled neofascism and identity politics over class solidarity. They advocate "left populism," drawing from abolitionism, 1930s labor movements, and Occupy Wall Street, to foster interracial alliances and achieve "deep democracy."[26] They argued that Democrats need a realignment.[27]
His newest 2025 book, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations and the Quest for Democracy, argues that market-driven competition and greed are breaking down social relations and community, leading to American sociocide,[28] an epidemic of loneliness, and a breeding ground of authoritarianism.[29]
Books published
Derber, Charles (2025). Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy. Routledge.
Derber, Charles; Magrass, Yale (2024). Who Owns Democracy? The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America. NY: Routledge.
Derber, Charles; Moodliar, Suren (2023). Dying For Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Our Extinction and What We Can Do About It. New York: Routledge.
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