Charles Derber is an American Professor of Sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on the crises of capitalism, globalization, corporate power, 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, 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 analysis of the intertwined crises we face and analysis of 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 is a prolific author, having 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 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 the crisis of 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 is a study of how corporations penetrate and control every sector of American life. People Before Profit, a treatment of corporate globalization and its 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 treatment of 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 the 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 shows 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] (Paradigm Publishers, 2010), that shows 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 argues that we are 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 also 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 a careful analysis of "surplus people", those without jobs or any meaningful place in society, but a concluding play already performed at Boston College. The book describes a dystopia in 2020, where 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. He shows how a society can be based on anti-social values, leading toward violence, fascism and sociocide. He argues that today's hyper-individualistic version of the American Dream, the master cultural script of US capitalism, is helping fuel all these perils in the US today.
Derber's 2017 book is Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice.[8] It explores the anti-Trump resistance movement and the anti-systemic universalizing movement needed to transform contemporary militarized capitalism. In conjunction with that book, Derber has brought together leaders of unions and many social justice movement, to analyze where we go from here. With Routledge Publishers, Derber is editing a new Universalizing Resistance Book Series where leading critical public intellectuals and activists analyze and flesh out stories of mass anti-systemic resistance that moves beyond the siloes of our current identity politics in our Left and Progressive movements. Derber is also helping direct a series of films and books about and with Noam Chomsky, funded by the Wallace Action Fund. 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 a novel approach to combating it. He is also working on a new book focusing on the history and future of fascism and democracy in the US.
Derber is known as a public sociologist who writes for general audiences, offering not only sociological critiques but alternative visions. He appears frequently on talk shows, has written opinion pieces for media including the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and Tikkun and Truthout. His interviews on Youtube, called "Failings of the Left" and "Security Tales," with Chris Hedges, have gotten wide attention. He champions the sociological imagination conceived by sociologist C. Wright Mills, and, like Mills, he believes in the importance of melding critical scholarship with social justice activism.
Personal life
Derber has long been active in the peace, environmental and labor movements, from his 1960s work to register African-American voters in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and his opposition to the Vietnam War to current movements such as Occupy and the struggle to prevent climate change and transform global corporate capitalism into a robust economic and political democracy.[according to whom?]
Works
Derber, Charles; Moodliar, Suren (2023). Dying For Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Our Extinction and What We Can Do About It. New York: Routledge.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as socialism or communism.
The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies, such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
Conflict theories are perspectives in sociology and social psychology that emphasize a materialist interpretation of history, dialectical method of analysis, a critical stance toward existing social arrangements, and political program of revolution or, at least, reform. Conflict theories draw attention to power differentials, such as class conflict, and generally contrast historically dominant ideologies. It is therefore a macro-level analysis of society.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
Social change is the alteration of the social order of a society which may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Sustained at a larger scale, it may lead to social transformation or societal transformation.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. Marxism has had a profound impact in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
In political and sociological theory, the elite are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "those people or organizations that are considered the best or most powerful compared to others of a similar type."
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety. Criticism of capitalism is generally a left-wing to far-left stance on political economy.
Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.
Sidney George Tarrow is an emeritus professor of political science, known for his research in the areas of comparative politics, social movements, political parties, collective action and political sociology.
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Charles Lemert is an American born social theorist and sociologist. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization and culture. He has contributed to many key debates in social thought, authoring dozens of books including his text Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life, 5th edition. From 1982 to 2010, he taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his family.
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism.
Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order is a 1966 book by the Marxian economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. It was published by Monthly Review Press. It made a major contribution to Marxian theory by shifting attention from the assumption of a competitive economy to the monopolistic economy associated with the giant corporations that dominate the modern accumulation process. Their work played a leading role in the intellectual development of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. As a review in the American Economic Review stated, it represented "the first serious attempt to extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism." It attracted renewed attention following the Great Recession.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1990s.
In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and relations of production into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating to production including its culture, institutions, roles, rituals, religion, media, and state. The relation of the two parts is not strictly unidirectional. The superstructure can affect the base. However, the influence of the base is predominant.
Marxism was introduced by Karl Marx. Most Marxist critics who were writing in what could chronologically be specified as the early period of Marxist literary criticism, subscribed to what has come to be called "vulgar Marxism." In this thinking of the structure of societies, literary texts are one register of the superstructure, which is determined by the economic base of any given society. Therefore, literary texts are a reflection of the economic base rather than "the social institutions from which they originate" for all social institutions, or more precisely human–social relationships, are in the final analysis determined by the economic base.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also known as Capital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy and critique of political economy written by Karl Marx, published as three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his life's work, the text contains Marx's analysis of capitalism, to which he sought to apply his theory of historical materialism "to lay bare the economic laws of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. The text's second and third volumes were completed from Marx's notes after his death and published by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
