The State and Social Movements

Prologue We live in a time marked by the revolutionary upsurge that began in the Arab world in 2011, followed swiftly by Madison, Madrid, Occupy Wall Street, and then a bit later, by Gezi Park in Turkey, the defense of Kobane, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders and Corbyn phenomena. During this whole period, tiny…

Crisis, Democracy and Reaction The current Brazilian crisis is redefining the boundaries between law and politics for a second time in less than 30 years in a dramatic and radical fashion. For different reasons, when the music stops, Brazilian politics and law will never be the same again. It seems that the Brazilian justice system…

  “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[1]   For a long time, that concise declaration by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto formed the basis for how many radicals and revolutionaries thought about the nature of political power and the state.…