December 2007 • Issue 407



Another production is possible

Another production is possible book cover

I picked (or rather, lifted) up this volume unaware that it is only the second of five in a giant project entitled Reinventing Social Emancipation. Whether anyone will be able to lift all five and reinvent social emancipation at the same time is open to question. So I’d better come clean – I’ve yet to digest even the second one properly. But I’ll certainly do my very best, during the months ahead, to keep trying. The admirable project, based in Portugal, has employed Majority World academics to put some intellectual flesh on the bare bones of the alternatives to neoliberal globalization, many of which are already up and running.

Something is surely afoot, and digesting these volumes, even incompletely, should help the more inquisitive among us to see what it looks like. It will doubtless take a lot more alternatives a lot longer to overturn prevailing orthodoxy. But, at the very least, anyone who already feels entitled to dismiss them out of hand should be required – especially by the Northern media – to read the entire series before making further comment.

Product information
by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed)
Publisher
Verso
Product number
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-148-9
Star rating
***
Product link
http://www.versobooks.com




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