Dr Albena Azmanova has received the American Political Science Association’s Michael Harrington Book Award for her boook Capitalism on Edge
The award “recognises an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world”.
At the award ceremony on Saturday 2 October, Dr Azmanova said: ‘This award is precious to me as it marks a critical moment in a journey that began more than 30 years ago when, as a student at Sofia University in Bulgaria, I became involved with the dissident movement against the dictatorship. That experience influenced my writing and led me to pursue lines of inquiry that challenge the entrenched views of the day.’
Dr Azmanova is Reader in Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. She is also an Advisory Board member of Kent’s Centre for Critical Thought.
Capitalism on Edge contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Dr Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Dr Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation.
