PROKLA. Journal of Critical Social Science
PROKLA - Journal of Critical Social Science is a German peer-reviewed journal that has been working on topics from the fields of political economy, political science, social history and sociology since 1971. The focus is on social power relations, polarizations in the international system and the social relations with nature. The issues are put together according to thematic focuses.
In this essay, I criticise fragmented feminist politics and advocate for Promethean’ thinking – ambitious, technology- and system-oriented politics against neoliberal capitalism. How can Prometheanism be reconciled with feminist concerns, especially in relation to social reproduction and the domestic sphere? With reference to feminist debates on housework, especially since the 1970s, the possibility of automating housework and reproductive processes is explored: How can technology radically overcome ›domestic realism‹ and the ideas and realities of work and family?
Copyright (c) 2026 PROKLA. Journal of Critical Social Science
Trump II and the Military-Industrial Complex in Authoritarian Upheaval
»Project 2025« is considered to be the master plan for the policies of the second Trump administration, outlining a national-conservative restructuring of the government into an authoritarian regime. This article examines five core demands set out in the project for the military: 1. prioritizing the confrontation with China; 2. cultural change in the military; 3. maximum effectiveness of the armed forces; 4. support for border protection measures; 5. financial transparency and accountability. The question is how these demands should be viewed against the backdrop of the existing military-industrial complex and what became of them in political practice during the first year of the Trump administration.
Editorial: Emancipation – Power – Technology
In this issue, we seek to explore the relationship between »emancipation« and »technology« in a materialistic way, using relevant social problem areas as a basis, under changing, contemporary diagnostic parameters such as the increasing importance of data extraction and the automation of work, particularly in the form of generative, highly scalable AI systems. To this end, we will examine the conditions and forms of effective emancipation through technology and the contradictory movements between partial and general socialisation that minimises domination. For technologies never consist simply of »means«; they must be thought of in »means-end« contexts and are an expression of which view of problems has prevailed within social power relations, which »problems« needed to be solved and still need to be solved – and which remained excluded.
The Political Economy of Trump’s Tariffs
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'; color: black; mso-font-kerning: 1.0pt; mso-style-textoutline-type: none; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-dpiwidth: 0pt; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-linecap: flat; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-join: bevel; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-pctmiterlimit: 0%; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-dash: solid; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-align: center; mso-style-textoutline-outlinestyle-compound: simple; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: DE; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">In this article I answer two questions. First: Why is the populist Trump pursuing an aggressive tariff policy that does not have majority support? The answer is: because it primarily serves as an instrument of power for Trump in domestic and foreign policy. While Trump’s policies are generally aimed at strengthening capital, granting exemptions subjects individual capital to him. This raises the second question: Why is US capital not mobilizing against this tariff policy? The answer lies in Trump’s otherwise capital-friendly policies, lower effective tariff rates, and the dependence of individual companies on the state.
Increased transfer volumes and costly transfers, particularly of young talented players characterize the current state of men’s professional football in Europe. In light of these phenomena and against the backdrop of changes in club ownership, this article analyzes the assetization of football players: how did players become assets and what does this mean? Such a process was not without conflict; rather, it involved negotiations on the extraction of income, the distribution of risks in player transfers and the regulation of player registrations. The perspective of football players as assets developed here ultimately reveals the investor’s view of football.
Copyright (c) 2025 PROKLA. Journal of Critical Social Science
Between Stadium Diplomacy and Football Commercialism
The construction of stadiums for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania illustrates the political economy of football, in which sporting infrastructure goes far beyond its original purpose. Stadiums serve as symbols of geopolitical power, economic interests and national prestige projects. China’s »stadium diplomacy« in particular highlights how infrastructure projects are part of global influence strategies. At the same time, requirements imposed by the African Football Confederation and international marketing logic are increasing the pressure to invest, while the social costs, such as displacement, debt and the maintenance costs of the new stadiums, are often borne by society.
The Hooligans of Red Star Belgrade in the Yugoslavian War
In this article, I examine the notorious paramilitary organization active throughout the Yugoslavian war, called the Serbian Volunteer Guard, also known as Arkans Tiger, which recruited a significant portion of its members from fans and hooligans of the Serbian football club Red Star Belgrade. The subject in question is what motivated a collective of football fans and regional criminals to join a militia that became known as a particularly brutal and effective unit throughout the conflict. An organizational sociological perspective, hitherto neglected in the research, is adopted in order to identify some of the motivational means used by the organization.
The article places one segment of the German football scene at the centre of economic reflections: men’s football of the first and second division. As a starting point, professional football is defined as service production – not commodity production. The underlying business model is based on the fact that specific conditions are created in various fields through legislation and case law that deviate significantly from the way »ordinary« capitalism operates and make commercial exploitability at the level achieved today possible at all. The league’s »ecosystem« is, in effect, one that absorbs capital from other economic sectors without generating any significant amount of new capital itself.
The article analyzes the political economy of football video games using the example of EA FC and the Virtual Bundesliga. It shows how the shift from initial resistance by organized football to the mandatory integration of eFootball is an expression of »digital football capitalism.« Key features include monetization through live services, platformization, and monopolization by Electronic Arts. The VBL, as the DFL’s third competition, serves as a link between analog and digital soccer—but under the power conditions of private-sector platform structures.
Like all sports, Association Football (soccer) is a product of bourgeois society. When we depict this game’s unique global aura, we refer to the sport’s very core, its most valued global representation, performed by men in the major European professional leagues. Arguably the most important ingredient of soccer fandom is the fans’ authenticity. But this authenticity clashes with capitalist exigencies that have come to define the modern game’s very existence. It is a study of this contradiction that comprises the essence of this article.
Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, The German Party THE LEFT and the Concept of Community
This article examines the surprising electoral outcomes of DIE LINKE and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in the 2025 federal elections. Whilst previous electoral analyses have primarily emphasised tactical factors, this contribution develops a structural-theoretical perspective. The central thesis argues that the divergent trajectories of both parties reflect distinct conceptions of community and political solidarity. DIE LINKE successfully drew upon the proletarian concept of community, which reconciles subjective experiences of belonging with practical class solidarity, whilst the BSW, with its communitarian-republican understanding of community, failed to distinguish this conception from right-wing ideologies.
Structural Limitations of the Decarbonisation State
To achieve net-zero climate targets, many OECD states have ramped up ambitions to decarbonize their economies. Nevertheless, there is a serious implementation gap, which is intensified by climate backsliding pressure. Based on the argument of an emerging »decarbonisation state«, we argue that a deeper understanding of the liberal capitalist state and its basic functions can help explain this gap. The transformation to a decarbonisation state, however, challenges basic functions of the underlying liberal capitalist state model. Our analysis implies analytical and normative avenues for future research.
Labour and Politics in Israel in Times of War
Before the state was founded, the Israeli trade union Histadrut was an organ of the emerging Jewish community and only secondarily a representative of workers. This changed after the 1967 war, when tens of thousands of non-citizen Palestinians from the occupied territories joined. However, the liberalization of the Israeli economy tended to erode the union’s political power, thereby strengthening the representation of Palestinian workers. As time went on, Histadrut’s importance as a class-based actor grew, at the expense of its exclusionary, ethnic-national role. The foreseeable prospects for these two contradictory sides of the union are discussed.
Editorial: The Political Economy of Football
Football is a fascinating sociological phenomenon. No other sport captivates more people globally today. Every weekend, millions of people around the world go to stadiums and fields to watch football matches. Modern professional football has come a long way from its origins as an emancipatory working-class sport. The global industry that has developed around football since the 1990s now represents the »very embodiment of unbridled capitalism’s worst excesses« (Correia).
Datafication and Power in the Labour Process
In this article, I take a power-theoretical look at datafication in the labour process. Based on qualitative case studies, I explore the nexus between data and power at the micro level of social action by corporate actors. In doing so, I show how datafication can have different effects on the power of corporate actors depending on their position as subject or object in relation to the data collection process. A key finding is that work process data can be used not only as a management tool for process rationalisation and work control, but also as a means of power for workers.
On The (Re)Articulation of Capitalism Through Digital Regulation Technologies
In this article I define the role of digital technologies in capitalism in terms of productive forces theory with reference to activity theory as regulation technologies that today, as learning machines, can recognise, predict and produce regularities in large data sets. This allows for a new form of internal articulation – vertically between an »anti-market« that rises above the market-mediated and moral economy, and horizontally between a capitalist core and its enabling reproductive peripheries. Finally, some implications of this perspective for an emancipatory technology policy are examined.
Work, Technology, Reflexive Emancipation
In this article we explore the emancipatory potential of technologically optimized work in times of economic and ecological crises. Work and technology are understood as ambivalent forces that enable emancipation while also reproducing domination. Based on a literature-driven analysis, the article reconstructs two arenas of emancipation: emancipation from work through automation and emancipation in work through democratic technology design. Given the limits of both approaches, it argues for a third arena, which hints to a reflexive approach of emancipation: the democratization of work as a collective negotiation of shared dependencies.
Between Data Extractivism and Digital Emancipation
We examine how digital colonialism is reconfiguring the agrarian question in Brazil through data extraction, the platformisation of agriculture, and the expansion of digital and energy infrastructures. Focusing on rural regions of Rio Grande do Sul, we analyse the impacts of megaprojects such as data centers on agrarian reform territories. Based on qualitative fieldwork and document analysis, we show how land, water, and peasants’ knowledge are transformed into assets of informational capitalism, reinforcing historical inequalities. At the same time, we explore emancipatory counterstrategies, aimed at data sovereignty and collective control over digital infrastructures.
Power and Powerlessness in the Green Transformation
In this article, I examine how venture capital shapes the green transition. By analyzing power relations in investment chains, I show how venture capital shapes the technological conditions of possibility for social development. Investors primarily promote scalable, data-driven business models and only consider sustainability goals such as decarbonization if they are compatible with revenue growth. Public investors exert influence through conditionalities, but encounter structural limitations in doing so. In an outlook, I highlight transparency, democratic co-determination, and institutional reforms as key levers for a socio-ecological investment policy.
Researching and Organising Global Value Chains
One of the biggest challenges for trade unions in the 21st century is to connect and organise labour in constantly changing global value chains. In this paper, I introduce the next-node approach as a methodological tool to systematically (1) explore value chains together with workers, and based on that (2) identify networking and organisational potentials with and among workers along the chains. A participatory research project with garment workers in Cambodia documents the challenges as well as the potentials of this approach. It can be applied not only in the garment industry but in any other value chain.
The shortage of nursing staff has led in Germany to recruitment efforts extending beyond European countries, creating new transnational opportunities for aspiring migrant nurses. They use digital platforms for the navigation in a complex migration infrastructure. This study examines the intersection of social media and nurses’ migration in India and Mexico, addressing a research gap in this area. In the digital space, vloggers have a strong presence, along with influencers promoting commercial recruitment agencies, while state-run recruitment is noticeably absent. We analyse the exchange of information in the contrasting space between neoliberal subjectification for the destination labour market and a solidary community building.
We analyse the strike of Romanian seasonal workers on the »Spargel Ritter« farm near Bonn, Germany, in May 2020 and examine why resistance strategies were used as an exception in this case. The triad of »loyalty«, »exit« and »voice« is used to reconstruct the scope for action of migrant workers in the German seasonal work system. In Ritter’s case, seemingly contradictory strategies of the workers merged in a unique constellation of loss of company control, pandemic-related mobility restrictions and civil society support. The legal-geographical analysis thus sheds light not only on the structural conditions of migrant labour struggles, but also on their transformative potential.
Labour geography focuses on the agency of workers, but neglects a theoretical examination of the concept of work itself, which forms the basis of this agency. Referring to Marx’s concept of work, we attempt to (re)conceptualizes the concepts of work and social reproduction for Labour Geography. This is done with the help of a transversal understanding of work and reproduction beyond functionalist narrow-mindedness, as well as through the understanding of (wage) labour as an activity oriented towards social meaning and empowering space production.
Shipping Company Power from the Quay to the Rail?
MSC buying into HHLA at the Port of Hamburg marks a new stage in the privatization of ports: shipping companies gain structural control over transport routes, hinterland logistics, and labor relations, while state regulatory capacity declines and workers risk losing power resources. In this article, we discuss from the perspectives of Labour Geography and the Sociology of Work how this shift affects the scope for action and conflict dynamics of dockworkers, and which questions it raises for their collective agency amid increasing privatization and rationalization.
Lithium is considered a »critical raw material« for decarbonising societal metabolic processes. The conditions under which lithium is mined, and who it is mined for, are highly contested. In this article, I analyse the struggle of organised workers in lithium mining in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile. From a labour geography perspective, I show how workers’ struggles over issues of social reproduction have developed locally. I argue that spaces of social reproduction are central sites of control and power in labour conflicts in raw material extraction and thus also potential anchors for collective struggles against the appropriation and exploitation of people and nature for profit.
Labour Struggles, Space, and Socio-Ecological Transformation
In this article we bring Environmental Labour Studies in dialog with Labour Geography in order to develop an Environmental Labour Geography. We argue that the social relations of nature and the ecological crisis are contradictory spaces co-produced by labour. Using the automobile industry as an example, we propose three concepts to capture these labour processes: 1. alienated, spatially situated metabolisms; 2. ecological labour regimes; and 3. geographies of the metabolic rift. Based on this analysis, we argue that the labour movement needs to renew its spatial strategies to be able to fight pro-actively for socio-ecological transformation.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at German highway rest stops and interviews with truck drivers, I analyse (over)exploitation in the relations of production and social reproduction within transnational road freight transport. Using the case of Gräfenhausen, it illustrates how migrant drivers develop forms of collective agency while simultaneously facing everyday challenges of social reproduction. This generally demonstrates how social inequality is spatially organized and (re)produced.
Spatial changes in the field of production influence labour disputes – and vice versa. Globalisation, offshoring and outsourcing of production were partly reactions to successful worker organisation, aimed at undermining hard-won wage levels or social standards. At the same time, spatial restructuring – both nationally and globally – is giving rise to new groups of workers who are developing new forms of struggle and new strategies for organising transnational campaigns and international solidarity. Labour geography focuses on the spatial problems of class struggle. It addresses the question of how workers actively produce economic spaces and spatial scales.
Though this be Madness yet there is Method in’t – the Political Upheaval in the USA
We are witnessing a political upheaval in the US that is aimed at destroying institutions and the rule of law. It is being driven by the radicalised neoliberalism of tech billionaires and the »Make America Great Again« movement. At the same time, we are observing a global economic power that is attempting to counter its decline with a newly formed imperial policy. At first glance, both seem irrational, but they nevertheless follow their own logic and determination. This is not aimed at regression, but rather at a future that is to be withdrawn from democratic intervention in the interests of a new ruling class.
The Rule of Law as an Unfinished Project
The thesis of the article is that the rule of law must necessarily be understood as a project of social transformation. To support this, it is first shown that legal violations are commonplace in supposedly established rule-of-law states like Germany, and that they affect marginalized population groups in a severe way. Legal knowledge, legal awareness, as well as opportunities for legal mobilization and access to the law are heavily dependent on one's social position within societal inequality. Therefore, the rule of law can only be conceived as an aspirational, yet practically unattainable horizon.