Abstract:The goal of this article is twofold. First, to illustrate how in the last decade a growing number of critical and Marxist thinkers committed to discussing and developing theories of change have started to broaden their focus by including social movements and grassroots initiatives that are "interstitial", i.e. initiatives that are developing within capitalism and are striving to prefigure a post-capitalist society in the here and now without engaging in contentious, violent and revolutionary actions and activities. To achieve this, I mainly focus on the work of four authors: Erik Olin Wright, John Holloway, Ana C. Dinerstein, and Luke Martell. The second goal of this article is to understand why these interstitial movements are getting so much attention from critical scholars and to argue that the time is ripe for establishing a theory of (and for) prefigurative social movements. The article closes with some brief reflections on the future of radical thinking that includes an invitation, directed mostly at the young generation of critical and Marxist scholars, to begin a dialogue with theories of change developed within other disciplines, to engage with activists, and to experiment with participatory methods and techniques.

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the concept of prefiguration by outlining the necessity of its contribution to a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. In the introduction, I explain how the object of critique for many social theorists has shifted over the course of the last decade from neoliberal globalization to capitalism understood as an encompassing form of life. In light of this, I enumerate the features that should define a progressive public philosophy: radical, emancipatory, and decolonized. The introduction is followed by an overview of the academic debates emerging after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–8. Among these, accelerationism fundamentally rejects the incorporation of prefigurative politics in any emancipatory political agenda. To better understand this position, I examine the origin and meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative practices in more detail in Section III. In it, I argue that prefigurative politics entails a holistic approach to social change that digs its roots in feminist and ecological thought and focuses on social reproduction and the preservation of life rather than solely economic production. Subsequently, I deploy the case of Occupy Wall Street to show that a growing number of contemporary social movements are implementing a dualistic strategy that simultaneously combines repertoires of action typical of protest movements with prefigurative practices focused on the embodiment of alternatives. This dualism, along with the limited success of Occupy Wall Street in concretizing its claims and goals, has led prefigurative politics to being labelled as incompatible with, if not even hindering, any emancipatory strategy. My argument instead is that prefigurative politics constitutes a fundamental and necessary component of any political strategy aimed at transcending contemporary capitalism since it conceives progressive social change in an ontologically and epistemologically different way with respect to political parties and protest movements. Taking this into consideration, I conclude that conventional politics and prefigurative politics can be seen as having the potential to mutually reinforce each other and that prefigurative politics should be acknowledged as a pivotal concept in establishing a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. Only by doing so, will this philosophy be truly radical, emancipatory, and decolonial.

Since the inception of the European Employment Strategy in 1997, individualized employment support has been a key priority of the European Union and its Member States. Nevertheless, empirical research on the delivery of individualized services for the unemployed is still underdeveloped. In this article, we explore how local employment agencies in three European cities tailor counselling and services to jobseekers' individual needs. We find that limited service budgets and underdeveloped organizational interfaces with social service providers tend to constrain the substantive individualization of services in practice, which works in the disfavour of vulnerable jobseekers. Individualized counselling is more widespread, at least for 91 selected target groups. However, organizational capacities for offering individualized problem assessment and advice vary considerably across "worlds of individualization" in Europe.

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In this paper, the authors analyse non-institutionalised political participation patterns of precarious urban youth in five European cities-Cologne (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Kielce (Poland), Lyon (France) and Turin (Italy)-following the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, the aim is to test the validity of the 'grievance theory' on precarious youth. In fact, the political participation of precarious youth has been overlooked to date. The article shows that across the cities, precarious workers exhibit higher levels of political participation owing to a sense of relative deprivation with respect to their regularly employed counterparts. The authors apply a logit analysis to duly consider the local context (i.e. unemployment regulations and labour market regulations). The empirical results show that precarious youth are more active than regular workers when unemployment regulations and labour market regulations are at their intermediate level, featuring as 'issue-specific' political opportunity structures. In sum, the article contributes to the debate on occupational disadvantage and political participation, shifting the focus on precarious young workers.

This introduction sets out the context of the special issue "Karl Marx @ 200: Debating Capitalism & Perspectives for the Future of Radical Theory", which was published on the occasion of Marx's bicentenary on 5 May 2018. First, we give a brief overview of contemporary capitalism's development and its crises. Second, we argue that it is important to repeat Marx today. Third, we reflect on lessons learned from 200 years of struggles for alternatives to capitalism. Fourth, we give an overview of the contributions in this special issue. Taken together, the contributions in this special issue show that Marx's theory and politics remain key inspirations for understanding exploitation and domination in 21st-century society and for struggles that aim to overcome these phenomena and establishing a just and fair society. We need to repeat Marx today. , and many others, Marx laid the foundations for the critique of capitalism's political economy. The approach he advanced operates with the help of categories such as the commodity, work, labour, exchangevalue, use-value, value, the labour theory of value, labour-time, abstract and concrete labour, money, capital, capitalism, wages, prices, profits, fetishism, surplusvalue, necessary labour, surplus labour, class, exploitation, alienation, accumulation, profit, ideology, absolute and relative surplus-value production, formal and real subsumption, co-operation, machinery, the means of production, the general intellect, the means of communication, the collective worker, the rate of surplus-value, the organic composition of capital, the rate of profit, the international division of labour, primitive accumulation, the antagonism of productive forces and relations of production, modes of production, capitalist crises, overaccumulation, the tendency of the profit rate to fall, the anarchy of the market, overproduction, underconsumption, prof- Keywords

The chapter aims at providing a set of interpretive tools to analyze the outcomes of consumer activism when performed through collective action. In the last years, there has been a shift from political consumerism understood as a practice of the individual citizen-consumer to political consumerism performed by a growing number of organized collectives like solidarity purchasing groups, consumer-producer cooperatives, ecological communities, etc. This implies that a reconceptualization of political consumerism should be accompanied by renewed interpretive frameworks and methodologies. Drawing from the literature on social movements and their outcomes, the chapter proposes an interpretive compass composed of six main features (type, domain, nature, target, timing, duration) that help in understanding the effectiveness of consumer activism. The authors then underline the importance of taking into account factors like resources, media outreach, and alliances as well as political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts.