The Rest and the West Capital and Power in a Multipolar World

by Mezzadra, Sandro; Neilson, Brett

• ISBN13: 9781804296059
• ISBN10: 1804296058
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-11-12
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

THE FIRST AND LONG-AWAITED INSIDER BIOGRAPHY OF LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA

One of seven children raised in abject poverty by a single parent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva acquired his politics on the hard road of personal suffering, inspired by the selfless example of his mother. He started work at the age of eight and didn’t learn to read for another two years. At twenty, he lost his wife and child. A union organizer in the 1980s, when Brazil still languished under military dictatorship, Lula helped form the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT or Brazilian Workers’ Party). His first steps in politics were faltering. He came last running for governor of São Paulo and would have retreated from electoral politics entirely were it not for the intercession of Fidel Castro.

More setbacks were to follow, but in 2003 Lula was elected president. He became one of the most popular politicians not only in Brazilian history but on the planet. His seven years in office saw millions of his compatriots lifted out of poverty. Disqualified from running for president in 2018, he was subsequently sentenced to nine and a half years in prison. That sentence was quashed in 2019, allowing Lula to defeat Jair Bolsonaro and win a third term.

Leading Brazilian journalist Fernando Morais has enjoyed direct, frank, and frequent access to his subject for decades. The result is a biography that paints a human portrait of grandeur and complexity.

Author Biography

Sandro Mezzadra is professor of political theory at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, and adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His work centers on the relations among globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is a participant in ‘post-workerist’ debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade. Mezzadra has published widely in the Italian, English, German and Spanish languages. His latest book in English is In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Brett Neilson is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. In the last decade, his work has centered on issues of migration, borders, and globalization, logistics and digitalization, contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and automation. Apart from writings with Sandro Mezzadra, he has published many articles and books, including Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota, 2004). His writings have been translated into sixteen languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Slovenian, Turkish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Table of Contents

Preface


Introduction
1. Yet Another Crisis?
2. Turning Production Over
3. Regimes of War
4. Working the Poles
5. Poles of Struggle


Acknowledgements
Index