Ngai-Ling Sum

This piece is a tribute to Michael’s innovative and influential idea of “public sociology” and how this can be enhanced to address the attention economy and the post-truth Trump era. Theoretically, he distinguished Marx from Polanyi and attempted to synthesize and extend their work, especially on the three waves of marketization, when examining capitalism, commodification, exploitation, and inequalities. Michael, Marx, and...

Hong Kong’s June 2019 protest was triggered by an Extradition Bill which, if passed, would allow the repatriation of Hong Kong citizens/visitors to mainland China for criminal prosecution under its rule by (and not rule of) law system. This ignites local fear of Hong Kong losing its “high degree of autonomy” under the One-Country-Two-Systems framework. The latter was guaranteed by the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration...

Marx and Engels used the term Lumpenproletariat in mainly descriptive, pejorative, and rhetorical ways. The “underclass” occupies a similar place in recent economic and political discourse, while the “precariat” has a more positive connotation. This paper employs Gramsci’s notion of the “subaltern” or “subordinate” classes, which aimed to capture the multi-dimensional nature...