Costas Panayotakis

Faculty Fellow

Costas Panayotakis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. Originally from Greece, he received a BA in Economics from Stanford University and a PhD in Sociology from CUNY’s Graduate Center. His numerous articles, essays, and book reviews on issues relating to globalization, political economy, ecology and social movements have appeared in a number of journals, including Sociological Theory, Review of Radical Political Economics, Environmental Ethics, Socialist Register,Capitalism Nature Socialism, Science and Societyand Rethinking Marxism. He has also published articles in various newspapers and magazines both in the United States and in Greece and has been interviewed by numerous TV and radio programs in the US and abroad. His book Remaking Scarcity: Economic Democracy and the Myth of Market Efficiency will be published by Pluto Press this fall. He is also the Book Reviews editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism. An amateur performer, he is also the creator of Austerity Nut, who travels through New York City subways preaching the need for all working people to sacrifice for “our suffering brothers and sisters on Wall Street.”

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?