The radical Right has turned to the Left’s iconic hero Antonio Gramsci for inspiration and guidance on how to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal cultural and political domination. Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right, and many of Gramsci’s ideas, particularly cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. What radical Right intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’ provides them with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, as well as a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre. It provides a strategic direction that seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. The global Right is not ideologically unified, nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, their counter-hegemonic ideologies enable diverse actors and agendas to find common cause despite their differences.

This chapter opens the final section of the book in which I identify some promising real legal utopias emerging from social activism against unjust suffering caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, with a special focus on the pandemic and the ecological crises. In this chapter, I focus on the possibility deriving from a spiritual understanding of the dignity of human and other living beings as a source of nonconformism, resistance and struggle in the direst conditions of human suffering. Such an encounter between spirituality and unjust suffering has been at the core of progressive theologies. I propose an ecology of knowledges and practices involving secular knowledges (human rights) and spiritual or religious knowledges (progressive theologies). Progressive theologies have been in the front line of struggles against the radical separation between humanity and subhumanity. The struggle against unjust human suffering is conceived herein as a starting point for a counter-hegemonic reinvention of human rights. In light of the reactionary challenge to human rights, the progressive challenge faces a double task: to question the hegemonic conception of human rights, and to do so in a such a way as to give credibility to a stronger intercultural, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal and, in sum, counter-hegemonic conception of human rights. I begin with a radical critique of the conventional understanding of human rights and then present one of the possible paths towards a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights: the meeting point between human rights repertoires and progressive political theologies.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

This chapter explores the various analytical traditions studying the commons, the different meanings each ascribes to this concept, and their implications for challenging and generating alternatives to dominant power relations, practices, institutions and common senses (ideas). I begin by discussing the institutional tradition of commons theory, and analyzes how they are governed through collective actions and rules (institutions). I then discuss the critique of this approach from political ecology, which situates commons in the political-economic context of capitalist development. I then identify four additional understandings of commons: as social relations and commons-making practices, as movements, as an alternative political-ecological paradigm, and as counter-hegemonic environmental politics.I conclude arguing that commons invite (re)thinking of key common senses in capitalist hegemony, such as private property and the concept of property itself, the developmentalist/extractivist, growth-based economy and its violent enclosures and dispossessions, democracy and “the state”, the separation of “nature” and “humans.,” and purely rational and individualistic subjectivities.