William K. Carroll is Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research explores relationships between corporate power, fossil capitalism and the climate crisis, the political economy and ecology of corporate capitalism, social movements and social change, and critical social theory and method. He has also co-directed ‘Mapping the power of the carbon-extractive corporate resource sector’, a partnership of several universities and civil-society organizations which has examined corporate power and resistance within the global political economy with a focus on fossil capital based in western Canada. He is the author of Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice (2016) and The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century (2010) and the co-author of Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works (2018). He is also the editor of The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci (2024) and Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (2021) and the co-editor of A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony (2016).
“The deepening climate crisis is caused by the capitalist mode of production and living and its main agents, fossil capital, supported by imperial politics. William Carroll gives us a historical understanding of how fossil capital´s power has led to a civilizational crisis and the current ecocide. The promise of Green Capitalism is a false one, based as it is on technological and market fetishism, “clean growth” (which usually means “dirty” capitalist accumulation) and a largely unsustainable hegemony of the everyday, e.g. the dominance of a car-centred mobility system. Historical materialism at its best! Carroll also contributes to the urgently needed creation of emancipatory alternatives. Democratic eco-socialism has the potential to unite these into a coherent project against fossil capitalism because it intervenes in production relations, promotes democratic planning and develops strategies to unite progressive forces. A must-read for activists, progressive decision-makers, scholars and anyone interested in critical thinking and radical change!” Ulrich Brand, Professor of International Politics, University of Vienna, Austria, and co-author of The Imperial Mode of Living (2021) and Capitalism at the Limit (forthcoming)