James O'Connor (academic)

James Richard O'Connor (April 20, 1930 – November 12, 2017)^[1] was an American political economist and professor of sociology.^[2]

He was co-founder^[3] and Editor-in-Chief (1988–2003)^[4] of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, and Director of the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, California.^[5] O'Connor was also a participant in the Freedom Rides, the civil rights campaign initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality to desegregate Southern interstate buses in 1961.^[6]

After earning a PhD in economics at Columbia University, and teaching economics at Washington University and San Jose State University, he was among the new faculty hired to initiate the Sociology PhD program at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s. While at San Jose State, O'Connor co-founded and served as Coordinating Editor in the United States as part of the Bay Area Editorial Collective (along with Tasuku Noguchi – Japan, Marino Rigini – Italy, Stephan Liebfried – Germany, Tom Wengraf – Great Britain) of the journal Kapitalistate (1973-1983).^[7]

He retired from teaching sociology, economics, and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz^[5] in 1992 but remained active in the graduate program into the early 2000s.

Bibliography[]

Origins of Socialism in Cuba (Cornell University Press, 1970). ISBN 978-0801405426
The Corporation and the State: Essays in the Theory of Capitalism and Imperialism (1973). (HarperCollins, 1974). ISBN 978-0060903626
The Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973). (Transaction Publishers, October 17, 2001). ISBN 978-0765808608
Accumulation Crisis (1984) (Blackwell, 1986). ISBN 978-0631149477
The Meaning of Crisis (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). ISBN 0-631-13821-8
Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (Guilford Press, 1998). ISBN 978-1-57230-273-0