Our contemporary era of perpetual crises demands, we contend, a critical reappraisal of the state’s potential role, to supplant the predominant market-led responses to crisis, to advance a more equitable society. Historically, all major theories of the state—liberal and radical—have been [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group recently held a workshop on ‘negative totality,’ read through the work of Chris O’Kane, who has developed and defended that concept within contemporary critical theory. In lieu of his attendance (due to our failure to achieve space-time compression), we have [...]
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International climate negotiations have rolled around again, with heads of state at COP26 promising (yet again) to take climate change seriously, smiling for the press while surrounded by protesters. Following decades of denial and delay tactics, climate change is now being presented by many [...]
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I have the distinctly nerve-wracking pleasure of being the resident ecosocialist* charged with writing up a review of Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (hereafter KME), the latest academic tome read by the Past & Present [...]
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During the Past & Present Reading Group's progress through Kohei Saito's volume Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), we noticed a lurking, recurring reference to 'negative ontology'. This workshop is an [...]
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Introduction
We are living, as they say, in interesting times. Conversations that until recently have been confined to the margins of academia (but were very alive in social movements) have now become mainstream fare as we navigate COVID-19 and the accelerated breakdown of [...]
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In February of this year, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a Green New Deal resolution into the United States Congress. The resolution outlined a 10 year plan for the decarbonisation of the American economy in the tradition of FDR’s 1930s New Deal, but rewritten for the [...]
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