In his 1973 essay ‘Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser’, the French historian Pierre Vilar wrote ‘Anybody can call himself a historian. Anybody can add ‘Marxist’ to the title if he sees fit. Anybody can call anything he likes ‘Marxist’. Nevertheless, if [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group commenced 2022 by reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour. In my view, engaging with the book meant a rare and valuable opportunity to stop and reflect on the link between epistemology and Marxist theorising, a theme that had been haunting [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group has reengaged its spatial turn since completing Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour; and Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities. It has done so also by travelling outside the Anglophone and European scholarly world to [...]
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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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The first book that the Past & Present Reading Group has encountered in 2021 has been Martha Giménez’s Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays. Giménez’s aims are to theorise the relationship between the capitalist mode of production, social reproduction [...]
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For the last book of 2020, the Past & Present Reading Group tackled Georg Lukács’ classic, History and Class Consciousness. There was a general sense that although the text remains a critical work for the development of a theory of praxis and for historical materialism more broadly, as [...]
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There is too much to say. At the same time, there is a marked simplicity to convey. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition is both a sprawling investigation and also hums a singular refrain. To convey these rhythms, this brief piece will attempt to both entice readers to [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group at the University of Sydney has just completed reading Moishe Postone’s classic book Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The book provided very fertile ground for [...]
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