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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Class Structure in Australian History has been ignored for most of its life as an academic publication. Historians argued the text was not empirically rigorous; left-wing commentators that it lacked a sufficient account of race, class, gender, the mode of production, the world-system [...]
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Over the last year, the Past & Present Reading Group has taken a spatial turn, with a triad of three books of spatial theory from different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks: Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour, and most [...]
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Discussing the analytical and political challenges
It is important to have a spatial or geographical dimension to political economic analysis, just as it is important to recognise its temporal dimension. In the real world, all human activity occurs in both space and time. Any [...]
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What is the unitary theory of space that is awaiting to be discovered in The Production of Space?
“Intellectual labour, like material labour, is subject to endless division”, Lefebvre says. “The aim is to discover or construct theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended [...]
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I first became aware of the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham a few years ago, when a friend recommended that I read their seminal work The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A feminist Critique of Political Economy. Being instantly fascinated by what the book suggested, I bought a copy and began [...]
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