In high school, like many young women, my friends and I developed a fascination with witches. Years before we knew what feminism was, a sense of foreboding had developed among us, about our place in the world and our power relative to adults and to our male peers. As ambitious teen girls [...]
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In the first semester of this year, the Past & Present Reading Group chose to tackle the newly published Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, a collection of work by five thinkers, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. Their [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group at the University of Sydney has just completed reading Jason W. Moore’s major new book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015). The book provided very fertile ground for lively and critical discussions on [...]
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In the preface to the 1872 French edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx warned those readers who zealously seek the truth that ‘there is no royal road to science and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. In [...]
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“Did you know that approximately 3 million Australians – around 16.9% of the adult population – are either fully or severely excluded from obtaining credit from the banks?” So asks the peak body representing Australia’s payday lenders as part of their Small Loans Big Need [...]
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Let us start from the end. State, Power, Socialism (1978) is closed with a section entitled “Towards a democratic socialism” (Part Five). Poulantzas therein condensed basic tenets of his positioning before the debates around democracy and socialism running in the 1970s. These debates [...]
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Let me start this piece on Samuel Knafo’s The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard with a disclaimer: it makes no claims to neutrality or objectivity. I have witnessed the book’s development up close since approximately the turn of the century, when Sam and I [...]
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The transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist property relations…must be understood as an unintended consequence of the acts of … pre-capitalist classes, Robert Brenner, ‘The Social Bases of Economic Development’, in John Roemer (ed.) Analytical Marxism, p. 26.
The [...]
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