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Marxism Reading Group

 

At the University of Nottingham, the Marxism Reading Group, launched in 2006 by Andreas Bieler and other colleagues within the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), has been a pivotal space for critical exchange and dialogue. The group has retained a continued presence ever since, made up of staff and postgraduate research students, meeting each Wednesday afternoon in term time to discuss collectively chosen texts. As a result, over 30 texts have been read to date covering a range of Marxist classics, both from today and in the past. In 2014, members of the group published a joint article on the contemporary relevance of Rosa Luxemburg. The group has been a key collective project shaping spaces of self-development within an ever more market-driven higher education sector. Here we showcase some of the key developments flowing out of the group and the texts that have been the focus of political debate.

      
 

Marx at the Margins: towards a multilinear theory of history

Andreas Bieler | May 21, 2019

In his book Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Kevin B. Anderson clearly demonstrates that Marx did not embrace a unilinear, economic determinist position on historical development. Rather, especially in his later writings, he demonstrated a [...]

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Witch-Hunts and the Birth of Capitalism: Reflections on Caliban and the Witch

Andreas Bieler | March 7, 2019

In her powerful book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes the important claim that the medieval witch-hunt across Europe constituted part of the processes of primitive accumulation, preparing the ground for the emergence of capitalism. While the enclosures put an end to [...]

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Modes of Production and Forms of Exploitation: Understanding Capitalism

Andreas Bieler | November 20, 2017

In his remarkable collection of essays Theory As History, Jairus Banaji makes two significant claims about how to conceptualise capitalism and our historical understanding of it. First, capitalism as a mode of production cannot be reduced to the specific form of exploitation around wage [...]

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How the West Came to Rule Reviewed

Paul Cammack | February 1, 2017

How the West Came to Rule is an ambitious book that has three related components – a critique of existing accounts of the emergence of capitalism as Eurocentric, an alternative approach based on Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD), and a series of empirical [...]

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Towards Labour Centred Development

Andreas Bieler | November 22, 2016

In 2014, Ben Selwyn published the book The Global Development Crisis, in which he critically engages with market-led and state-led developmental models alike. Importantly, he puts forward the novel concept of labour centred development. In this blog post, I will discuss the main [...]

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The Being and Becoming of Capitalism

Alexander Anievas | October 13, 2016

In this post, jointly written with Kerem Nisancioglu, we want to thank the contributors to this forum as well as Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton in organising it and for posing a number of insightful and challenging questions concerning our analysis of the origins of capitalism and the [...]

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How the West Came to Rule? Challenging Eurocentrism

Andreas Bieler | October 4, 2016

The notion of uneven and combined development (U&CD), introduced by Leon Trotsky in his assessment of the Russian political economy and the possibilities of transformation toward communism in the early 20th century, has gained increasing attention within [...]

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Against Eurocentrism in the Emergence and the Transcendence of Global Capitalism

Jon L. Mansell | September 26, 2016

Every cosmology, every religion, every philosophy has its myth of creation.  The monotheistic faiths have the book of Genesis, the pre-Socratic metaphysicians had their accounts of primordial forces, even modern secular science has its “big bang” [...]

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