Building on earlier initiatives, this reading group was launched in 2014 within the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney to provide a regular focus on classics of heterodox political economy, past and present. The group meets once a week to share comments, thoughts, and reflections on key books shaping the broad contours of political economy. The aim is to carry an online repository of book reviews on all the titles featured in the Past & Present Reading Group. These reviews may be in the genre of a “feuilleton” or more capacious reviews that want to say something about political economy in and beyond the Marxist tradition.
If you want to join the group or suggest an idea for a book to review please contact
The list of books read, reviewed and by whom in the group include the following reviews (most recent first), which are accessible by clicking on the individual tabs to each book title, below:
32. Flávia Soares Julius on Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias
31. Chris Hesketh on Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
30. Pranita Shrestha on Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty
29. David Avilés Espinoza on Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas
28. Adam David Morton on Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet―and What We Can Do about It
27. Elna Tulus on William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure?
26. Madelaine Moore on Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class
25. Brett Heino on Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory
24. Ksenia Arapko on Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
23. Christian Caiconte on Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
22. David Avilés Espinoza on Milton Santos, The Nature of Space
21. Anna Sturman on Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
20. Arianna Introna on Martha E. Giménez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist-Feminist Essays
19. Madelaine Moore on Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
18. Austin Smidt on Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
17. Janet Burstall on Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory
16. Llewellyn Williams-Brooks on Raewyn Connell and Terry Irving, Class Structure in Australian History
15. Riki Scanlan on Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development
14. Frank Stilwell on Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production
13. Sirma Altun on Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
12. Oliver Mispelhorn on J.K. Gibson-Graham et al., Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities
11. Natasha Heenan on Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
10. Mark Kelly on Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition
9. Gareth Bryant on Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
8. Joe Collins on Suzanne de Brunhoff, Marx on Money
7. Gareth Bryant on Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population
6. Luis F. Angosto-Ferrández on Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism
5. Martijn Konings on Samuel Knafo, The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard
4. Bill Dunn on Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877
3. Adam David Morton on Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America
2. Claire Parfitt on Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All and
1. Adam David Morton on Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism.
How are the works of Ruy Marini, Vania Bambirra and Theotônio dos Santos brought together by Felipe Antunes de Oliveira in Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina to offer a non-Eurocentric theory of “uneven and combined dependency”?
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To mark PPE@10 this post continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
From the beginning of February to the end of July this year the Past & [...]
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Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her book The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty presents a collection of essays on race, dispossession and sovereignty. She argues that ‘the thread that weaves the chapter(s) together is the intersubstantive relations between white [...]
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Almost nine years after reading Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's Dependencia y Desarrollo en America Latina, the Past & Present Reading Group has come back to visit the history of Latin American political economy. In this journey, I have the pleasure of being the Latin American [...]
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In what is an important reflection on the political stakes for wider Marxist Feminist theory, Cinzia Arruzza has counselled against the fashionable conflation of racial and patriarchy oppressions within capitalism. Asserting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class is simply not enough [...]
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Capitalism has its capacity to reinvent itself and not only survive the many crises it has caused but transform itself into more aggressive forms over the years. This has prompted many authors to query the possibility of its collapse and at what point this event may occur. More importantly, how [...]
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My first introduction to Michael Lebowitz’s Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class was through social reproduction theory. Specifically Tithi Bhattacharya’s chapter ‘How not to skip class’ in Social Reproduction Theory uses Lebowitz as a basis for centreing social [...]
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One of the grand traditions of the Past & Present Reading Group is “the pitch.” As we near the end of our current text, those who have engaged with it are given the opportunity to nominate the next book that the group will tackle. At risk of doing an injustice to any selfless members of the [...]
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