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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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