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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In his 1973 essay ‘Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser’, the French historian Pierre Vilar wrote ‘Anybody can call himself a historian. Anybody can add ‘Marxist’ to the title if he sees fit. Anybody can call anything he likes ‘Marxist’. Nevertheless, if [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group commenced 2022 by reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour. In my view, engaging with the book meant a rare and valuable opportunity to stop and reflect on the link between epistemology and Marxist theorising, a theme that had been haunting [...]
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The Past & Present Reading Group has reengaged its spatial turn since completing Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour; and Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities. It has done so also by travelling outside the Anglophone and European scholarly world to [...]
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I have the distinctly nerve-wracking pleasure of being the resident ecosocialist* charged with writing up a review of Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (hereafter KME), the latest academic tome read by the Past & Present [...]
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The first book that the Past & Present Reading Group has encountered in 2021 has been Martha Giménez’s Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays. Giménez’s aims are to theorise the relationship between the capitalist mode of production, social reproduction [...]
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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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