David Harvey’s pioneering book Social Justice and the City (1973) takes its readers on a fascinating journey, from a mainstream liberal view of the city to a radical political economic alternative. The transition is developed through engagement with an array of complex analytical issues – [...]
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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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Financialisation, though nebulous, emerging and highly contested, is a concept that contemporary political economists can ill afford to ignore. Staff and research students in the University of Sydney’s Past & Present reading group chose the latest book by Costas Lapavitsas as a basis for [...]
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