Recent transformations in the global economy have sparked renewed interest in the role of the state in capital accumulation. Such transformations include a ‘return’ to various forms of state-led development across the global South since the early 2000s (in China, Russia, and other large [...]
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Australia’s student loan scheme, originally called the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), was introduced in 1989. This innovation, now known as the Higher Education Loan Programme (HELP) has since been exported around the world. It reflects a new way of thinking of [...]
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The Bureaucratic-Military State vs. Radical Democracy and the Socialist Commons
So diminished have become the political horizons of much of the left in the neoliberal era that many have become captives of what Engels once called “a superstitious reverence for the state and [...]
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Preliminaries on Colonialism and War
Marx’s theory of the modern state developed in its earliest stages by way of critical engagement with Hegel’s political philosophy. Of course, the young Marx already understood that the modern state expresses the dominance of a new form of [...]
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In August Laurie Carmichael, former AMWU and ACTU leader, former president of the Communist Party of Australia and one of the architects of the accord, died. In October commemorations of Laurie’s life were held in Melbourne and Sydney. I attended the Sydney event. It was very moving and [...]
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It has become clear that the Marxist critique of the state is once again in disfavour in many parts of the left. Sometimes this disfavour disguises wholesale political accommodation to the nation-state (e.g., with those on the left who oppose calls for open borders and smuggle in some kind [...]
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Werner Bonefeld’s The Strong State and the Free Economy is both a brilliant treatise on the work of a group of German thinkers in the interwar- and postwar years known as ordoliberals, and a forceful argument concerning the nature of present-day European monetary union. In the introduction, [...]
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For anyone interested in understanding the European “Great Transformation” that tore down the feudal structures of the past and opened the door to the modern system, Sandra Halperin’s War and Social Change in Modern Europe is a book that cannot be missed. Examining the transformation [...]
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