Can the notion of ‘utopia’ be explained in 500 words? This was the challenge that Mark Steven set for me in relation to his exciting new book entitled, Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2020. The book will carry [...]
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Utopia is a complex and contested concept that has been explored elsewhere here on the PPE blog by David Bell. My own work has also covered the concept of utopia in detail, notably in my book Utopian Politics. Here, though, I shall sidestep definitional debates to focus on the intimate, yet [...]
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From the very beginning, the area of mainstream economics devoted to Third World development has been imbued with a utopian impulse. The basic idea has been that traditional societies need to be transformed in order to pass through the various stages of growth and, if successful, they will [...]
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Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanations of what happens in (and alongside) markets.
As I see it, price/value theory serves as the framework to [...]
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We all know the story of utopia. It’s a tragic narrative in which hopes, dreams and projects oriented to a better world give way to ‘totalitarianism’. ‘Nice ideas on paper’ prove ‘disastrous in practice’. Utopia itself is disgraced, revealed as nothing more than dystopia disguised by false [...]
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Over the last weeks, the Marxism Reading Group of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at Nottingham University has read the book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015) by Murray Bookchin. In this post, six [...]
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