Past & Present

To mark PPE@10 this post continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014. 

From the beginning of February to the end of July this year the Past & Present Reading Group undertook a reading of Grundrisse. Meaning ‘rough plan’ or ‘draft’, Grundrisse is a series of seven notebooks written by Karl Marx between 1857-8. Unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, a defining feature of the work is its unfinished quality. Sprawling in nature at over 900 pages, any attempt to provide a precis of such a work would be a fool’s errand. So, given the acknowledged roughness of the text and, given also that the work formed the materials written in preparation for the more polished outcome of Capital, what is the value of reading this work? Why not just proceed directly to the finished product? In this short blog post I will provide a number of reasons why I think Grundrisse makes for compelling reading and should be read as part of a broader understanding of Marx’s work.

Before Capital and before Capital

Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her book The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty presents a collection of essays on race, dispossession and sovereignty. She argues that ‘the thread that weaves the chapter(s) together is the intersubstantive relations between white possession and Aboriginal sovereignty’. Moreton-Robinson’s position aligning with the aim of the book as written by a critical Indigenous scholar is clear and well-defined through a wide range of issues that are addressed in each of these essays. Thus, there are a number of avenues that a commentary on this book can take – I choose to focus on two main broader themes in relation to solidarity and power.

The aim of this book is to reveal how racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct itself as the pinnacle of its own racial hierarchy.

Almost nine years after reading Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's Dependencia y Desarrollo en America Latina, the Past & Present Reading Group has come back to visit the history of Latin American political economy. In this journey, I have the pleasure of being the Latin American spatial political economist in residence, writing up a review of Amy C. Offner's Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas.

The post Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

In what is an important reflection on the political stakes for wider Marxist Feminist theory, Cinzia Arruzza has counselled against the fashionable conflation of racial and patriarchy oppressions within capitalism. Asserting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class is simply not enough in attempting to unpack such oppressions as features of capitalism. Equally an emphasis on relationality can become bland without the capacity to decide on where a relation begins or ends. Significant logical and historical questions can then arise. Is gender oppression a structurally necessary feature of capitalism? Is discrimination based on race in-built into the reproduction of racial capitalism? These are knotty issues that come to prominence and utility when assessing Nancy Fraser’s new book Cannibal Capitalism, the latest text completed in the Past & Present Reading Group.

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Capitalism has its capacity to reinvent itself and not only survive the many crises it has caused but transform itself into more aggressive forms over the years. This has prompted many authors to query the possibility of its collapse and at what point this event may occur. More importantly, how will this system of appropriation and accumulation that the world has got used to finally unravel? It is a timely question when the availability, accessibility and affordability of basic and essential human needs such as staple foods are being impacted by the dilapidated state of governments, economy, and ecology under the capitalist system. One explanation offered by William I. Robinson has come at a time when the world is at an intersection of many crises on multiple fronts: health, environment, economy, and escalating geopolitical tensions. Robinsons’ latest book Can Global Capitalism Endure? was published in 2022 by Clarity Press as the world just experienced the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ripple effects of war between Ukraine and Russia and the escalating wrath of climate change.

My first introduction to Michael Lebowitz’s Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class was through social reproduction theory. Specifically Tithi Bhattacharya’s chapter ‘How not to skip class’ in Social Reproduction Theory uses Lebowitz as a basis for centreing social reproduction and class struggle across the social factory within a Marxist analysis. Reading it six years ago, alone, and at the beginning of my PhD was a very different experience to re-reading it this time with the collective wisdom of the PPE reading group. My notes from 2017 capture my insecurity with the theory but also desire to find a framework from which to build my own theoretical approach to understanding the role of nature and social reproduction within capitalism. Returning to the text in 2022, its unique take on some old Marxist questions as well as some weaknesses were more apparent.

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 group, I would suggest that most pitches combine two motives of the pitcher: on the one hand, a genuine feeling that a collective reading of the suggested text will pay dividends to all members; on the other, a more prosaic, self-interested desire to recommend a book that is important to their own work and which they want to read anyway. Such was definitely the case when I pitched Alex Callinicos’ Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory.

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