Suchergebnisse

Now in an updated edition, this groundbreaking study develops a new approach to understanding the formation of the postrevolutionary state in Mexico. Adam David Morton links the rise and demise of the modern Mexican state to ongoing forms of class struggle that have shaped and restructured state and civil society. He thus sheds valuable interdisciplinary light on debates on state formation by recovering radical tools of analysis, such as uneven development and class struggle, for the wider study of past and present politics in Mexico and, more broadly, Latin America. A substantive

Unravelling Gramsci makes extensive use of Antonio Gramsci's writings, including his much- overlooked pre-prison journalism, prison letters, as well as his prison notebooks, to provide a fresh approach to understanding his contemporary relevance in the current neoliberal world order. Adam Morton examines in detail the themes of hegemony, passive revolution and uneven development to provide a useful way of analysing the contemporary global political economy, the project of neoliberalism, processes of state formation, and practices of resistance. The book explores the theoretical and practical limitations of how Gramsci's ideas can be used today, offering a broad insight into state formation and the international factors shaping hegemony within a capitalist framework

How might the critique of the scientific method in Herman Meville's Moby Dick be related to a reading of Antonio Gramsci or Edward Said in some of their combined reflections on science and the exploitation and examination of society and nature?
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The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today's conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see 'Mainstreaming Marxism', International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos' theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.

As an 'antechamber' to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, 'even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality' (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.
In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.
The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian [...]
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My "novel" reading in 2023 focusing on the monstrosity of capitalism and the monster-stories in the making of capital, combining political economy and literary theory.
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For our last Political Economy seminar in 2023, three recent doctoral graduates will illuminate the diverse applications and insights offered by a political economy approach. From Latin America to East Asia, via Sydney, these three papers will explore the intersections of political economy with other disciplines, such as geography and psychoanalysis, and a range of theoretical traditions from Marxism to post-Keynesian economics to world-ecology. These conceptual resources are applied to crucial and pressing questions about labour’s subordination to economic development, the role of central banks in financial stability, and the relations between nature and the state at the frontiers of commodity exploitation. This panel will give us an opportunity to discuss the connections and contradictions between different applications of a political economy approach and its essential interdisciplinarity.
Presenters:
David Avilés Espinoza, Spatial Political Economy: The Ideology of Nature, state-space, and the Oil Commodity Frontier in Chilean Patagonia
Luciano Carment, Quantitative Easing in Japan: A Critical Evaluation
Christian Caiconte, Theorising the Unconscious in the Study of Political Economy: The Case of Korea
Chair: Adam David Morton
When: 21 November, 12:00-13:30
Where: Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 441
The post Roundtable—The Flight of a Kite: Methodological and Geographical Diversity from Sydney’s Political Economy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

As part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism at the City Road Podcast organised by Dallas Rogers, Adam David Morton talks with Mark Steven in the podcast, below, about his new book, Class War: A Literary History.
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This is to announce that the Past & Present Reading Group will be meeting to discuss, on a weekly basis, our next text which is: Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
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If you are interested in joining this panel, please send through your proposed abstract (maximum 200 words), title (maximum 50 words) and three keywords to Alejandro Colás (A.Colas@bbk.ac.uk) or Adam David Morton (Adam.Morton@sydney.edu.au) by 11:59pm 28 May (AET).
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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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