Left Flank’s ELIZABETH HUMPHRYS has launched a new website for her own work, An Integral State: Notes on Marx & Gramsci. The latest post is her paper from the roundtable on Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin’s Deutscher Prize winning book The Making of Global Capitalism, at the Historical Materialism Australasia conference last weekend in Sydney. […]
09 Jul
Comments Off on Jacobin Book Club: The Making of Global Capitalism
Jacobin magazine has just started their inaugural Book Club seminar on Panitch and Gindin’s The Making of Global Capitalism. Up today is my contribution, ‘Within or Against the State‘, which is chiefly in response to how the authors conceive of the state in relation to class struggle. Also available to be read, with more to follow, […]
04 Jul
With good reason Sydney-based economist Steve Keen has developed a local and international reputation as a sharp critic of neoclassical economics. For performing this valuable service he has earned the scorn of the neoliberal ideologues dominating mainstream economic commentary. Yet Keen is also a critic of Marx’s approach to political economy, and Left Flank here […]
17 Dec
Comments Off on When freedom is a dirty word
Whatever criticism one may have of the Occupy Everywhere movement, its central idea that ‘We Are the 99%’ speaks to the many people who sense a deep injustice in the current socio-economic system. People do not feel they have it ‘better than ever’, even in Australia, and many point to the diminished freedom they feel […]
22 Jul
Comments Off on Beyond the age of austerity, a new pattern of resistance and revolution emerges
In apparently “normal” times we Marxists are given a hard time, derided for our economic determinism about the crisis-prone nature of capitalism, scoffed at for suggesting that revolutionary movements could possibly occur in modern times, and accused of totalitarian impulses if we suggest that conscious revolutionaries should try to cohere their forces. Often the most […]
06 Jul
Comments Off on John Quiggin, ‘Marxism without revolution’ and Left strategy: A response. (Part 2)
John Quiggin recently ran a series on “Marxism without revolution”, with posts covering Marx’s ideas on class, crisis and capital. I began a response here. In this post I look at his claims about Marx’s theory of crisis and his approach to Left strategy. John’s attack on Marx’s crisis theory, specifically the “law of the tendency of the rate […]
04 Jul
Comments Off on John Quiggin, ‘Marxism without revolution’ and Left strategy: A response. (Part 1)
Thanks to @liz_beths for her helpful comments and suggestions. The economist John Quiggin — whose valuable book Zombie Economics I reviewed last October — has just completed a three part series on “Marxism without revolution” at his blog. The three posts cover Marx’s ideas on class, crisis and capital. In responding it is difficult to know where to start because the case he mounts […]
16 Jun
Comments Off on Explaining the age of austerity: Beyond the conjunctural, the organic crisis re-emerges
How did it come to this? Just two years ago everything seemed so different: The GFC was crashing across the planet, provoking the largest internationally coordinated program of state intervention in human history. Prime Ministers were writing quasi-erudite essays damning “market fundamentalism” while disinterring Keynesianism and social democracy. Progressive thinkers spoke hopefully of Green New […]
09 Jun
Comments Off on Unfit for purpose: The carbon price debate as smokescreen for inaction
ABC’s The Drum has published an article today by @Dr_Tad and I about the reliance on market mechanisms to solve the climate crisis. We take on the accepted wisdom these mechanisms can adequately deal with the climate crisis, or that they are the only option. Moreover, we argue the debate is a distraction harming the climate movement and likely to see its demobilisation and defeat. Yet it is […]
07 May
Comments Off on The state: Australian capitalism’s long time companion
> In reading Alex Callinicos’s article ‘The Limits of Passive Revolution’ in Capital & Class, I have found myself diverging off in to some reading about the role of the state in capitalist development in Australia. A common view I encounter is that the period prior to the Great Depression was one of a classic […]
08 Sep
Comments Off on The capitalist state, neoliberalism and industrial arbitration