Building on earlier initiatives, this reading group was launched in 2014 within the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney to provide a regular focus on classics of heterodox political economy, past and present. The group meets once a week to share comments, thoughts, and reflections on key books shaping the broad contours of political economy. The aim is to carry an online repository of book reviews on all the titles featured in the Past & Present Reading Group. These reviews may be in the genre of a “feuilleton” or more capacious reviews that want to say something about political economy in and beyond the Marxist tradition.
If you want to join the group or suggest an idea for a book to review please contact
The list of books read, reviewed and by whom in the group include the following reviews (most recent first), which are accessible by clicking on the individual tabs to each book title, below:
35. Neil Maclean on Evgeny Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory
34. Christian Caiconte on Heide Gerstenberger, Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History
33. Laisrian Flynn on Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital
32. Flávia Soares Julius on Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias
31. Chris Hesketh on Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
30. Pranita Shrestha on Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty
29. David Avilés Espinoza on Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas
28. Adam David Morton on Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet―and What We Can Do about It
27. Elna Tulus on William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure?
26. Madelaine Moore on Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class
25. Brett Heino on Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory
24. Ksenia Arapko on Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
23. Christian Caiconte on Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
22. David Avilés Espinoza on Milton Santos, The Nature of Space
21. Anna Sturman on Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
20. Arianna Introna on Martha E. Giménez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist-Feminist Essays
19. Madelaine Moore on Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
18. Austin Smidt on Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
17. Janet Burstall on Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory
16. Llewellyn Williams-Brooks on Raewyn Connell and Terry Irving, Class Structure in Australian History
15. Riki Scanlan on Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development
14. Frank Stilwell on Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production
13. Sirma Altun on Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
12. Oliver Mispelhorn on J.K. Gibson-Graham et al., Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities
11. Natasha Heenan on Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
10. Mark Kelly on Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition
9. Gareth Bryant on Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
8. Joe Collins on Suzanne de Brunhoff, Marx on Money
7. Gareth Bryant on Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population
6. Luis F. Angosto-Ferrández on Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism
5. Martijn Konings on Samuel Knafo, The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard
4. Bill Dunn on Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877
3. Adam David Morton on Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America
2. Claire Parfitt on Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All and
1. Adam David Morton on Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism.
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