This book of essays is written in honour of James Petras, in recognition of his intellectual achievements and political interventions--his steadfast principles, distinguished scholarship, extraordinary writing and uncompromising dedication to the popular struggles of millions across the world. In recognition of his lifetime of significant contributions and central role in the global struggle for social justice, the authors of this collection, each a leading scholar in his own right, address some of the most critical issues of our time: those of imperialism, crisis and class struggle. These...

The object is to assess the validity, in the light of current economic development, of the epistemology structuring different historical interpretations linking capitalism, unfreedom and primitive accumulation. Conventional wisdom is that - regarding the incompatibility between capitalism and unfreedom -an unbroken continuity links Marxism to Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill and Max Weber. Challenging this, it is argued Marxism accepts that, where class struggle is global, capitalist producers employ workers who are unfree. The reasons are traced to the conceptualization by Smith of labour as value,...

Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth. Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing. Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, 'ordinary' or well-disposed towards 'those below', whose interests they share, underwrite populism and...

Debates about labour markets and the identity of those who, in an economic sense, circulate within them, together with the controversies such issues generate, have in the past been confined by development studies to the Third World. Now these same concerns have shifted, as the study of development has turned its attention to how these same phenomena affect metropolitan capitalist nations. Debates about labour markets and the identity of those who, in an economic sense, circulate within them, together with the controversies such issues generate, have in the past been confined by development...

Against the usual argument heard most frequently on the left, that there is no subject for a radical politics together with its form of political mobilization, there is – but in the absence of a radical leftist project, this subject has in the past transferred, and in many instances is still transferring, his/her support to the radical politics on offer from the other end of the ideological spectrum. The combination of on the one hand a globally expanding industrial reserve army, generating ever more intense competition in the labour markets of capitalism, and on the other the endorsement...

Examining how Marxist theory is missing but necessary, this book traces the theoretical maze in which Marxism currently finds itself, and from which it is trying to exit whilst at the same time remaining epistemologically intact. When stripped of any or all of its core elements – such as class formation/consciousness/struggle, and a socialist transition – it ceases to be what historically Marxists have claimed it is. Consequently, the book constitutes an attempt by Marxist political economy to extricate itself from mistaken attempts to conflate it with the cultural turn, identity...