Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Democracy against capitalism. Renewing historical materialism", London, Verso, 2016, 300 pp.

Th e Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital

Th e dynamics of the emerging transnational stage in world capitalism cannot be understood through the blinkers of nation-state-centric thinking. In her study Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood exhibits the reification and outdated nation-state-centric thinking that plagues much recent work on world capitalism and US intervention, expressed in the confusing notion of a ‘new imperialism’. Th...

Capitalism and Democracy*

Ecology and Historical Materialism

Against Materialism

Materialism is the idea that human beings are material objects—brains, perhaps, or some part of the brain—without immaterial selves or souls. I give two arguments against materialism. The first is an argument from possibility: it is possible that I should exist when no part of my body exists, in which case I am not identical with my body or any part of my body. The second is an argument from im...

Renewing Social Democracy? Beyond the Third Way