Adam David Morton – författare

Revisiting the magnetic poles of Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek on the utopian springs of political economy, this book seeks to provide a compass for questioning the market economy of the twenty-first century.For Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, the utopian springs of the dogma of liberalism existed within the extension of the market mechanism to the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour, and money. There was nothing natural about laissez-faire. The progress of the utopia of a self-regulating market was backed by the state and checked by a double movement, which attempted to subordinate the laws of the market to the substance of human society through principles of self-protection, legislative intervention, and regulation. For Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, the utopia of freedom was threatened by the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism. The tyranny of government interventionism led to the loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, and the despotism of dictatorship that led to the serfdom of the individual. Economic planning in the form of socialism and fascism had commonalities that stifled individual freedom. Against the power of the state, the guiding principle of the policy of freedom for the individual was advocated. Taking these different aspects of market economy as its point of departure, this book promises to deliver a set of essays by leading commentators on twenty- first- century political economy debates relevant to the present conjuncture of neoliberalism.The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

Revisiting the magnetic poles of Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek on the utopian springs of political economy, this book seeks to provide a compass for questioning the market economy of the twenty-first century.For Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, the utopian springs of the dogma of liberalism existed within the extension of the market mechanism to the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour, and money. There was nothing natural about laissez-faire. The progress of the utopia of a self-regulating market was backed by the state and checked by a double movement, which attempted to subordinate the laws of the market to the substance of human society through principles of self-protection, legislative intervention, and regulation. For Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, the utopia of freedom was threatened by the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism. The tyranny of government interventionism led to the loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, and the despotism of dictatorship that led to the serfdom of the individual. Economic planning in the form of socialism and fascism had commonalities that stifled individual freedom. Against the power of the state, the guiding principle of the policy of freedom for the individual was advocated. Taking these different aspects of market economy as its point of departure, this book promises to deliver a set of essays by leading commentators on twenty- first- century political economy debates relevant to the present conjuncture of neoliberalism.The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

‘Powerful and clarifying ... The book’s combination of careful argument and cogent illustration will make this a landmark volume in Gramscian studies.’ John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power‘Morton draws upon an impressive knowledge of Gramsci’s writings to provide new insights into key processes in today’s world order.’ Anne Showstack Sassoon, Emeritus Professor, Kingston University and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck College, University of LondonUnravelling 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.

This book assesses the forces of social struggle shaping the past and present of the global political economy from the perspective of historical materialism. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, the character of capital is understood in such a way that the ties between the relations of production, state-civil society, and conditions of class struggle can be realised. By conceiving the internal relationship of global capitalism, global war, global crisis as a struggle-driven process, the book provides a novel intervention on debates within theories of 'the international'. Through a set of conceptual reflections, on agency, structure and the role of discourses embedded in the economy, class struggle is established as our point of departure. This involves analysing historical and contemporary themes on the expansion of capitalism through uneven and combined development, the role of the state and geopolitics, and conditions of exploitation and resistance. These conceptual reflections and thematic considerations are then extended in a series of empirical interventions, including a focus on the 'rising powers' of the BRICS, conditions of the 'new imperialism', and the ongoing financial crisis. The book delivers a radically open-ended dialectical consideration of ruptures of resistance within the global political economy.

This book assesses the forces of social struggle shaping the past and present of the global political economy from the perspective of historical materialism. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, the character of capital is understood in such a way that the ties between the relations of production, state-civil society, and conditions of class struggle can be realised. By conceiving the internal relationship of global capitalism, global war, global crisis as a struggle-driven process, the book provides a novel intervention on debates within theories of 'the international'. Through a set of conceptual reflections, on agency, structure and the role of discourses embedded in the economy, class struggle is established as our point of departure. This involves analysing historical and contemporary themes on the expansion of capitalism through uneven and combined development, the role of the state and geopolitics, and conditions of exploitation and resistance. These conceptual reflections and thematic considerations are then extended in a series of empirical interventions, including a focus on the 'rising powers' of the BRICS, conditions of the 'new imperialism', and the ongoing financial crisis. The book delivers a radically open-ended dialectical consideration of ruptures of resistance within the global political economy.

A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist workOn the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy, presenting a wide-ranging approach to understanding the historical and rural sociology of precapitalist social forms, their endurance today, and conditions of dispossession and uneven development.  In On the Rural, Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural À l’urbain and supplementary texts, two of which are largely unknown conference presentations published outside France. On the Rural offers methodological orientations for addressing questions of economy, sociology, and geography by deploying insights from spatial political economy to decipher the rural as a terrain and stake of capitalist transformation. By doing so, it reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle. This volume delivers a careful translation-supplemented with extensive notes and a substantive introduction-to cement Lefebvre’s central contribution to the political economy of rural sociology and geography.