Max Bastow

Hope you're feeling better now, solidarity ✊

This looks very exciting, looking forward to reading it!

I can tell, there's some deep cuts here! I'm loving your book btw, working through slowly and trying to watch each movie before the chapter about it. Thanks so much for writing it 😁

Thanks so much for sharing, half of these are completely new to me!

Perhaps we can avoid all the discourse going forward by simply planning world-historic revolutions for the start of every century. If they were disruptive enough we'd get nice neat demarkations for all to agree on.

Finding this and the surrounding discussion fun. Lots of disagreement over the 18th century in particular, but depending on the purpose there's very good reasons for both short (1715-1789) and long (1688-1815) periodisations. As long as we always appreciate how they are formed and why.

Title page of a master's thesis, saying: "The Bitter Taste of Freedom: How Saint-Domingue’s Sugar-Slavery Economy Was Built and Destroyed Master’s Thesis Master in the Political Economy of Capitalism University of Geneva"

Thrilled to have submitted my master's thesis!

I gave myself a difficult task with this one and it took me to some fascinating areas of study. I'm excited to defend it - I'll post with some of my findings once I've done so.

A big thanks to everyone who helped me along the way.

🚨From the June 2nd to 6th, the Paul Bairoch Institute will host the inaugural doctoral summer school "Conflict in the History of Capitalism: Themes, Approaches, Methods as part of the European Laboratory Project "History of Capitalism" (CAP-HIST lab)🚨🧵👇

Save the date:
Fanon Today: Contemporary Struggles and Theoretical Perspectives
International Symposium
Berlin, July 22-23, 2025
organized by @vethompson.bsky.social, @raulzelik.bsky.social & me

Our book is *finally* available for pre-order! It'll ship next week on May 30th 😱 Been a long time coming, very curious about what you all will think.
@devikadutt.bsky.social
@cacrisalves.bsky.social @surbhikesar.bsky.social

this is not an exaggeration

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

OK folks, pause and digest this.

It's all over. Let the waves come.

Or maybe start teaching handwriting again, for the closed exams we're about to need.

“Islamophobia is also racism, rarely considered as such, condemned only half-heartedly. It is racism by denial. It kills. Projecting violence onto another’s body is giving permission to exercise violence against them.”
Important piece by Mohamed Amer Meziane on the recent murder of Aboubakar Cissé

“There is no such thing as ‘economics’—only ‘political economy’, in which the ‘political’ element is an ever-present component.”

– Ralph Miliband, 'Marxism and Politics'

Thank you for your incredible work, and for making it publicly available!

Haha — and Lordon's tricky even for fluent French speakers too! Would be happy to revisit it to summarise. IIRC Lordon says that Piketty collapses ideology into just news articles, and that P's definition of capital as property means he doesn't understand capitalism and should return to Marx's def.

Thomas Piketty - Frédéric Lordon, un débat de haut vol sur la propriété YouTube video by Journal l'Humanité

On his approach to capital and ideology, his debate with Lordon is instructive. I think Lordon's criticism is mostly accurate, though quite harshly delivered: www.youtube.com/live/dDY3acz...

Agreed! There's a couple of reasons I can think of that made this book a pleasant surprise.

1) I think he's improving over time, and 2) his methods are better suited to studying inequality than to studying "capital" or "ideology", which he doesn't define so well.

I uploaded an English version of the interview. Sorry economists, don’t get too sad.

www.academia.edu/128620967/_Y...

It wasn't showing up there last night but it is now, thank you so much!

It looks like the link is broken, just a heads up. Would love to read this, thanks for sharing!

A new episode of Future Histories!

This time I talk to @ceciliarikap.bsky.social (@iipp-ucl.bsky.social) about how today’s big tech hegemons build intellectual monopolies and use their power for corporate planning beyond ownership. Recorded at the @rosaluxstiftung.bsky.social!

tinyurl.com/FH-Rikap

"Le mondialisation capitaliste est l'âge des passions tristes qui surdéterminent le conflit de classe en conflits identitaires réactifs." André Tosel, Un Monde en Abîme

Researchers uncover stories of Black Londoners who escaped slavery Findings in Tower Hamlets archives shed light on resistance to enslavement likened to Underground Railroad in US The untold stories of Black Londoners who escaped slavery in the capital and joined free communities in the East End have been uncovered by…

Researchers uncover stories of Black Londoners who escaped slavery

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Scooby meme: under the "populism" hood is "reactionary politics"

Hopefully it's now finally clear that the threat was always far-right/fascist politics rather than 'populism'

Imagine if we'd focused on racism and authoritarianism from the start rather than divert attention on a term that did more to legitimise reactionaries than help us understand the situation

Des figures importantes (j'en compte sept, toutes intéressantes).

Kōhei Saitō ajouterait le Marx des années 1880, détourné du productivisme et de l'Eurocentrisme pour s'inspirer des sociétés qui ont "une interaction métabolique durable et égalitaire entre les humains et la nature" (2022, p. 208).

Such targets are often highly limited anyway, but this shows us how often they serve to greenwash. It's especially bad if a company can get all the reputational benefits of announcing a target without even needing to follow through.

Limited accountability and awareness of corporate emissions target outcomes - Nature Climate Change Companies have set emissions reduction targets globally, yet whether they are held accountable for the outcomes remains uncertain. By examining the emissions targets that ended in 2020, researchers fi...

A study of corporate emissions targets finds that:
- companies get positive coverage when announcing targets
- 9% of 2020 targets failed and 31% simply vanished, not announcing the outcome
- just 3 of the 88 failures garnered *any* media coverage

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In case of interest in US #BlackHistoryMonth: why trans-Atlantic slavery was unlike any other form of slavery in history and why it still matters.

player.vimeo.com/video/101761...