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Rethinking Our Future – free online course

All the presentations from our three courses plus additional
resources to help you dig deeper.

Unmasking the state

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Session 5

  • The consolidation of the capitalist state 1800-1850, John Savile. Pluto Press, 1995
  • The State, Past, Present and Future, Bob Jessop. Polity 2015
  • The state and political theory, Martin Carnoy. Princeton University Press 2014
  • Commentary Session 5 (pdf)

Session 6

Session 7

  • The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  • Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers Co, 1989
  • Socialism for a Sceptical Age, Ralph Miliband. Polity 1995
  • Alternatives to Neoliberalism, Bryn Jones and Mike O’Donnell. Policy Press, 2018
  • Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism. Routledge 2020
  • Commentary Session 7  (pdf)

Session 8

Session 9

Session 10

Podcasts of all 10 sessions can be downloaded here.

Let’s Compost Capitalism

Session 1: A System of Crisis

Session 1 Commentary pdf

Climate Change

Oil And War

Biodiversity Loss/Land Grabbing

Covid

Employment – more precarious by the minute

Inequality

Racial and social injustice

Pollution

The Health of the Capitalist Economy

Session 2: Defying the System

Commentary Session 2 pdf

Session 3: So what is the system? It’s called Capitalism

Commentary Session 3 pdf

Session 4a: Essential features of capitalist production  – What makes it work

Commentary Session 4a pdf

Session 4b: Essential features of capitalist production – a system at war with itself

Commentary Session 4b pdf

Session 5: Climate chaos: A threat to our existence

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, page 30 in this pdf

“Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. But coats and linen, like every other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature, must invariably owe their existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life. The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour.

“If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother. “

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, chapter on Estranged Labour

“Man is a species-being [20], not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.”

Session 6: Climate chaos: a way forward

  • Nature for Sale, The Commons Versus Commodities Giovanni Recoveri, Pluto Press ISBN: 9780745333700 
  • Commonwealth, Michael Hardt & Tony Negri, Harvard University Press, (2009)
  • Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, 
  • Nobel Prize Lecture, December 8, 2009 by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize for Economics

Session 7: Neoliberalism – ascent and decline

Commentary Session 7 pdf

Session 8: Your data – their profit

Commentary Session 8 pdf

Corporations, countries, tax and profits

Debt/ Quantitative Easing

‘Ownership concentration is also a reality for listed firms, where the top 3 shareholders have majority control in 50% of the world’s largest companies, according to recent OECD estimates.’

‘Ultimately, these recent trends translate into a dwindling number of large enterprises and financial intermediaries whose underlying ownership is increasingly concentrated. This is equally true for the industrial and financial companies, privately and state-owned, resulting in a death of a “dispersed ownership company”, on which modern economic theory is premised.’

Session 9 A system beyond reform, revolutionary solutions

Commentary Session 9 pdf

Philosophy for revolution

Session 1: Why theory matters

Session 2: A theory of knowledge: How we know what we know

Session 3: My thinking toolbox

Session 4: Perception and contradiction

Session 5: The Ancients lay foundations

Session 6 – Early Enlighteners

Session 7 – Scandalous thinkers

Session 8: Hegel: the Dialectic makes a comeback

Session 9: Postmodernism

Session 10: Exiting postmodernism

Session 11: Marx and Engels: exiting capitalism

Session 12: The path of cognition