Acknowledgements
This book is in defense of the idea that production and production relations absolutely matter. I have benefitted from my (email or in-person) communication with many scholars of Marxist political economy on this and related topics, directly or otherwise. They include Greg Albo, Tom Brass, Joseph Choonara, Kevin Cox, Jamie Gough, Robert Latham, Stavros Mavroudeas, Michael Roberts, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Murray Smith as well as my colleagues on the manuscript collective of Science & Society, including David Laibman, Julio Huato, Nana Liu, Barbara Foley, and others. Current and former graduate supervisees, and students in my graduate course on Marxist political economy have been a source of my learning in ways they might not recognize. Educating others gives the educators an opportunity to be (re)educated. Members of the Marxist reading group in Toronto, under the auspices of ‘the Marx center’ at York University (https://marxiststudies.blog.yorku.ca/), have provided a stimulating milieu. One of its meetings was on Grundrisse, and the long commentary I wrote for the meeting became chapters 3–4 of this book. As Marx says in his ‘Introduction’ to Grundrisse, there is a constant connection between the producing individual and the wider society. This applies to individuals in academia. Even if we produce ideas as individuals, that production can only happen as a part of a wider structure of relations which include a large number of thinkers, not just in academia but also outside.
A grant from the office of York University’s Vice President for Research has made it possible for me to get some assistance needed to complete the book. Ankit Singh, a PhD student of mine, has kindly collated several lists of references into one consolidated list. The book contains many diagrams. I made rough sketches of these. Aishwarya Bhattacharyya, another PhD student of mine, was able to convert one such sketch into a more suitable form. A former graduate student, Ashley Chen, did the same for a number of diagrams used in chapter 7–8 and 10. Their assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
I would not write this book, and if I did, I would not complete this book in 2024, if it was not for the constant encouragement from Professor David Fasenfest, the editor of Brill’s Studies in Critical Social Sciences book series.