Jairus Banaji, jairus@vsnl.com, has joined our list. In the attachment to this message, Jairus has sent us a summary of his main research interests and a basic bibliography. For the benefit of subscribers who might have a problem opening and reading the attachment, I'll type out the former here (which is highly controversial in parts): ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Main research interests: 1) Marx's *Capital*, and why the Hegelian "background" is indispensable to any sophisticated grasp of this text; 2) Agrarian history; this began c.1970 as a proposed book on the fate of the peasantry under capitalism. Over the years, this generated case studies as well as 'comparativist' essays, and led to a long spell of work on late antiquity, not published as *Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity*. 3) There were also "theoretical" contributions which tried to do several things: to contest the dominant view of modes of production as entities driven *essentially* by characteristic forms of exploitation of labour; confront the primitivist/Weberian orthodoxies about the ancient economy which continue to influence Marxist accounts; and underline the vastly more sophisticated and flexible ways in which dominant agrarian classes have structured the management and exploitation of rural labour as part of a calculus driven to a large degree by considerations of profitability. 4) Since the early 90s, much of my work has been a "field" study of the contemporary evolution of capital, exploring the impact of global financial markets on domestic business via competition, regulation, and corporate governance. This work is largely based on interviews with representatives of capital and the corporate sector, but relates, "theoretically", to many of the themes in Vol. 3. 5) Sarte's *Critique de la Raison Dialectique*, esp. the first volume. There *is* a problem of intelligibility and this book is the single most important attempt to respond to it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Jairus: welcome aboard! In solidarity, Jerry
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