Antonio, who many listmembers already know, introduces himself as
follows:
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As for my own introduction: I am on the Editorial Board of Rethinking
Marxism and i teach at Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster (Amish
country) in Pennsylvania. My research interests, in addition to Marx, are
in the area of the history of economic thought. My original theoretical
inspiration for these areas came from the debates around Marxism (vs.
neo-ricardianism, or ricardianism, which I studied both admiringly and
critically) from the late 70s and the 80s. Marx and Sraffa and all that. I
wrote a little about that; the most important work from that period I did
with two collaborators: Bruce Roberts, a graduate school pal, and Rick
Wolff, our prof. at the time. For about the last 10 years or so, my work
has mostly focussed on a possible reconstruction of Marxism, a
reconstitution of the philosophical impulses of Marxism. Some of this
work--again, with collaborators: Ruccio, Cullenberg, Amariglio,
Biewener--has focussed on the intersection of Marxism with some
post-modernist currents [I mean this, as opposed to pomo in toto]. The
postmodernist tendency has also influenced my thinking about the history of
economic thought; and I have a couple of papers on that as well. Since
there has been much angst about the "pomo" thing, I should explain that my
interest in it is explained by a hypothesis: that while Marxism has and
continues to provide a powerful and, on the whole, quite persuasive theory
of capitalism, it does not provide a similarly powerful guide to political
action. By this I mean that while Marxism has been able to identify the
issues at stake in a politics of social trasformation, it has not developed
the political sensibilities (I mean this in a Gramscian sense: I forgot to
mention in this respect that I also worked on translating the first volume
of Gramsci's Notebooks edited by J. Buttigieg and published by columbia)
necessary for a powerful transformative political project. I should say
that my leanings here are towards the type of philosophical position taken
by Etienne Balibar (in his Philosophy of Marx) and the philosophical and
analytical positions developed by Toni Negri.
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Antonio: welcome aboard!
In solidarity, Jerry